Japan still failing to curb school bullying
Print Edition
SCHOOLYARD bullying has long bedeviled Japan where some students have taken their own lives after being harassed in person or online.
Bullying and suicide first entered Japanese national discourse in 1986, when a 13-year-old boy hanged himself in a shopping center toilet after repeated bullying at school that included a mock funeral that teachers took part in.
One of the latest cases involved a 13-year-old girl who jumped in front of a train after enduring more than a year of bullying by classmates, including being labeled a “pest” and repeatedly told to die.
Japan ranks fourth among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries for rates of suicide, after Lithuania, South Korea and Hungary.
Overall numbers have been falling. Suicides peaked in 2003 at 34,427 and fell to 21,897 in 2016, according to the National Police Agency. However, youth suicides have held relatively steady since 2007, ranging from 300 to 350 a year.
Four youth suicides are already being investigated this year for a connection to bullying, which remains a serious issue despite anti-bullying legislation passed in 2013.
Officials and experts say bullying is especially bad in Japan because of its homogeneity, and a deeply fixed mindset of conformity in which differences are often singled out for attack.
Japanese bullying differs from that in other countries in that it is mostly carried out by groups as opposed to two or three people against one individual, experts say.
They added that teachers had also been slow to take action, since many had long viewed bullying as part of normal quarrels among children.
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