Bullying (いじめ/Ijime)
Bullying is a word which covers a multitude of sins, ranging from name-calling to near murder. It has long been endemic in Japanese schools and the bouts of hand-wringing which follow the suicide of a victim of bullying never seem to result in any systematic improvement. It seems hard to imagine that children will ever stop being violent to one another when they themselves are the regular victims of teacher violence.
The school system is infused with that violence. Although corporal punishment has been against the law for decades, children are regularly hit by teachers, especially when they are at middle school, between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. Perhaps because it is illegal, teachers don’t use straps or cane but rather slap kids about the head with the open hand, rap their heads with their knuckles or, in the worse cases, kick and punch them.
I have not taught in Japanese schools but what I saw in the prefectural theatre at a concert one afternoon confirmed what I had heard from teachers and friends. Y and I had been given tickets to a rakugo (a kind of sit-down comedy) performance, which had been arranged by one of the local high schools. I saw a teacher come up behind a boy and give him a powerful clip across the back of his head with his open hand. I didn’t see what the boy had done but it was enough to explain why a number of kids die each year from that kind of assault.
Physical Education teachers are notorious for such teacher violence. One of Y’s family was slapped repeatedly around the face by his Phys. Ed. Teacher, because he had forgotten to bring his gym clothes to school. Together with the parents of other children who had been the victims of the same teacher, his parents contacted the local newspaper which ran a story about the teacher’s methods of discipline. As far as I know, he continued in his job without any official reprimand.
If the child’s father had not been a teacher himself, and known that the Phys. Ed. Teacher was more violent than the norm, I doubt if the incident would have made it into the newspapers.
The violence between children seldom makes the news unless it results in death, whether directly, or because the victim has been driven to suicide. The reluctance to talk about unpleasant things, particularly in front of outsiders, means that most of the anecdotal stories of school violence have been told to me by other foreigners, in particular from AETs (the young foreign graduates brought in as assistant language teachers in Japanese schools).
I heard of one of the worst incidents from James W., an Australian teaching in a girls’ high school in
She survived. The shocked parents of the girl talked to the headmaster and, when they heard that the police had not been contacted, insisted that the attack be reported. The headmaster did everything he could to persuade them against this. He told them that it would reflect badly on their daughter, that she would not graduate from high school and would have trouble finding either a job or a spouse. The parents caved in to such pressure.
The seriousness of the assault though, meant that there was dissatisfaction among the staff at the suppression of the attack. At the next staff meeting, several teachers questioned the headmaster. He became angry and stormed out of the meeting. My Australian friend then ruefully observed that the attack itself was then forgotten as the teachers were now upset because of the headmaster’s behaviour.
Another AET friend was working in a high school in Amakusa, the island area in the south of
Such incidents are seldom reported in the official statistics, providing further evidence that there are indeed “lies, damned lies and statistics”.
Any casual visitor to Japanese schools will be impressed by the tidiness, diligence and discipline of the children. The darker side is seldom visible. One of the reasons for the violence is the size of the classes which, in spite of declining school rolls. remain large by the standards of most other developed countries. Classes of 45 and 50 are not uncommon in middle schools, and the draconian discipline is, in part, a result of the desperate attempts of teachers to maintain an environment where learning is possible.
Needless to say, any evidence of individuality is regarded as a threat to the learning environment. One of the friends of my Noh teacher runs a Jazz bar in the city. At one of Tsuiji sensei’s annual parties, the friend was lamenting the poor performance of his only son at middle school. His reports said things like “秀美君は、個性がありすぎます.” [Your son has too much character.]
I said that I had heard that the schools were very severe in their enforcement of regulations about hair length. The father said, “It’s not just the length of the kids’ hair. They even count the number of hairs on each kid’s head.”
No comments:
Post a Comment