Tokyo public schools will stop forcing students to dye their hair black (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Tokyo public schools will stop forcing students to dye their hair black (2019)

japantoday.com

141 pointsmonort136 comments

I had absolutely no idea this was part of the dress code.

"The ostensible reason for the rule is that almost all Japanese people have naturally black hair, and so they’ll only have non-black hair if they’ve chosen to dye it a different color."

Are there any children currently enrolled in Tokyo public schools that are of say european ancestry with blonde hair that needed to follow this rule?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_nail_that_sticks_out_gets...

I know that at least a bald friend of mine had to get black wig to get employed / taken seriously in Japan.

Is baldness uncommon in Japan?

What about naturally graying hair?

Both are uncommon for young people.

So pairing this with a quote from the article “Students are encouraged to have black hair to serve as a visible signal that they are willing to adapt to society,” makes it feel like accepting societal norms isn't just encouraged it's almost a fascist doctrine? I'm assuming then that phrases like "celebrate diversity" are frowned upon. Edit: I just wanted to add that having not grown up in a non-individualistic society these things feel very unusual to me. My comparison to fascism is a bit hyperbolic and not meant to offend, apologies all round. I'm leaving it instead of deleting purely for the sake of discussion.

It's the logical derivation of a non-individualist society.

It's just a different culture. Societal harmony is more important then individuality.

Japan is extremely racist, but generally in that "clueless Uncle" kind of way, not the "actual malicious dislike" way of say, China right now.

Societal acceptance is an enormous aspect of Japanese society. It isn't "fascism", its their culture. Japanese people like diversity in the same way extremely wealthy American liberal people like diversity. Its a great idea that almost everyone will openly back... right up until you tell them you're going to re-locate a lot of diverse peoples around their homes. Then you see the backpedaling.

>not the "actual malicious dislike" way of say, China right now

mind to elaborate on that?

I'm not sure how much you know or don't know, so it might be hard to know where to start.

Over the past few years as China's economic growth has slowed for everyone (but less so for the upper middle class and the wealthy), there's a lot of growing discontent that's turning into outright hostility towards white and black foreigners who poorer Chinese people see as "hurting the Chinese economy" in some way.

This is exacerbated by local Chinese media outlets and party politicians that need a place to put the blame, and so immigrants are chosen. You can't blame the Party. For what ought to be obvious reasons (see: Jack Ma).

Westerners don't really see this because if you read The Economist, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and/or listen to Fox Business, CNBC, Bloomberg, etc., then according to them, China is the land of plenty - a veritable mine full of diamonds and platinum waiting to be extracted. These people aren't stupid by the way - they know that China's economy is a glass house that could be fairly easily cracked. They have the same information you have, they can see the enormous tracts of empty 20-50 story-tall apartment buildings. They just don't care, because they (falsely) think that economic interest is the sole motivator of Chinese policy. I mean, what else could it be, right?? Why would anyone care about anything but profit? So they discard any information that could lead them to different conclusions about the economic prospects of the nation. For the very few that haven't been brainwashed by business school, the promise of 1,000,000,000 future middle class customers is just too much to ignore, but they too are blinded by greed, but they're blind to how China operates. China wants to own it. They don't want their customers using Samsung and Apple phones and LG washing machines and driving Teslas. They want their customers using Huawei and Xiaomi phones, and using Chinese washing machines, and driving Chinese electric cars.

So anyway... because of poor central planning - because unfortunately all central planning is poor by its very nature, you need people to be able to be flexible based upon local circumstances and conditions - the effects are starting to be felt, by the poorest Chinese. And like all poor people, they tend to blame immigrants.

It isn't a critical problem - yet - but many foreign workers (mostly white, Western, educated one) are starting to leave because the climate is becoming hostile.

Well, I read this in The Economist:

  https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/10/17/the-persecution-of-the-uyghurs-is-a-crime-against-humanity

I explicitly refrained from mentioning the Uyghurs here because inevitably someone mentions the "violent bomb attacks" that they're conducting against the Chinese government.

I mean, I can't imagine why someone would actively attack a government that was rounding them up and systematically jailing them.

Agree with everything you said, and wha'ts left unsaid (uygours, the aging issue, the abandonned youths in central China, and many others). But this:

> because unfortunately all central planning is poor by its very nature

Is untrue for a very specific subset of issue: nation-wide infrastructure. W/o central planning, not nuclear plants, no French/Japanese/Italian/Chinese trains. Electricity: the bigger you network is, the easier it is to pilot said network. Central planning is a tool, like the free market is a tool. Hardcore Liberals and Communists will both disagree with me, but it is 2021, i think we're past Marx and can recognize Adam Smith was not always right (even if he was on point on a lot of thing).

You can also have a central-planning thingy along a river that multiple community use to better allocate a really needed ressource that is called water. Not nation central planning, but something in between.

> Is untrue for a very specific subset of issue: nation-wide infrastructure. W/o central planning, not nuclear plants, no French/Japanese/Italian/Chinese trains. Electricity: the bigger you network is, the easier it is to pilot said network. Central planning is a tool, like the free market is a tool.

Hmm... yes. Yes I suppose that is indeed correct. I agree.

I have long blond hair and blue eyes, and every time I go to Japan I get stared at with the intensity of a thousand suns. It is a nearly homogeneous culture and most Japanese people are conformists.

Hah. I like the liberal characterization.

Like the massive nimbyism in Cape Cod, when windmills were being proposed.

I’m a democrat, but I don’t have tolerance for hypocrites.

> "clueless Uncle" kind of way

This nails it. And Japanese school teachers are textbook example of that.

A German friend of mine, who did high school I think in Osaka encountered this. If I remember it right one teacher wanted to enforce this and dye his hair so that he wouldn't stand out, but the principal overruled him and he didn't end up with black hair.

Is it just me, or is this a counter to the HN article earlier that "Japan isn't homogeneous"?

Reminds me of other quirks in Japan like when customer-facing women were banned from wearing glasses[0]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50342714

Don't know which article were talking about since there is a couple of articles saying that.

Ethnically Japan isn't homogeneous (almost no country is), culturally it depends.

I think their stance on LGBT says it all, no one cares if you're gay/trans, until you announce that you intend to have a long standing relationship, then people especially family will care a lot (negatively).

Because you go against societies own mandate, of family before yourself.

China has a more extreme version of that.

This was the HN thread I was referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883680

I checked to make sure it wasn't somehow an Onion article. That's an interesting cultural quirk I'm surprised still exists.

I went to an american school that had its own strict requirements regarding hair. male students were required to keep their hair cut short enough so it would not touch their collar and to be clean shaven. repeat offenders would get a (sloppy) haircut from the dean or be required to shave on the spot, respectively. I don't find the hair color requirement to be any more unreasonable, though perhaps it has a racial subtext?

Or even genetic subtext perhaps?

Requiring naturally blonde people to dye their hair black seems significantly more unreasonable to me.

The parallel to requiring naturally bearded people to shave their facial hair off is very close.

Both are potentially mildly damaging, and they take roughly similar amounts of time to reverse.

Dying hair is a lot more work and chemicals than shaving, although you dont have to do it as frequently

Requiring someone to use a potentially damaging product on themselves is different from requiring a certain hair cut.

That being said, I find hair requirements distasteful as well.

perhaps I'm just wrong, but I thought dyes were mostly safe and the bleaching step was the damaging part.

in any case, this was more of a "people who live in glass houses" post than a defense of the rule. imo we have a lot of arbitrary appearance requirements for school children that do more to distract from learning than anything else. the school I went to justified their strict dress code by claiming it was all to prepare us for our professional lives. I have to chuckle at that one when I show up to the office with hair that goes down to my bellybutton, a beard, and a tshirt, still looking more "presentable" than many of my peers.

Increased breast cancer risks have recently been reported: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/permanent-hair...

I grew up under communism in E Europe and we had a similar standard and enforced sort of violently and humiliatingly. I remember having longish hair when a primary teacher from an adjacent class stepped in, put her hand in my hair (hair wasn’t supposed to go over finger girth in length for boys) and while dragging it she loudly said: is this a boy? Let’s check his private parts cause he looks like a girl. All other kids were either stupefied or laughing. They did not check my private parts but it was humiliating enough to leave an emotional scar to remember. My teacher liked me and let me have longer hair but when it was growing too long she’d gently tell me she’ll have problems for me, so not everybody was mean. But the mean teachers were very empowered and acting on a whim whenever they felt like. Corporal punishment was also common, they would slap put palms with wooden rulers, pull out hair, etc. I wasn’t roudy and I can say I didn’t get a lot of it but still, if one had ADHD they’d be constantly punished. I wonder what came of those kids eventually

My private Catholic high school had a policy that hair must be a natural hair color. Doesn't mean it can't be dyed, just can't be blue. I'm sure the Japanese policies have the same intent, they just weren't somewhere you'll see red, blond(e), brown, and black in a class of 100.

Several Sikhs went to my highschool, and men are forbidden from shaving or cutting their hair (kept in a turban, it was always above the collar). This wasn't a problem, as we were generally allowed to dress and style ourselves how we liked except for some rules around "decency" and "gang colors". But I've heard plenty of stories, even in the last few years, about Sikhs and black people getting punished for not adhering to various western norms

Aren't their anti discrimination laws which should prevent such very obvious discrimination against some cultures??

In the US, such laws provide students recourse after they've been punished, thrown out of sporting events, etc. Schools and sports associations often update their policies after such events get broadly publicized. But no, the law doesn't prevent it altogether.

Of course, literally speaking, the law doesn’t prevent any behavior, it simply deters it.

I think the reason why we see these things still happen is because the laws are broad, continually improving, and education is administrated at a local level so you have different organizations rediscovering the same social issues over and over.

It's not just preventing behavior -- there's a ton of places where there are still variously unconstitutional/illegal policies and laws. Unless schools, local lawmakers, etc. are proactive in bringing this up to date (like my high school) then the legal system demands its pound of flesh to show that harm was done to force a change to happen.

Come on, It’s not a stretch that when being discriminated by school staff also other authorities like the police won’t be on your side.

The authorities response between the black live matter protests and the terrorism from trump supporters is just one recent example of this. As long as the people discriminating have more power than the ones being discriminated, laws only protect some.

Yeah, these rules might not have bad intention but they get dicey when you broaden who they apply to.

I never forgot this story from 2018 about a black police officer suing over a requirement to be clean-shaven every day.

> Officers have to be clean cut, except for mustaches or short sideburns. Joseph Lewis, a six-year vet of the force, however, suffered from razor bumps, which made it painful to shave. The condition is common in about 60 percent of African-American men or people with coarse, curly hair, according to the American Osteopathic College of Dermatology.

https://newsone.com/3780050/racial-discrimination-shaving-fa...

Afaik the US military used to mandate a buzzcut for new recruits that was recently dropped because it causes a lot of issues for black recruits (curly hair).

Any more details? Black people have been in the military for a very long time now. And I see a lot with short hair.

I think they are referring to shaving beards, which is known to cause issues for black people.

The US military issues medical waivers for these things. It was very common for African-American males (and some others who have justification) to be on a medical waivers (simply referree to as shaving waivers) to not shave when I served. It's not really an issue, or at least it wasn't 20 years ago.

It seems the USAF is now issuing these waivers with 5 year terms. [0].

[0]: https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2020/06/24...

It has:

a) a racial subtext, through maybe unintended

b) damages your hair, potentially permanent

c) tells you you are less good because you don't have natural black hair

How does dyeing your hair damage it permanently? Doesn't seem possible to me since it just regrows.

Well, the structure of the follicle is altered. So if you want to truly remove all damage, you need to cut it all off and regrow it. That’s a lengthy process, particularly for women or men who prefer to wear their hair long. Moreover, there ARE things chemicals can do to your scalp that can prevent hair from growing or growing the same way.

People who have chemotherapy and lose all their hair often find that their hair grows back differently (texture, elasticity) than it was before. Hair dye isn’t going to do that, but chemicals absolutely can alter your scalp and the follicle permanently.

I somehow doubt that over the counter hair dye can alter your scalp permanently like that. Do you have a source for that?

I explicitly said hair dye won’t do that, but that chemicals can impact your scalp permanently, i.e. chemotherapy or radiation. Acne can impact your scalp permanently (scar tissue from acne can prevent new growth in those areas). Using too many extensions (particularly if sewn into the scalp) can damage your scalp permanently (again, scar tissue).

Having said that, over the counter stuff absolutely affects the the health of your hair and dying too frequently, leaving dye on too long, using a poor quality of dye (of which over the counter almost always is), too much peroxide (which is often needed so the color can stick) can absolutely damage the hair on your head permanently (until that hair is cut off and regrows). The only way to truly recover from the damage due to hair dye is to cut it all off and regrow, which for people with long hair, can take a tremendous amount of time.

On a slight tangent, OTC hair dye with lead acetate was a thing (in the US) as recently as 2019. It may be/probably is banned now, but even after it wasn't being manufactured, it was still on store shelves. I never used it, but several years ago I looked at a package of "Grecian Formula" and saw "lead" and was like whaaa?

https://www.consumerreports.org/lead/removing-lead-acetate-f...

The roots of Hair do not get removed when you cut your hair, and I'm not sure if they do easily regrow I think they don't (easily regrow).

This is why you should, if possible not dye your hair up to the roots. But the more the difference between dye color and natural color the more this is noticable. Furthermore even if your don't dye up to the roots it's still possible for damage to affect them.

Exactly. Every culture has conformity standards, they just differ in the details. The reasoning largely reduces to "kids who stand out are 'distractions' and need to conform". It's not any different from rules in US schools about bare shoulders, pants vs. skirts (and length of skirt), buttons on shirts, etc...

My school had these requirements. Vice principal carried around disposable razors and made you dry shave.

It was a (catholic) religious school so there were religious exemptions but they also talked with the parents a ton so no one could pull that.

Why stop at hair?

https://soranews24.com/2016/10/27/tokyo-junior-high-school-d...

I agree, it’s a weird cultural quirk that you think wouldn’t exist with the longstanding trend towards acceptance of difference.

It’s a bit like Zwarte Piet in The Netherlands, where from an outsiders perspective it looks clearly problematic, but if you have grown up in The Netherlands you likely don’t see anything wrong.

A consideration of the Japanese saying "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down": https://www.tofugu.com/japan/conformity-in-japan/

This makes me feel very privileged for my mostly liberal and progressive society, for which it seems I take a lot for granted, like the right to dye my hair.

Also, I was surprised to hear this, because, in anime, characters very often have colorful hair.

This is actually one of the reasons that anime characters have colourful hair. It helps serve as a creative outlet and an escape from the conformity, rather than to depict it.

(Conformity at work and school, that is. Walk through somewhere like Harajuku, and even anime hair might start to seem tame).

In the US public schools I'm familiar with, they had strict rules about hair color and length, dress codes and rules about piercings and tattoos.

And the right to NOT dye your hair, apparently.

A humorous way of showing that negative rights are indeed more fundamental.

This is just sad and a good reminder that intolerance to any deviation is inherent to any society or organization.

Maybe it's just the weird intolerances - but Japan seems to have much worse and bigger intolerances than anywhere else.

Japan is pretty damn racist, any white who has there for an extended period of time knows that their skin color means they have a much harder time in certain establishments, or even just aren't allowed at all.

If you are white in Japan they will perpetually treat you like a tourist, which when you are a tourist is great bc they are super helpful, but I could see it becoming demeaning if one wanted to reside there permanently.

If you are black in Japan people treat you like an oddity and take pictures of you without asking, comment on your skin color, etc bc they rarely see black people in person. It’s quite rude and I agree racist.

The thing I've heard about Japan is that they're incredibly racist, but so polite it's hard to notice.

The only people downvoting you are people who haven't spent any time there. I was there for over a year, and most Americans can't pick up on the racism initially because its subtle, but like every Oz behind a curtain, once you slow down and pay attention, its glaringly obvious.

There are entirely too many idiots - and I don't care what anyone here says, they are idiots - who think only Americans can be racist.

Is it just like having dark skin in white-majority countries, or worse?

/r/2020PoliceBrutality

Please don't lump the US and the rest of the world together. The UK still has racism, for example, but we don't get people being regularly shot by police black or not.

Bobbies are less trigger happy, true, however there are quite a few that will happily hit someone on their head repeatedly. I guess that's common for law enforcement anywhere.

According to the Washington Post police shooting database, 19 unarmed black men were shot by police in all of 2019. Not exactly some runaway problem.

Meanwhile your government can dictate whether your child can live or die based on their calculated prognosis - and won’t let you leave the country for a second opinion.

> According to the Washington Post police shooting database, 19 unarmed black men were shot by police in all of 2019. Not exactly some runaway problem.

Ignoring that 2019 seemed to be a low year, that's still more people than were killed by police in the UK in total.

> Meanwhile your government can dictate whether your child can live or die based on their calculated prognosis - and won’t let you leave the country for a second opinion.

Second opinion from whom? NICE have to balance treatments based on cost-efficiency as well as efficacy, if you want to pay for better treatment they don't stop you because it's not on the NHS.

https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/health/nhs-healthcare/nhs-... If you want a second opinion you have to change GP, which is basically exact what you'd do in the states anyway. Just because you want them to give you an opinion doesn't mean you'll get the one you want.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-fin...

Meanwhile, people die every year in the United States because they have no healthcare at all. A Bit of perspective...

> that's still more people than were killed by police in the UK in total.

This makes perfect sense, the US has almost 5 times more population than the UK.

> If you want a second opinion you have to change GP

You can't just change GP, you have to do some bureaucratic BS first afaik.

Do you have the option to leave the country in order to get a second opinion from a doctor in the EU?

> This makes perfect sense, the US has almost 5 times more population than the UK.

5 (UK Police-induced deaths including Terrorists and the like) times 5 is not 1000.

> You can't just change GP, you have to do some bureaucratic BS first afaik.

The website I linked says change GP, and it's not that difficult to do in my experience (It's still annoyingly non-automated).

> Do you have the option to leave the country in order to get a second opinion from a doctor in the EU?

Practically I think it would arguably be malpractice if your GP ignored you if you did of your own accord, but with Brexit I genuinely don't know what the framework is anymore.

https://www.nhs.uk/using-the-nhs/healthcare-abroad/going-abr...

But contrary to what you seemed to be implying they don't stop you from doing that or paying for it yourself.

The NHS is not without flaws, and is arguably (I would certainly argue) empirically worse than other alternatives in Europe, but all this death-panel crap is literally just regurgitated anti-Obamacare talking points from a decade ago with almost no relevance to the ills actually plaguing single-payer healthcare.

> Practically I think it would arguably be malpractice if your GP ignored you if you did of your own accord

I do not think that this answers the question. It also does not need to be in the EU. Do I have the option to get a second opinion from a doctor in Brazil or the US or Russia?

> But contrary to what you seemed to be implying

I never implied that, not sure where you got that from. I find this attack unwarranted.

I have never head of Britain preventing people from leaving the country, except for criminals serving their sentence, and (presumably) people awaiting trial.

Where does the idea that people are prevented from leaving the country for private healthcare originate? (It would be rare, as there's a good private healthcare system in Britain anyway. The opposite is much more common: the UK is a common choice for private healthcare for rich people in the Middle East.)

> Where does the idea that people are prevented from leaving the country for private healthcare originate?

From this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25894454

I've never heard of this, and can't find anything to back it up (which is why I asked). There's usually a couple of reported cases a year where people travel abroad for something that isn't (yet) approved or available in the UK, and others that are routine.

The closest thing I can think of is a cannabis medicine, which isn't available in the UK, but the children involved have been able to go to the Netherlands for it. The trouble was when their parents brought the medicine back.

So, I assume it's American anti-public-healthcare fake news.

> You can't just change GP, you have to do some bureaucratic BS first afaik.

No, this is untrue.

In England you can change GP at any time. You don't need a reason.

For other stuff if you want a second opinion you ask for it.

The case being talked about is of a child who had no brain who was being kept breathing by machine. He had no hope of life.

In the UK the doctors come up with a care plan and put it to the parents. If the parents disagree the doctors have to go to court to get a ruling. The English courts are there to protect the rights of the child, and the rights of the parents. The child is given their own independent legal representative.

> In England you can change GP at any time. You don't need a reason.

This is irrelevant to what I said. I never claimed that you need to have a reason to change, rather I said that you need to "do some bureaucratic BS first", the registration.

Anyway, most GPs are not accepting new registrations due to corona :)

I wouldn't call it racist. You are genuinely an oddity if you're not japanese and not a tourist.

Racism is a deeper thing. True racism exists in some form between the chinese and the japanese due to the horrific atrocities committed by the japanese in the rape of nanking.

>I wouldn't call it racist.

I would. Sure, in most cases people don't actively dislike you when compared with some Japanese people that spew vitriol and really have it out for Koreans or Chinese, but you still get treated differently and often not in a good way.

I've met many, many people over the years, myself included, who wound up developing a love/hate relationship with Japan because of the racism.

I wouldn't call it racism because this behavior isn't unique to japan... it's unique to humanity. It will happen everywhere where you look and drastically different from anything the local population has ever seen before.

Only certain places have a unique culture where such treatment is deliberately frowned upon culturally. We are from the west so equality seems normal but it is not the default. If you decide to live in Asia, expect the default, it's not actually racist; it's normal.

Generally you just don't like being treated as a foreigner. But that's actually what you are. Don't expect to travel to another place and have them treat you as a local.

I know that it's the default. Doesn't make it not racism. It's not only racism when it happens in desirable countries people want to immigrate to en-masse.

Functionally it's the same thing. They just turn a blind eye because "hey it's normal, right?". It has been an ongoing shift over decades and even hundreds of years in the so-called melting pots of the world to get to the point people can live alongside people different than them and at least pretend they're equal and should be treated as such. It wasn't always the default in the West.

The rest of the world needs to catch up. They're behind the times.

>The rest of the world needs to catch up. They're behind the times.

It's not about the times. It's about biology, people are born with this type of behavior that is as biologically ingrained as heterosexuality or homosexuality. Humans tend to group with each other based off of race. This occurs everywhere including with Japanese and Chinese people born in the US. If you ever grew up in a community of people where there was a large enough mixture of Caucasians and minorities you will see that races group together automatically little incentive from others even though everyone more or less shares the same culture of being born in the same country.

You can't expect culture to override biology. What you see in the west is the unique phenomenon and everywhere else is basically displaying the biological norm. Because of biology this phenomenon is unlikely to establish itself as the norm for the majority of human existence. You cannot overwrite biology.

If you go to another country and your face stands out like a sore thumb expect to be treated differently everywhere because of nature, don't expect everyone to come to their senses and implement total equality.

The best you can hope for is equal treatment under the law, but the law is an ideal that is a caricature of the actual reality. If you have a two foot long nose, you will be treated differently in every country you go to, no amount of equality in the law can fix this.

I can cite tons of evidence for the biological origins of this "racist" behavior if that's the direction we want to take this. Either way I don't agree to even attack minor "infractions" or call it racism because it can't ever be fixed.

What can be fixed is deep racial hatreds and actual racial tensions. White people enslaving black people then segregating them and shooting them under the cover a "crime" is a real issue. White people forcing and enslaving chinese people to build rail roads is actual racism, Hitler killing Jews is racism. Other things are unfix-able and minor and therefore I wouldn't group it with the atrocities committed above.

Not to mention when a white guy goes to an Asian country they often actually can get "better" treatment along with the "bad" treatment just because of the privilege associated with the caucasian race. It's often one of the reasons why white people go live in another Asian country because Asian girls are "easier" and more "beautiful." No doubt if you lived in Asia it's likely you've taken advantage of this "reverse" racism.

By all means take advantage of it, I see nothing wrong with it, but don't expect total equality, we all know it's not going to happen if we're all perfectly honest with ourselves... especially if you're already taking advantage of the inequalities that benefit you.

I take the same position that it's a fundamental biological modus operandi of human beings to be that way. No need to convince me of that.

What I don't accept it the double standard. I don't live in the US, but elsewhere in the West and I see sometimes on the news "this country is racist because X happened blah blah blah" and when you zoom out and actually look at it we have some of the most diverse populations living side by side in harmony with relatively little tension and an extremely welcoming attitude in general. You go elsewhere in the world and it's not even close to the level we're on as it's a lot of monoculture and not much immigration, mostly people emigrating towards places like where we're from. So there is no or very little culture of accepting that other types of people live where you live and that's ok. If you hold both places to the same standard the non-Western countries are racist AF in comparison.

If it's all just biology and that's the norm, I'm just going to go back to that norm right here in the West. Oh wait... I can't because that would be racist.

I know 1000x over that it's absolutely the case that biologically speaking this is the natural state of things and you can never hope to override it at the deepest levels. But I bet my bottom dollar if immigration/emigration we're to reverse the places that became the new melting pots would be forced to lose those defaults as the West has. The only difference between us is they've never had large enough groups of people jumping up and down and getting in their face about it enough for it to change the cultural norms. We have.

I'm pretty tired of the End Racism narrative in the West because of this double standard. It's like wait... If I were to go to your country and try to live the life you live here I'd get nowhere close to the acceptance and treatment you get here yet WE'RE the bad guys? Like fuck off. If people want to end racism there's lower hanging fruit than the West which is comparatively doing amazing.

> If you decide to live in Asia, expect the default, it's not actually racist; it's normal.

I find that for a lot of folks raised in the West, the existence of this norm is a very rude wake-up call. But to your point, that doesn't stop it from being a norm in the first place in Asia. And it doesn't mean that it's necessarily "on the way out" either.

Well. 1. Little Boy and Hiroshima. 2. Fat Man and Nagasaki.

3. The Rape of Nanking 4. Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbour doesn’t count. Certainly not in the same sentence as Rape of Nanking

It’s surprisingly bad here in the UK as well. At one of the local schools here any uniform violation means isolation. They take your phone away and you are kept on your own in a room until the end of the day and visited by teachers only to issue work.

The student this happened to, my daughter, caused this to be triggered by dying her hair a lighter shade of brown than her normal colour.

I found out about this when she arrived home without her phone because the teacher had left it locked in her desk.

She was moved to a not insane school immediately and complaints raised with the school and the phone was collected by me the next day. Of course all record of all events magically disappeared.

I'm sure this has become worse. It seems to have happened with the change in many places to "academy" schools, where appearance reigns and they're run like businesses.

In the 1990s-2000s, when my parents were both teachers and I was at school, "uniform" meant wearing the correct colours (e.g. dark trousers or skirt, white shirt/t-shirt, blue jumper/sweater). It was still ridiculous, but being punished for it would require repeatedly breaking those rules. The usual response was the teacher saying "tuck your shirt in, William".

That’s a good observation. That was an academy school.

Is the point of school uniform to squash individuality? Is this how we want to prepare children for adulthood? I doubt that conformity, submission to arbitrary rules out of fear, and not standing out are good things to teach children, at least if you don't want them to become a bunch of zombies as adults.

Also, given the choice, who wants the sort of job that mandates a uniform?

A lot of people decide to become pilots or work for the army.

Uniforms are a big thing in the UK. Many jobs require them, even places where it seems entirely irrelevant. Hell, many non-customer facing office workers get a very strict dress code (black shoes, black trews, x/y/z colour shirt).

I never understood why that was a thing.

I wore school uniforms for 12 years in school. I don’t consider myself a conformist.

Arguably, this is the point of school, even if I disagree with it.

I regarded a uniform as one of the reasons to choose a factory job over an office job, since I would not have to make any clothes purchasing decisions or wear out my own stuff. Remote work is even better -- I got to have my cake and eat it too.

The point of modern Western education was to create factory and low-level office workers.

A more recent justification was to remove the chance for rich children to "look different" to poor children -- everyone is equal by wearing the same.

Of course, it doesn't work that way -- the poor children have second-hand clothes or the cheapest clothes from Asda, and the rich children will spend money on whatever they can -- fancy shoes etc.

Your list of “anywhere else” must be pretty fucking short if you really believe that.

What weird intolerances specifically are you referring to? Other than the black hair thing.

Here's a list of bizarre things that my school in Belgium was intolerant about back when I was in school. These are just the ones that come to mind right now, there were many others.

1. No short hair for girls. No bald boys. No dyed hair.

2. No piercings for boys, and only pierced ears for girls

3. No hats. No shorts.

4. No long skirts for girls. No short skirts for girls. Only between knee and calf length or some such bizarre nonsense.

5. No skirts for boys (I tried a kilt once, was not appreciated).

6. No rings for boys. Not "too many" rings for girls.

7. No sitting in boys' laps. Except when you're a girl sitting in another girl's lap, that was apparently fine.

8. No tops with straps thinner than a finger (for girls, I guess).

The problematic gendering aside, all of those rules always seemed bizarre and stupidly specific to me. Did a pierced bald boy with a ring once torch a school? Do teachers have some kind of phobia for specific hairdos? I get that it's a conformity thing, but conformity never struck me as being useful.

Conformity is useful in terms of (illusionary) efficiency: they look the same, they think the same, so you can run the same algo on them and they will produce a curve-bell result which you can use to single out and either eliminate or boost outliers. Problem is, diversity runs deeper than appearances; but few people and even fewer _orgs_ grok that.

> Did a pierced bald boy with a ring once torch a school? Do teachers have some kind of phobia for specific hairdos?

I can't say this was the case for your school, but often certain events or changes in culture cause rules to be established that end up being incomprehensible years later.

For example a shaved head was ok when I started school, but when neo-nazi skinheads became popular in the '90s the haircut became unwelcome (though not strictly prohibited).

You would think that the logical thing to rally against would be neo-nazi behaviour instead of hairdos. Of course the former is much harder to detect & enforce than the latter. So instead we pick a terrible proxy to identify unwanted behaviour. A few iterations later, anyone who doesn't fit a narrow set of criteria is immediately suspicious.

While I agree with the general statement about the arbitrary nature of dress codes, conformity itself not being useful is quite the stretch.

Beyond the observational evidence: that fact that every culture to ever exist in all parts of the planet value some degree of conformity, the conceptual points are just as strong: efficiency, harmony, unity, happiness and many other traits are higher in more uniform groups.

What if everyone in the classroom spoke a different language? What if everyone in the classroom had a different set of values and ethics? These commonalities ARE a degree of conformity, and they made interacting and the rules of engagement clear and simple so more important things can be focused on.

Obviously there are drawbacks: if everyone was the same person then there’s nothing new. One could argue that everyone having the same religion is worth it because now everyone has more in common to agree on, one could argue that removing that freedom comes with too high a cost to the new and interesting.

In summary, conformity is certainly useful, but comes with side effects and drawbacks.

> One could argue that everyone having the same religion is worth it because now everyone has more in common to agree on

LOL, yeah right.

"WHAT?!There are still BITS OF PLANT IN THIS HOLY MUSTARD! BLASPHEMER! Knights of Lord French, SEIZE HER! 'Stone ground'?? WHAT HERESY IS THIS?! The Book of French's, Chapter 8, Verse 3 clearly states, 'Our Lord French, who blessed the world with bright yellow smooth mustard, hath decreed all other mustards to be a blight upon the world!'

You will face trial by hot dog eating contest. Lord French will judge your pitiful soul..."

I’m referring primarily to Islamic countries where islam is the state religion. They’re argument is that it creates greater harmony

>Not "too many" rings for girls.

This is weirdly specific. Were there any gypsies?

Not specific to schools, but Japan is still racist to anyone who is not Japanese, very intolerant to plus-size people, and intolerant to anyone with a differing opinion - those who don't participate in the general groupthink, which is very much far to the right.

Sorry, what?

There are plenty of societies and organisations that embrace diversity or deviation.

Am I reading your post wrong?

Our opinions are both valid, but it is apparent that our core beliefs differ. While I agree that there are societies and organizations that embrace diversity, I strongly believe that itself to be a deviance, not the norm. "Classic" societies, orgs and memeplexes are almost all xenotoxic and value homogenity. Yes, even most flavours of buddhism.

yes, but you said > intolerance to any deviation is inherent to any society or organization.

While I agree that there is a certain amount of homogenity inherent to any grouping (after all, a group has to have something in common to be a group), I don't think that implies that it must be intolerant to deviation.

Historically, I'd agree that societies, etc have been more homogenous, but I don't agree that it is an inherent quality.

If I were to argue my point deeper, I'd say that these societies (orgs) that embrace diversity both are very recent or very recently exerted a significant effort to be more tolerant due to very pressing issues. Otherwise our monkey brains are wired to think "other/them = bad, same/us = good". Groups amplify monkey brain, because monkey brain gets us in groups so that leopards don't kill us at night. Hence the inherence and need for significant effory to override instinct.

I went to a school with a strict uniform code. The hall monitor would check for well polished shoes(white canvas shoes on mondays, black leather/faux leather rest of the days. The faux leather was a religious exemption, but they didn’t care as long as the girls wore Mary Jane type shoes. Boys had a different design), nails(no long untrimmed nails or polish).

Having said that..we had free rein over hair. As long as it was not loose and plaited neatly, any style is fine. We could wear flowers in our hair and earrings as this was in India and there were social/cultural/religious reasons for girls wearing jewelery, flowers and even henna on our hands.

Also: Fridays were non uniform days for grades 5 and lower. And you can wear anything you want on your birthday..all grades.

We still had to march to class and up the stairs from daily outdoor morning assembly(20-30 minutes or so) everyday to the music of a band! Prayer, reading of daily news, thought of the day, school announcements, school sports team announcements and national anthem before dispersing in ‘an orderly fashion’. And by that, I mean..we had to march to class in a line(class lines were in height order)

When I tell this to kids these days, they think I am pulling their legs. And I thought my school was being strict!!

I wonder: how unpleasant was all of that, as a kid at the time?

From an outsider's perspective it sounds tyrannical, but there's also something appealing about a codified environment that looks very different than my own life; it would be an alien adventure to get used to it. Well, for a while, until it starts to feel oppressive.

I would certainly have a much greater emotional association with band music if I had been made to march to it as a child.

I loved it! I never thought of my school days as oppressive. They were the best days of my life. I had no worries. I could focus on what I wanted and study without distractions. I had adults I could trust. My friends were all like me and there were few squabbles. If anything, it was a tad protective that it was a little bit jarring when I went to college. I never realised that this wasn’t the norm for many until after my school years. I think I missed out on other people skills and didn’t know how to read cues about people who were different than me.

I owe everything that I like about myself to my school teachers. They gave me space to explore..the wiggle room was monitored tho’. They gave me structure and expected discipline. Is that tyrannical? I still talk to my old teachers and am in touch with many of my school friends. It’s been almost 30 years and my math teacher still calls me. Another of my favourite teacher just told me on WhatsApp the other day that I shouldn’t waste my idle time during covid. She has given me exercises for vocal music and I have to sing for her every weekend. I will never be old.

I am in California now and a healthy number of my classmates are in the Bay Area. We meet often. I am not under any illusion that my life was perfect, but I only remember the good parts. It was certainly not unpleasant.

College was different. I went to a Jesuit institution run by Irish Catholic nuns that unfortunately happened to be the same one my mother went to...and the same nuns were still around and kept calling my mother who ended up being in a bad mood after one or the other would complain about me. Otoh, it amused me to see my mother so rattled because they were able to get that adult in my life so uncomfortable and squirmy with just one unblinking glance. I still laugh out loud when I think about it. My mother..on the other hand..remains unamused.

Some of the comments seem to be suggesting that this is because of some Japanese quirk of requiring extreme uniformity far above what is required in other countries but it really isn't; it's essentially just laziness on the part of schools. The real reason for these rules is that (as with schools in many other countries for better or worse) Japanese schools don't want their students, who mostly have black hair, to dye their hair brown or other colors.

However, since the vast majority of the students naturally have black hair it's just MUCH easier to write the rules to say that in the rare cases where a student has another hair color they have to dye it black rather than trying to argue with students who have dyed "chapatsu" brown hair but then claim that that's really their natural hair color when it isn't.

Some schools like high schools in Osaka have a system where students with natural colors other than black are supposed to register so the school can record their natural hair color to know that they aren't dying it.

It's pretty dumb and it sucks for the students who naturally have brown hair but it's easy for the school to be lazy and take the approach of just requiring all the students to have black hair.

Nah. Japan has a very insular attitude towards culture.

e.g., https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilians_in_Japan

Wikipedia mostly talks about Brazilian nikkei (fascinating).

However, and I can’t find it now, last decade Japan was in the process of pushing out Brazilian “migrant” workers, leaving the workers’ children (born and raised in Japan) in a cultural & language limbo.

Background on the business organizing this. Sounds like a daycare facility:

>In Japan, NPO Florence has profited from competent business models and reinvested that profit into solving children’s social issues, all while still providing decent remuneration to its staff.

https://globisinsights.com/mba-essentials/critical-questioni...

>Our Vision - Society fulfilled with smiles of diverse families

>Zero waiting children for nursery school. All the mothers can continue their work.

>Assist parents (mothers in particular) to remain in the workforce

https://florence.or.jp/english/

(2019)

I wonder what impact this has on Japanese students willingness to take risks and express themselves once they leave the educational system.

Links to Japanese articles:

[0]: https://mainichi.jp/articles/20190905/k00/00m/040/210000c

[1]: https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXMZO47985000Q9A730C1000000

Edit: structure.

Many schools in China require girls to cut their hairs short, so they don’t spend all their time on it and can study instead.

To think that many of them then end up in big tech makes me wonder if their oppressed needs causes them to make decisions that impose the same oppression of ideas/joy on their customers (basically, the rest of the world).

Edit: Not saying that it would, I'm just questioning the possibility of it.

It is more like high school pressure to conform

If you think people have “oppressed” needs caused by the rules around them, perhaps you should reassess which aspects of your own life are oppressed.

That's a pretty good idea. Has anyone explored the option of disallowing friendships and romance? I think kids waste far too much time socializing and pursuing young love. That's a tremendous amount of wasted study time.

"Celibacy" might be a relevant keyword?

There's probably some study of highly successful people that shows that the sociopaths with no friends tend to become CEOs so people want to follow in their footsteps to get the maximum score in life.

That’s either genius satire or terrifying psychopathy.

FWIW, I did spot this on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Akikun1124/status/1219144685299490816

>街で男女と1m以上離れる

>恋愛禁止のため

>（公立高校）

Basically (as far as my elementary Japanese understands it), a public school has ruled that boys and girls should keep a distance of at least a metre in town in order to forbid relationships.

I can't tell if you are serious or not.

Life isn't all about studying. We don't want a socially stunted generation that is so optimized for academic success they lose important lessons along the way. And to be honest, you can't stop teenagers anyway.

I think you're being sarcastic, but in some Asian countries disallowing romance is actually pretty common, even in high schools.

Yet I'd still rather live in Japan then in the US

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