School Bullying in Japan
320,000- this is the (documented) number of school bullying happened in Japan in 2016. This comes out that on average 12 cases happened in every elementary school, 7 cases for every junior high school and 2 cases for each high school in a year in Japan. School Bullying or Ijime in Japanese has been a major concern of education in Japan.
Here is the article that a high school girl attempted suicide suffering from being bullied at her school. She had been bullied by a group of her classmates, like they threw numerous scraps of paper toward her. Those pieces of paper said "Hey ugly! Get out of this school!"
The article also mentions that her homeroom teacher did not take this happening in the class serious, even regarded it as just "playing among friends." The teacher never officially reported what was happening to the school until it figured out that the girl actually tried to kill herself.
Teachers in Japan have unique and extra-responsible roles because they are in charge of guiding students in psychological and social development in addition to in academic development (Akiba, Shimizu & Zhuang, 2010). They are expected to be aware of what happening in the class and to gain skills to seeks a decision how to solve the problem. When a problem is serious and the homeroom teacher judges that it is beyond the homeroom’s ability to solve, the teacher brings the issue to the whole community involving other teachers and community members outside the school. Essentially, school should not be a closed community, but need to use the community network whether a problem happens or not.
The article wraps up with the victim's comment that “I am glad that it was proved that bullying had taken place. But I still cannot think, ‘It is good that I am alive.’” This saying reminds me of a question; "what does school exist for?" School is supposed to be a shelter for kids to be protected from the outside world because they are not "mature" to live alone. However, the issue of school bullying shows that school can be no longer safe place for them when bullying happens. This is what the girl in the video (the link to CNN news on the top of this article) says that she felt liberated after she decided not to go to school anymore. For her, being forced to go to school again after being bullied was more stressful and suffering than being bullied itself.
In Japan, choices for schools or education in general are very limited. Conventional schooling system is still very dominant, and you just have to pick a "school,"- either public or private one. Once you choose public one, choices are more limited depending which school district you live in. School bullying issue strongly makes me think that we should have more choices like alternative education system in the US.
<references>
Akiba, M., Shimizu, K., & Zhuang, Y. (2010). Bullies, Victims, and Teachers in Japanese Middle Schools. Comparative Education Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (August 2010), pp. 369-392
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. (2016). Educational Statistics, http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/houdou/30/02/1401595.htm
