ABSTRACT
On January 8, 1980, Ohira Mitsuyo, a 14-year-old second-year junior high school student in Hyogo prefecture, attempted suicide by cutting open her stomach with a knife. Her life was saved when passers-by found her and called an ambulance. During her first year of junior high school, she had transferred to a new school mid-way through the year, meaning that she entered her homeroom class as a newcomer after it had already formed into a strong social group. Almost immediately she was subject to pitiless bullying by the class that was orchestrated by, in her words, “the leader of the ‘bad’ girls in our homeroom” (Ohira 2002, 26). At first, the bullying took the form of ostracism, followed by obscene graffiti carved into her desk, a bucket of water being poured over her in the toilets and dumping of her belongings into the trash. She endured this and in her second year was able to make three friends with whom she was able to share some intimate details about her life. However, these friends divulged this secret information, including a private medical condition and the name of a boy she had a crush on, to some other girls, who used it to torment and ridicule Ohira. “I looked at the faces of my three ‘friends’ one by one. All three wore a very peculiar smile: a triumphant leer. In all my life I had never seen such a hideous smile” (Ohira 2002, 52). Betrayed by her only friends, Ohira was reduced to suicidal thoughts: “if I tell my parents what happened today, they’ll tell the people at school. Then I’ll be a ‘rat’ again and even worse things will happen. I’ve reached the limit. I can’t take any more … the only thing to do is die” (Ohira 2002, 53-54). After her suicide attempt she was hospitalized for a while and then forced to return to the same school where the bullying became even worse than it had been before. On top of this she had to cope with the intense shame her actions had brought to her parents and family. Unable to endure the misery of school life, Ohira dropped out and entered a life of delinquency, finding acceptance and friendship in a group of thugs and small-time crooks. This is just one story among thousands of a young life destroyed by school bullying.
In Ohira’s case, with the help of a family friend, she was able to escape a life on the margins of society and turn her life around. She successfully completed her education, studied law at home, and in 1994 passed the notoriously difficult bar exam. As a lawyer she involved herself in juvenile cases, and wrote an inspirational book to encourage others who were going through the hell of school bullying (Ohira 2002). In 2004 she went on to further success, being appointed deputy mayor of Osaka city. Sadly, most cases of severe school bullying do not have this kind of happy ending. Studies of bullying in Japan have shown that one feature of the Japanese classroom that exacerbates the situation is the unwillingness of others to intervene on the side of the victim because they do not want to risk also being picked on. For Ohira, this was one of the
worst parts of her experience-that even her “friends” would betray her to the bullies. A full understanding of the phenomenon of bullying cannot be attained without addressing the ways in which group conformity is learned in classrooms and clubs. Group conformity can have many positive dimensions. There can be no question that
one of the reasons for the success of the Japanese education system in teaching the vast majority of children to master the basics of numeracy, literacy and science, lies in the order that prevails in the vast majority of school classrooms up and down the country. How else could Japan’s boys and girls stuck in typically large class sizes of up to 40 students, out-perform their competitors in Europe and North America in so many standardized tests? However, is violence in schools the price that must be paid to maintain these orderly classrooms, and scholastic achievement, either in the form of student-on-student violence or teacher-on-student violence? The well-known Japanese proverb “the nail that sticks up will be hammered down” (deru kugi wa utareru) refers both to the conformity and the violence implicit in this view of the Japanese classroom. This chapter will first examine the ways in which children learn how to conform to the group in Japan, and then move on to an analysis of bullying and corporal punishment, and the ways in which both of these problems have been addressed by those on the Left and the Right of the political spectrum from the 1980s up to the present day.
