Bullying Brings Despair, Death to Japanese Pupils

Seven-year-old Gaku Fujimoto suffered 18 months of bullying and brutality in silence, the eyesight in his left eye eventually failing from the repeated pummeling. Nightmares tormented him. He hinted at suicide.

The Kobe boy wrote anguished diary entries, including one in which he implored: “Please look at the many injuries on my hands and feet. Teacher, please help me quickly. I will be safe every day if I die.”

His parents complained repeatedly to his school, but his teacher told him to simply gaman , or endure it.

At least Gaku survived his torment.

Yuhei Kodama did not. On Jan. 13, his body was found stuffed into a rolled gymnasium mat at a junior high in Yamagata in northern Japan, his face swollen to twice its normal size.

A bright, personable boy, Yuhei, 13, had been tormented for months, in part because his family was well-off and his Tokyo accent made him stand out. Police say he was suffocated in the mat after being beaten by seven classmates in front of at least 20 other pupils, none of whom reported it to authorities.

The incidents have helped bring to public view what educational officials here say is their most serious problem: the cruel, increasingly violent world of school bullying. While bullying has always existed, experts say that ever-growing academic pressures on children, along with social isolation, are producing a more vicious, prolonged practice that sometimes lasts for years and leads to nervous breakdowns, suicides and even murders among children.

At the same time, officials say, the problem is becoming more difficult for teachers and parents to spot. The bullies hide it. In the Yamagata case, for instance, a student allegedly was posted at the gym door to watch out for adults.

And many victims don’t tell and sometimes can’t even articulate their pain. Yuhei tried to laugh off his suffering, for instance, while one Kyoto girl was kicked, taunted, ordered around and ostracized for eight months--suffering insomnia and stomach pains in the process--before she realized something was amiss and told her parents.

Most of Japan’s classrooms are well-mannered, with diligent students and earnest teachers and test scores that are the envy of the West. Yet the bullying problem is challenging officials to reflect on the unforeseen side effects of the academic pressures and rigid school rules that have produced Japan’s disciplined corps of well-trained students.

“Children today are valued for their test scores, rather than their human characteristics, and schools act as screening machines rather than helping them grow up as human beings,” said Nobuto Aoki, a Shizuoka probation officer who has written several books on troubled children. “So the children feel they can’t escape and get frustrated, angry, anxious and isolated. This is the basic emotional state of bullying.”

Although the conduct occurs in every country, experts say Japan’s group society tends to create a different breed of bully. Cases here are more apt to involve many youngsters ganging up on one and to escalate to serious injury or even death because children and teachers alike are less likely to intervene against the group, they say.

In one notorious case a few years ago, the teacher even participated in staging a mock funeral for a boy in front of him--which led him to commit suicide shortly thereafter.

Japanese society’s vertical structure also encourages bullying, said Yasusaburo Hoshino, a retired Rissho University law professor and head of the private Children’s Human Rights and Corporal Punishment Study Group. That’s because those on top tend to take license to treat those on the bottom with little regard, he said.

The bullying phenomenon is also made worse by the declining size of Japanese families, from the three-generation households of the past to the current average of fewer than two children.

That greater social isolation, along with the constant academic cramming and the mind-numbing television video games, are making children less sensitive to compassion and emotional pain, asserted Toru Wakahoi, head of the Japan Bar Assn.’s Children’s Rights Committee.

Wakahoi said many bullies don’t even understand that what they did was wrong. He added that the “samurai ethic” of honorable combat has been replaced, amid Japan’s rapid industrialization and fierce competition, with a more amoral attitude that “anything is permitted for the sake of winning.”

The result: “The brakes have disappeared,” Aoki said.

The fear that bullying is escalating in severity and duration has led the Ministry of Education to declare that the problem is its most serious, even though the number of reported cases has dropped, said spokesman Teruo Ogawa. Indeed, ministry officials thought they had solved the problem in the mid-1980s, when the soaring number of cases forced them to undertake a massive study and issue anti-bullying guidelines.

Although the number of reported cases dropped from a peak of 155,066 in 1985 to 52,610 the following year and 22,062 in 1991, even ministry officials believe that much of the problem has simply gone underground.

No one really knows how prevalent the problem actually is. But one survey of seventh- and eighth-graders at a Saitama junior high found that 32.4% had been bullied, with physical violence in two-thirds of the cases.

Officials also worry that the although the number of bullying cases is decreasing, the problem is simply resurfacing in the rising numbers of students refusing to go to school. The number refusing to go to school has increased sharply in the last decade--from 15,912 cases in 1981, or 0.5% of all junior-high students, to 43,794 in 1991, or 0.84%.

Many experts believe that the current spate of bullying is simply an extension of the phenomena of children’s violence against parents in the late 1970s and against teachers in the early 1980s. Although stopgap measures, such as harsh school rules or hiring teachers trained in martial arts, helped suppress those earlier types of violence, it is resurfacing now in the present forms, they say.

In reaction, the Ministry of Health and Welfare announced this year the unprecedented step of appointing 14,000 child-welfare workers to help deal with bullying and child abuse.

But how effective such measures will be is open to doubt, because officials say most children hide the problems from adults. And when children don’t hide the problem, some parents charge, the schools and teachers do.

“I’m sorry,” wrote Naoko Yoshino, 13, before she jumped to her death from her apartment building in April, 1990. Her friends later said that gentle, even-tempered Naoko, nicknamed “Bull,” had endured bullying for three years.

Her tormenting classmates designated certain days for bullying, gave prizes for the meanest acts and exhorted each other, “Let’s bully her and relieve our frustration.” One day Naoko went to school and found the graffiti: “Stupid Bull. Die.” Three days later, she killed herself.

Naoko’s school denied the presence of bullying.

But her parents say their daughter wrote about her anguish in her class journal, a common writing practice in schools here, which the teacher ignored.

Indeed, the failure of schools to acknowledge the problems and deal with them tops the list of complaints by victims’ families.

School officials were so unresponsive to Gaku Fujimoto’s duress that the Kobe Bar Assn. took the unusual step of issuing a formal letter of warning March 11. On repeated occasions, the boy was kicked, punched and scratched.

The lawyer’s group said Gaku’s teacher knew about his plight for a year but failed to report it to the principal. In July, 1991, the bully pummeled his face and caused such extensive nose bleeding that the boy had to change clothes, but neither the teacher nor the nursing aide told his parents.

“Teachers’ attitudes are really poor,” acknowledged Takashi Matsubuchi, spokesman for the Japan Teachers Union. He said some teachers believe bullying actually toughens children in a positive way, while others try to hide their classroom problems for fear of damaging their own reputations. Still others think bullies have legitimate reasons for their acts and try to remain neutral.

The basic problem, he said, is that too many teachers lack an appreciation of the individual rights of children, a legacy of the nation’s militaristic past and hierarchical social system.

The teachers union is advocating a human rights education program to teach tolerance, encompassing lessons on Japan’s outcasts, minorities and women. But Matsubuchi acknowledges that few teachers would have time to teach it, given the central government’s required curriculum and the pressure to teach children what appears on standardized exams.

Besides, says attorney Wakahoi, such a program would probably be superficial, and, thus, ineffective. What is needed is a frank and thorough airing of problems, he said, but “such methods are extremely rare in Japan.”

Just ask Ryo Tsuchiya, 14, of Kyoto, who wrote in his diary between June, 1991, and February, 1992: “Today I didn’t eat dinner. My stomach hurt and I couldn’t sleep. I suffered from stomach pains all night long. I can’t stop my tears because I find myself so miserable.”

Ryo’s case is less dramatic but perhaps more typical, involving emotional abuse rather than physical battering by three girls she considered her friends. They would, for instance, deny her existence by saying she had died and was a ghost they couldn’t see, or order her to carry their bags.

Her story also stands out for another reason: She published it.

“The Bullied’s Diary,” the first detailed account of a typical pattern of torment, published this month, has set off a media furor in Japan and helped reignite public interest in the problem.

Still emotionally fragile, bursting into tears as she recounts her story, Ryo says she spoke out to help other victims of bullying. Her father, Mamoru, a Kyoto psychiatrist, also said he felt that publicly airing the problem would help prod the school--which has declined to comment on the case--to come to terms with a problem he says they tried to ignore.

But since she went public, the frail girl has been plagued by nasty telephone calls, more isolation at school and fears that her teachers will retaliate with unfavorable grades. Her neighbors advise her to compromise with the school, lower her profile. Her mother accompanies her at school all day; they wonder now if they paid too high a price.

The price of not speaking out, however, can also be tragic.

Bullies had beaten a 20-year-old Kyushu man every day, torn his clothes and even taken them all off on some occasions while he was in junior high. Although he appealed to his teacher, nothing was done. He carried his rage inside until his class reunion years later.

In December, 1990, the man placed arsenic in 21 bottles of beer and crafted homemade bombs in a murder scheme elaborately drawn on his word processor two years in advance. The plot was foiled by his mother, who tipped off police; the man was sentenced to six years in prison.

As new horror stories hit the newspapers with dismaying frequency, experts lament that ultimate solutions would entail such sweeping changes in Japan’s educational system, competitive environment and social patterns of interaction that they may be all but out of reach.

Yet at least one Tokyo school, Higashi Kurume Junior High, has found a way to curb the violence using little more than plain and simple democracy.

The school had imposed strict rules on students to curb the growing incident of violence against teachers.

But, while that kind of violence dropped, bullying soared. So Nobuhiko Kato, the school’s principal at the time, took what is a radical step here: He abolished all rules imposed from the top and allowed students to make their own in consultation with teachers.

The more democratic environment led to a significant decrease in cases of bullying, Kato says.

“Japanese like the phrase isshi midarezu-- in strict and perfect order,” Kato said. “But to solve the problem of bullying, we simply must educate children to respect differences and think for themselves.”

Chiaki Kitada, a researcher in The Times’ Tokyo Bureau, contributed to this report.