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A while ago I read a french news article that talked about bullying in japan and what was mentioned in it was way beyond what counts as bullying here (except for the most severe cases). Bullying is always really bad and even just "mild" verbal or physical abuse can scar a child for life. But what apparently counts as "regular" bullying in Japan truly gave me the chills. Mentioned were things like stripping others naked, throwing away their clothes, burning their stuff, hitting them with sticks, spitting among other horrible things. The article also mentioned that this went on just as a bad online with encouragements for suicide being a frequent part of the cyber bullying.

Does someone here have any experience with japanese school life? Is it really that bad? Or did they just pick a number of the worst cases?

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I don't have any particular insight on bullying in Japan specifically, but having lived there for a big chunk of my childhood I can say for sure that you have to be very, very skeptical of the "Look how weird Japan is" trope which is super common in Western media.

Those stories always follow the same pattern - pick out the most extreme example of something that you can find, then spin some superficially insightful theory around it relating it to some essential difference between Japanese culture and other cultures.

There is no such thing as essential differences. And if all that reaches your attention about a faraway place is the extremes, you are bound to come to some weird conclusions.

It's just too easy to apply this recipe to anything you don't understand well. Just imagine the stories you could tell about European student culture if you started from the Belgian Reuzegom hazing story [0], and generalized from there.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuzegom#Death_of_Sanda_Dia

The "Japan is no different from any other country" trope is just as inaccurate as the "wacky Japan" trope and in my experience has actually overtaken the original in online discussions (though news articles clearly still focus on the original).

Making a generalized story from cherry-picked anecdotes is an incredibly common strategy for journalists writing about anything. Sometimes it might actually match more general trends and sometimes not; you can't say without real statistics, which in most cases don't exist or aren't accurate anyway.

No one's tracking it carefully, so who knows if bullying in Japan is actually worse or just picked up in the zeitgeist more. But it's ridiculous to pretend like Japanese school culture isn't drastically different from that of most western countries.

In Japanese society, historically, ritual suicide was accepted as an "honorable" way to die under otherwise shameful circumstances. It seems pretty natural that, with such a cultural legacy, Japanese people (including children) would be more willing to resort to suicide.

Reinforcing your comment, the fallacy here is in assuming that the factors affecting suicide rates among Western children are identical to the factors for Japanese children, and therefore bullying in Japan must be particularly atrocious to cause the high baseline suicide rate.

>In Japanese society, historically, ritual suicide was accepted as an "honorable" way to die under otherwise shameful circumstances. It seems pretty natural that, with such a cultural legacy, Japanese people (including children) would be more willing to resort to suicide.

Does it really? Do you feel the same way about western society and, say, duels to the death? The many old practices regarding marriage and the church all around?

I don't think suicide as an honorable death is any more of a real thing in Japan nowadays than ninjas are.

>Does it really? Do you feel the same way about western society and, say, duels to the death? The many old practices regarding marriage and the church all around?

Yes, I would. Such societal norms don't just die, they remain in the "ether" so to speak.

For example, americans might not be as religious, or sticking with the church. They might not even be born in the US, or just be first or second generation. But the culture, and this includes immigrants as they integrate, contains all kinds of protestant ideas.

And it's easier for something like a suicide norm to survice that a practice of the duel (which takes two to survice, plus has the law against it, even if you come out alive).

Suicide was also an honorable way to go out in the Roman empire, but I'm not sure it's a societal norm in Italy nowadays. Definitely in the ether though, I think suicide after disgrace is something everyone can relate to.

>Suicide was also an honorable way to go out in the Roman empire, but I'm not sure it's a societal norm in Italy nowadays.

Maybe not so nowadays, but you'd be surprised how often it was a solution to societal shame in Italy up to the 1950s or so...

The ether of American "death by duel" is part of the more general protestant idea that suicide is an act against god, but there's no rule against finding someone/something to kill yourself with. Drink yourself to death, get yourself killed by a cop, join the army and find a place to sacrifice yourself: all are related to why duels to the death were part of our culture. To what extent that ether still effects the way we act I couldn't say, but it's definitely still around.

>Do you feel the same way about western society and, say, duels to the death?

Considering how common a form of retribution gun violence is in the US nowadays, yes, I'd say yes.

Could there be a case to be made in comparing American school shooters and Japanese student suicides? Maybe we'd find they had similar school experiences prior to their final moments.

Do you want to reframe duels to the death as gun violence and then consider America, which is the most clear comparison?

American gun violence is on a different scale to most of the rest of Western society. I don't think it's a particularly useful comparison.

The relics of European honour culture, which includes duelling etc., being preserved in parts of the USA, particularly in the West and South, due to the delayed roleout of the centralised state, is a real argument made about why men from those parts can be so quick on the draw (perhaps literally) at the slightest interpersonal offence. Dunno if it's true but it doesn't seem preposterous.

Japan expat resident here.

The 'suicide for preserving honor' theory has been long abandoned & mostly outlawed, even. No one in the modern generation thinks that way. The causes for suicide are mostly due to economic imbalance & high credit/ loans/ failed businesses (sadly). Children have easy access to credit cards from family, and rack up huge debts by indulging in things as part of peer pressure. I saw several case studies highlighting this when I was part of influencer marketing business.

Ritual suicide was done by seppuku - slashing out your guts, as a final act of bravery. No one does anything remotely similar.

How do you “outlaw” a theory?

You can’t purge a cultural heritage—everyone in Japan learns Japanese history and ritual suicide is a notable part of that history. The point is not that people commit suicide today for the same reasons or in the same way that they did 500 years ago, but that it is more likely to be accepted as a way out than in a culture that e.g. considers suicide to be a one-way ticket to the spiritual inferno.

> You can’t purge a cultural heritage—everyone in Japan learns Japanese history and ritual suicide is a notable part of that history.

Not sure where you get this idea, but this is grossly inaccurate.

Japanese culture is strongly revisionist. People don't talk about the war, much less teach about it. The 'old ways' and 'samurai heroism' was faulted for the mess in '40s. People make a sigh whenever such touchy topics come up. New Japan is a different beast.

As a consequence, we are seeing a generation which is severely confused on why WW2 happened. American pop culture is embraced with open arms, but they can't explain why Hiroshima happened at the hands of US. It's all faulted to grave mistakes on the 'old thinking' which is best left behind. Japan adopted modernism & became America's best buddies, ignoring the blemishes over 3 decades of Imperial japanese horrors. Older generation, who used to teach from experience of pre-war and neo-modern Japan, are dying off due to age. A significant chapter of history is being ignored by looking the other way. Look up the editorials of any Japanese weekly, and on any random week you will find some discussion on how they bemoan the growing dissonance between the post-war values of peace & the cultural change alongside the pseudo-aggression of some political parties, which eventually aims to remilitarize Japan at some point. (That's a story for another time or another thread)

I have to assume that WWII history is still being taught. I'm not sure if they are censoring kamikaze tactics in Japan, but they are still well documented in US WWII media.

Funnily enough, WW2 is taught in a very sanitized way. Its more along the lines of "we had disagreement, we had a war, we were all somewhat wrong. let's move on and be peaceful". People take offense if you prod along the topic further. They don't want to talk about it anymore.

You are right, even asking people from a country directly can give a really false impression due to the pattern you describe. As someone who has lived both in the US as well as two european countries for equal parts of my life I know very well how easily views can become distorted by listening to single cases that are not representative.

Yeah having moved to China from France, I was expecting to meet aliens honestly, and ended up concluding like you there are no essential differences between cultures.

Everything is essetially the same with some limited number of levers being pulled a bit further: girls want to marry a little bit earlier, parents are a little bit more worried abt kids, politicians a bit more corrupt, racism is targeted at different colors in a different hierarchy, all that jazz, but all the patterns I was used to in France simply fit China very well and I didnt find it so difficult to just brush off the odd difference and adapt.

My Chinese parents in law also discovered I have the same strengths and flaws any other Chinese guy their daughter could have found :D

It took me about 10 years to really understand the enormous differences between my native culture and my current culture. And those differences are staggering. And they are both western.

You're assuming you can "see" the cultural differences.

Sometimes you can easily see it, but often it's really hard to figure out, because they are going to express themselves in edge cases that you have to run into, which takes time and then it takes time to run into enough of them to be able to see a pattern.

The modern media landscape is sub-optimal.

Seeing all these surveys that show that the more you consume media the less you know is extremely sad. I don’t think there are any short term solutions.

My two daughters went through Japanese public schools in Tokyo and Yokohama, and I now teach and do research about education-related topics at a university in Tokyo. My research focus is not student behavior, but I sometimes visit schools and I hear a lot of anecdotes about elementary and secondary schools from teachers and college students.

My impression is that, overall, the bullying is probably not significantly worse than in other countries, but that perhaps more media attention is focused on the issue than elsewhere. There was a major moral panic in the mid-1980s about school bullying, and the media continue to report regularly on statistical trends and extreme incidents.

Anecdotally, there seems to be a lot of variation among schools. More than one public school teacher has confided to me about how different the kids are in different neighborhoods. Japan may seem homogeneous, but there’s a lot of local variation by social class. In the tougher schools, there can be fighting, stealing, and bullying, while in other schools that might be practically unknown. Private schools can be very different from public, too, and there are a lot of single-gender schools, which have their own dynamics. Certain aspects of Japanese culture, such as age-based hierarchies, may be stronger or weaker or play out differently in different types of schools as well.

This isn’t very unique to Japan. Or at least I’ve seen schools in the US 5 min apart that had the same class discrepancy. Brawls every day and learning is for nerds in one, constant tutoring and homework in the other.

You’re right. Something I meant to say but didn’t in my comment above is that Japanese schools are more diverse than they seem to many people, including Japanese.

In the U.S., people tend to be keenly aware of school differences, because public schools have a lot of local autonomy and are typically locally funded. In Japan, because the curriculum and many other education-related matters are determined by the Ministry of Education, there is a large degree of apparent nationwide uniformity, especially between grades one and nine. For example, in every elementary and junior-high-school classroom I have been into in Japan, and in almost all that I’ve seen in photographs, all of the desks face the front of the room and the outside windows are on the students’ left-hand side [1]. There doesn’t seem to be any similar uniformity at least in California [2], where I went to elementary school more than fifty years ago.

This apparent uniformity can give people who have experienced Japanese schools only as students the impression that whatever they happened to experience in school—a lot of bullying, say, or none at all—must be typical of the entire country.

Of course, people in other countries might overgeneralize their individual educational experiences, too.

[1] Google image search for 小学校教室 [elementary-school classroom]

https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=%E5%B0%8F%E5%AD%A6%E6%A0%A...

[2] Google image search for elementary-school classroom California

https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=elementary-school+classroo...

This reminded me of experiences I wish I could forget for when I was bullied from 2nd grade to 8th. What made it worse was by puberty, I realized I was gay, which made me feel the bullying was justified because of how reprehensible my sexual orientation was. While I don't believe this anymore, I do feel those experiences have left a deep scare that won't simply go away.

Similar experiences here. If you haven't, really can't emphasize the value of a good therapist, and gay men's group therapy if you can find it.

That said, I think the deep scar analogy is apt. While therapy has helped me immensely in dealing with some of my issues, those issues will always be there, so it's hard not to feel an immense amount of regret and "if only" thoughts wishing I had never been bullied in the first place.

I'm sorry this happened to you. I actually find it terrible how bullying in general is seen as "part of growing up" and other nonsense or sometimes even heavily played down with lies or fabrications like "the bully himself is actually suffering/has a bad life thats why he does it" (which is in no way generally true).

Or even worse: blame is put on the victim.

I was a bully during my teenage years. Honestly, did it for the attention from peers, and especially the girls. It's sad to say, but girls definitely favor that mentality at that age range.

There was a recent scandal in Japan where a musician named Cornelius was chosen to preform at the Paralympics and had an old interview resurface where he bragged about this type of bullying: stripping naked, force feeding someone their own feces… sadly it sounds like this was done to a handicapped person.

He was forced to resign and ultimately put a lot of pressure on prime minister Suga because he was his pick. Suga had to also step down after this and other similar incidents.

https://aramajapan.com/news/cornelius-apologizes-after-bully...

> a French news article [about Japan]

Interestingly I experienced persistent bullying that included physical assault and mental abuse (it was always successfully passed off as a joke when they did something to me) in the French system.

It was so bad that I still relive it daily every single day now, many many years later.

I’m Japanese (24). In my own personal experience, I've never seen bullying that severe. There may be regional differences.

I lived in Japan for 8 years (not in Tokyo), and this sort of stuff was very rare and often newsworthy.

I imagine it does happen, but more often than not at urban school, at schools that are less academically oriented (e.g., construction high schools), and overall in lower socio-economic areas. The abusers are probably from abusive families.

If you’re in the burbs or the provincial parts of Japan, bullying at this extreme level is very unlikely to happen. The more common type of bullying is verbal abuse — still bad, but not like the examples you gave.

All that said, there is a form of hazing that is common in Japan that would probably be considered abusive, and that’s with high school baseball clubs. The new players on the team sometimes get boot camp-like treatment, and some folks (and sometimes coaches) take it too far. It’s theoretically all in fun and/or character building, and there are often checks and balances in place by the senior players, but I’ve heard some stories. That said, I don’t think that there are many baseball players who would not do it again.

> The article also mentioned that this went on just as a bad online with encouragements for suicide being a frequent part of the cyber bullying.

That doesn't surprise me at all. Back in the day 2ch, which was the forerunner of 4chan in Japan, was extremely popular, but basically just as toxic and awful as 4chan. I think in Asia generally there is a LOT of aggression online.

> I think in Asia generally there is a LOT of aggression online.

In Asia? You haven't seen Twitter yet in the US.

> You haven't seen Twitter yet in the US.

Yes I have, and there is much more of a culture to be taken care of and get emotional support there than I've seen in other countries. Even British twitter is way harsher lol Americans are generally very kind and soft

> Even British twitter is way harsher lol Americans are generally very kind and soft

You probably aren't exposed to the same kind of feed then.

Don't get in a verbal pissing contest. Bring up a concrete example. Then they can do the same. Anecdata battle until trends can be established. Or if data trends can be shown, link those.

Not every discussion between people needs to have the caliber of evidence required by a scientific study or dissertation. Besides, arguments like that tend to just end up being tennis matches where commenters lob citations back and forth at each other without reading them.

Also, I think people should feel free to share whatever life experience / observations / anecdotes they have because it's not like what we write here is going to get cited in some journal.

This was a case of "my dad can beat up your dad." Just stated as "I see worse than you are seeing." Nothing of substance. If we want to compare who's stream is worse, provide some examples, don't just say you've dealt with worse than what you assume the other person has.

Anyway, looks like I replied to the wrong post originally. And I botched my delivery. It was a poor attempt at encouraging more substantive discussion. I, for one, would have been interested in seeing an example that points out how much more ruthless a different country was, and I would have hoped that someone would show a counter example, and then a n interesting discussion pop up.

This is a conversation not a pissing context or a peer reviewed study. It's very hard to quantify one's experience. I was once active on both the UK and American sphere of twitter and I feel the American side of it is much worse. It's fine to not go further and just acknowledge different people have different experiences. We don't have to go fetch studies that take ages to read fully and to critically examine just to justify every opinion we have, especially when there's probably just as many studies pointing to the opposite.

Why didn’t you post this reply one comment up?

Sounds like a foolishly overbroad claim, perhaps you should step it back to "the Americans I follow on twitter"? https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-man-targeted-...

I find that interesting, especially for countries like Korea or Japan. The stereotype of those cultures is sort of passive, and accepting of the status quo. And yet, when anonymous, the fangs come out, if not even more pointed.

I'm sure there's something there, but I'm not a social scientist. Anyone with experience in sociology/psychology have an idea what that's about?

John Gabriel's Greater Internet F*&kwad Theory explains it succinctly (language warning): https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/325/699/4fc...

I think it's precisely because of that collectivism, which leads to much harsher punishment of outliers.

Hmm, I always thought conformity-culture was the cause of social accountability of outliers. My go to example for this is the highly individual valuing, yet Patagonia vest wearing finance bros. Conformity without collectivism. It's a thing and it's much more insidious than the collectivism-conformity script we got growing up.

Yes, accurate, with tacit approval of the masses, too. Which makes things even worse.

I always thought that the more you repress aggression and competition, specially in human males, the more it will end up being expressed anyway, but in bursts or in passive-aggressive ways. Of course, this is just a personal hypothesis.

This is self-evident, especially in the West. Girls are getting further and further ahead in education because they are obedient, and not unruly and full of energy like boys. And no one gives a shit. It's instead touted as some victory for feminism or something.

Unfortunately that bites them with a lack of confidence and taking risks in the future. However that is mainly due to patriarchy and internalised misogyny in my experience.

Problem is that the "feminist" label is so simplistic as to miss all nuance ala: all that is "good for women" is "feminist".

Is being successful in school good? yes. Is being successful in later life good? yes.

So you cannot consider the "successful school dropout". "risk taking" is the missed nuance, or "it has to get worse before it gets better"/"break a bone to set the leg" etc. Instead you have the only "feminist" path as (cherry-picked populations of) girls doing well in school and successes later in life, even if those don't necessarily/naturally correlate.

If you really wanted to capture that nuance, you need the kind of discussions Jordan Peterson has wrt personality/behavioural traits and their impacts on differences in outcomes; but you can clearly see how much hostility (in the name of feminism) he receives for that.

The funny thing is how he's accused of (sex/gender) essentialism, even if backed by stats/data, despite the advocated feminist alternatives being also full of essentialism (and just-so narratives), just ones seen as more culturally palatable.

It may also be elevated self-doubt when doing something logically sound but overall risky over an extended period without social validation, and not patriarchy or misogyny.

Why would that affect women more than men?

>The stereotype of those cultures is sort of passive, and accepting of the status quo. And yet, when anonymous, the fangs come out, if not even more pointed.

I think because can be a better replacement for yet in this sentence. Repression very often leads to higher intensity.

This is the iceberg of "face" culture. Appear happy content and whatever society demands in public and let out the true opinion, feelings and yes, often hatred in anonymity or inner family.

Good thing we wouldn't introduce such a thing in the west.

Does this thing even need to be introduced?

> Does someone here have any experience with japanese school life? Is it really that bad? Or did they just pick a number of the worst cases?

I sincerely believe these instances were cherry picked. If such things happened regularly, it would have made an awful amount of noise in an otherwise law abiding society. Mixed raced (hafu) children do get more bullying from anecdotal evidence, but that is more of name calling or poking some fun at visual attribute. My knowledge about the situation is limited to Tokyo & Osaka, but that is pretty much where most of the foreigners/ mixed race families are to be found.

Probably it is overblown, but I wouldn't be surprised if this actually happened somewhere (certainly not regular though).

That said, I'll say that bullying in Japan is different in that it is orchestrated. Peer pressure is enormous in Japan. When someone is being bullied, very few of us can raise an objection because doing so would make you the next target. So everyone is becoming an enabler. (Actually, this is not just kids' matter. It's pretty much how the whole society functions here. No wonder adults can't stop kids bullying - they're just imitating adults!)

Watching anime (yeah yeah I know) I used to laugh at the absurdity of the bullying and how sexual it all was. I had no idea that bullying is really that bad in Japan. That's extremely sad.

The frequency of how much of what appears to be outlandish bullying gets portrayed in Japanese shows could be an indicator of how normalized it has become there. I have watched some anime too, and I cringed every time they showed those cartoonishly evil bullying scenes. They appeared so unrealistic to me, but reading this discussion it seems it might have actually been a quite relatable theme for Japanese audiences.

> Mentioned were things like stripping others naked, throwing away their clothes, burning their stuff, hitting them with sticks, spitting among other horrible things.

All of these things happened to at least one person I know growing up in the US.

This is probably something that varies a lot by area but based on my observations of elementary school students (who I’ve seen the most of) and others. The situations you describe sound like pretty strong outliers.

I would want to see pretty strong (non anecdotal) evidence to think otherwise.

Yeah it is always hard to get a proper picture of something like actual school life based on one (or a few) articles when in reality often not even parents of the children themselves know what is really going on.

> Does someone here have any experience with japanese school life?

No direct experience but heard stories of bullying of children of friends/colleagues living in Japan and that was scary enough.

This sounds inline with bullying in the US honestly, at least in the rougher schools.

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