おい、いじめをやめろ！目を覚ませ、先生！ (Bully, knock it off. Teacher, wake up!)
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Yoko (not her real name) got her dream job working at a famous firm in Tokyo
- the prestige of a high position, real responsibility, and 50% more money than she’d been making in retail. It had been a hard road - she’d learned English, gone to a business school, brushed up on her formal and business Japanese, and done the best she could to learn the ins and outs of traditional Japanese companies, knowing that such knowledge certainly wouldn’t hurt.
When she announced that she’d been chosen from among several candidates, she was surprised and overjoyed. The odds had been against her. While a beautiful, impeccably- mannered lady, she had never been a flight attendant, as all of the office staff had (being a flight attendant was more of a marker of social status than a job skill, as the business was finance with no foreign clients) and she was twenty-nine, almost at the unemployable age of thirty,
whereas most of the girls in the office had left Japan Air Lines for this particular company at twenty-five or twenty-six. Now she was to be the junior secretary, the second-highest office lady in the office, working directly for the venerable CEO and his son, the Vice President. She had to keep the boss’s packed schedule in line. She had to make sure everything went smoothly at the conferences. She had to make sure everything ran so smoothly, no one noticed it was being done. She even had a budget as large as her own salary to take care of any and all minor purchases in the office.
Thank goodness her sempai, the senior secretary, was a nice lady.
The senior secretary was 36, divorced, let go after six years as a temp at a major American firm (a situation that would normally have resulted in a full-time position five and a half years before), by all accounts unattractive (yes, it matters), and rather stiff, not in the slightest charismatic. On top of this she routinely stole petty cash from the CEO, used other petty cash to buy things for herself, volunteered to go on errands for the boss, then just went home for the day (sometimes as early as lunchtime), and routinely lied to cover these things up.
Wow, you might say, what a shitty sempai to have. You don’t know the half of it.
Yoko, younger and more attractive than the senior secretary, although less experienced, was eager to please. She was a rather stereotypical Japanese lady - a little quiet, obedient to authority, and, above all, unwilling to make waves.
Well, it took about a week for poor Yoko to realize that it wasn’t the difficulty of her dream job that was going to do her in. Her sempai, the person who was supposed to be training her, took to mumbling vague hints, then quickly berating Yoko, calling her stupid, unfit for working in anything like the famous American firm at which the sempai had worked. (Yoko was not of the temperament that points out that the sempai was let go after spending six years there without being offered an actual job with the company, something employees of the company in question assure is me so unusual that they question whether the sempai in fact ever worked there in any capacity. They’d never heard of such a situation. Nor did Yoko point out that neither she nor the sempai were working for a famous American firm, thereby making the dig irrelevant.) The sempai was very fond of mocking Yoko’s high voice (”unacceptable in business”), her English ability (She once tossed a book of American tax law, written in English, at Yoko and demanded that she translate. Yoko had claimed, quite modestly, to be able to exchange pleasantries and have simple conversations in English. The sempai couldn’t speak a word.), questioning whether she had ever worked before, and even launching into tirades about Yoko’s “fake tits.” (Yoko has neither fake nor unusually large breasts, not that that’s relevant to her job, but that’s the point here.)
Not long after this abuse started, as Yoko was being abused until three or four o’clock, then left on her own, often until after midnight, to do work she was supposed to have been trained to do and assisted with, but wasn’t, the sempai started complaining about Yoko to the CEO and the VP. Yoko was stupid, Yoko was lazy, Yoko spent all day on the phone with her fiancee (he says she never once called him from work, as does she), she also claimed Yoko lied about having a fiancee (you figure it out), and that Yoko was eating the bosses’ snacks. (Untrue. Yoko was hospitalized twice for collapsing on the job due to stress, lack of sleep, and not having eaten.)
In short, Yoko was being subjected to some pretty nasty bullying.
Finally, on the advice of her fiancee, she told the company’s HR manager what was going on. The HR manager promised confidentiality, seemed sympathetic, and promptly told the CEO, the VP, the sempai, and a few of the office girls. Yoko was asked if she wanted to talk to the CEO, she said yes, and was told to resign. She was offered a month’s severance, but was reminded that accepting it was basically admitting that she was incompetent and incapable of finding a job. Accepting it would be shameful. She resigned and kept her dignity by refusing the money.
Yoko is far from alone. In fact, while that job was the first in which she was subjected to such profound direct bullying, she had quit a previous retail job after being told that moving closer to the store where she worked was grounds for the company cutting her salary and, when she complained that this was unfair, considering she had gone to personal expense for the company’s benefit, she was ordered to move to a store near the apartment she had just left. (Clearly a vindictive move.)
“What,” you justly ask, “does this have to do with teachers? The current scandal is about junior high and high school kids committing suicide.”
You’re right, but suicide is not the issue. Suicide is the headline-grabbing symptom. Unfortunately, if you thought suicide was the issue, and that simply making sure victims of school bullying had someone to talk to was the answer, you’d be very well-qualified to be Education Minister, which means you’d be, with all due respect, clueless and incompetent.
Ibuki Bunmei looked all right. I joked on Seijigiri that his being unqualified for and disinterested in his job wasn’t so bad as people at least wouldn’t die if he screwed it up. I was wrong.
Now, Ibuki hasn’t caused anyone’s death, but he also hasn’t done much to address the only actual emergency his ministry is facing. He was praised by Life Link for telling an anonymous suicidal letter-writer that the community cared and that his life was valuable. Good words. He told teachers not to ignore reports of bullying. A good step.
But. . .
After receiving more letters, Ibuki told suicidal bullying victims not to write him as it would “confuse [their] parents.” Right. Confusing the parents, that was the problem. More like Ibuki has no idea what to do and wants a cushy Cabinet position, but doesn’t want to have to work hard. The issue didn’t go away after a news cycle, so he took steps to distance himself from it and begin ignoring it. This is how his being unqualified for and disinterested in his job could cost lives.
Teachers and principals are not being subjected to actual disciplinary action for ignoring, lying about, or even participating in bullying. They’re being reprimanded. Not fired, not prosecuted. Reprimanded.
Counseling for victims is being discussed. But not counseling for bullies. This makes sense because it is the victims’ problems that cause bullies to pick on them. The bullies are just normal, well-adjusted kids who are apparently instinctively reacting to a stimulus. (It’s sad when The Simpsons puts forth, in twenty-two minutes, a more in-depth and nuanced view of bullying than the education ministry can figure out in, oh, sixty years.)
Teachers, to repeat a point, are sometimes participating in the bullying. Not only should they be fired, they should be prosecuted and spend many years in prison. If a kid bullies another kid, the victim is traumatized and the bully probably has issues of his own. If a teacher bullies a kid, that’s child abuse. That’s assault. Teachers are not only adults, but adults whose job it is to take care of children, at a minimum. Ideally they should instruct kids and act as role models for them. You know, be teachers. Abuse of pupils by teachers, especially in Japan, where teachers occupy a high social position and have almost unchecked authority in the classroom, is every bit as bad as child abuse by a parent and every bit as unacceptable.
At least two school principals have committed suicide in recent weeks, one definitely over issues of bullying. (He lied about the routine and serious extortion of a fifth-grade girl in his school by eight of her classmates, calling the extortion of over 100,000 yen from her “a financial problem.”) He was remembered at his funeral as always caring about the kids, et cetera. You know, sometimes ill words need be said about the dead, the truth needs to be told. I feel sorry for his family, but avoiding embarrassment was more important to him than protecting the children in his care. His suicide shows that his shame was more important to him than trying to set things right. He doesn’t deserve to be remembered fondly.
Bullying occurs from the tender years of kindergarten, through the school years, into university, through the working years, and probably even in retirement homes. The nail that sticks up is hammered down, as we so often hear.
Bullying is by no means unique to Japan. It occurs everywhere there are people and some of those people are in more powerful positions than others. What makes Japan different, at least from Western societies, is that bullying is, in effect, encouraged.
In the West, school bullying is seen as troubled kids lashing out in most cases and as kids establishing their places in a hierarchy or impressing their friends by showing themselves to be stronger than other kids. This seems to be true in Japan as well. The difference comes in the reaction of adults in authority positions. In the West, the squeaky wheel gets the grease; it is to the benefit of the victims of bullying to speak out, complain, make a stink. Solving a problem there means finding the cause and attempting to address it. As a result, it is bullies who are punished, but also bullies who receive counseling. The victim of bullying has a reasonable expectation of assistance from parents, teachers, administrators, and, in many cases, the parents of the bullies.
Not so in Japan. Ibuki’s reaction perfectly demonstrates the way bullying is treated: not as a problem to be solved, but as an issue to quiet down. Perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that making a problem drop off the radar is considered a solution. In other words, bullying has caused suicides, the suicides have drawn attention and created a public fiasco, and that fiasco is the problem.
So, for those in authority, the question becomes “How do we stop this furor?”
“Well, stop the suicides.”
“And how do we stop the suicides?”
“Well, tell kids not to do it. After all, we’re authority figures, kids should obey.”
And there’s the reason the problem is not going to go away. Sure, it’s going to recede. We may even get a triple-header of school-related news cycles, but the bullying will still be there and the victims will still be despondent.
When Ibuki appealed to the initial letter-writer, asking him to remember that his parents had embraced his life and reminding him that the community was not ignoring him, he was reacting to an emergency in the best way he could from his position. When he reminded the press that he had told teachers not to ignore reports of bullying, he was acting responsibly. He was by no means done, though, and, had he stopped there, it would have been bad enough - there was a lot of work left to do, the most important work an Education Minister could have. He didn’t stop there, though. No, Ibuki, following a trend in the current Government, turned right around and gave the lie to his own earlier pronouncement. After receiving more letters, after users of Japan’s popular 2-Channel web chate site got together to flood a Sapporo school with phone calls in a plea to get the school to take the problem more seriously, after the issue had dominated the mainstream media and the blogosphere, after it seemed that public attention was sufficient to get something done, he turned around. He turned 180 degrees, turned his back on the victims of bullying throughout Japan’s schools, and told kids not to write to him. The message was not lost on any troubled, victimized schoolchild. Ibuki told them he didn’t want to be bothered. He told them, in essence, that the community didn’t care.
When members of local education boards hold press conferences, they offer insincere apologies, often try to pretend that widely reported cases are isolated, try to skirt the issue by avoiding the word “bullying,” claim they did all they could, or deny that there was anything they could have done. They might, might mumble something vague about addressing the problem, but concrete plans have not been forthcoming.
There is no talk of getting to the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that students are expected to obey, to toe the line, they are expected to do well on tests, and be visible only for outstanding achievements. They are expected to move in the same direction and want the same things. If they’re not sure what they want, their teachers will tell them. If they drop too far below the norm or, just as bad, rise too far above it, they are set right. They are hammered down.
Teachers tend not to take deviation lightly, it is not necessarily bad behavior that is punished, it is deviation. The teachers have an unwitting, but effective ally in the student body. Deviation warrants bullying. When the bullying gets out of hand, even stricter rules are laid down, thus putting the victims of bullying even farther from the expected norm, which begets yet more bullying.
If a student creates a problem by being bullied too much, he may be moved to a different school, his family may move to a different town (bullying is not limited to the halls of the school.) Bullies, though, are not really punished, much less counseled or transferred. Of course not, the teachers themselves are not rarely bullies. And why not? Their job is to enforce the norm.
This is how Japan condones, even encourages bullying. It’s not malicious, though, it’s a lack of imagination, a lack of effort. It takes more work to deal with kids who have different abilities or need help. It takes more work to deal with people of different backgrounds, body types, physical abilities, and personalities. It takes effort to accept what you don’t understand and even more effort to understand it.
Japan has a massive bullying problem because it is not willing to put effort into stopping it. Because it is easier to react to bullying with more bullying and to try to drive the victim, intentionally or not, out of the sphere in which one might have to deal with him.
It easier to ignore the handicapped and accept that they stay at home out of shame or the lack of opportunities available to them outside than it is to learn to deal with a wheelchair or deafness or other disability, easier than installing a ramp.
It is easier to write the eccentric off as weird and to force them or shame them into conformity than it is to take a look at what they might have to offer.
It is easier to fire Yoko than it is to deal with her bitter sempai.
It is easier to tell people to suck it up and stop rocking the boat than it is to deal with a large company that flouts the law and violates its workers’ rights at every turn.
It is easier to pick on the little guy than it is to fight the big guy.
It is easier to ignore the small kid taking his lumps every day than it is to find out why he is being picked on and try to stop it.
It is easier, in the end, to hang one’s head for a moment and say you’re sorry about a child’s death than it is to try to save him.
It is easiest just to shut one’s eyes and hope the problem goes away.
It won’t.
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