In Japan, Parents Really Bug Their Kids

Mrs. F planted a tiny bugging device in her 16-year-old daughter’s school bag this spring--and she’s glad she did.

The girl had been skipping classes and cram school, pleading illness, though she did not look sick. Then there were the times she begged her mother for money, though she would not say exactly why she needed it.

While she was sleeping, her mother took her mobile phone and hit the “redial” button to find out whom she had been calling but came up with no clues.

Fearing that her daughter was being bullied by classmates, an endemic problem in Japanese schools, where violence also is rising sharply, Mrs. F finally called Angle Corp.

The midtown detective firm spends most of its time on conventional gumshoe pursuits such as investigating adultery, embezzlement and stalkings. But it also offers a discounted electronic sleuthing service for anxious parents that it says draws about 20 new inquiries a day.

Bugging one’s child is hardly considered normal here, nor is it commonplace. But newspaper reports and a TV documentary about the debut of kid-tapping products and services have set off alarm bells over what is seen as a symptom of a broader erosion in the confidence and trust that have long underpinned the tightly woven Japanese social fabric.

Leading child advocates denounce parental spying as a dreadful step that is likely to further estrange the very youngsters who most need to trust and confide in an adult.

“It’s a horrible form of remote control,” said Manabu Sato, a Tokyo University education professor.

Nevertheless, the media, lawyers and other sources report an apparent increase in bugging and other monitoring devices by all age groups as the gadgets become cheaper, easier to buy and more cleverly disguised in everything from pens to radios, calculators, clocks and even extension cords.

Ever-more miniaturized microphones, transmitters and cameras make it simple for the suspicious to spy on spouses, employees, business competitors, political foes, neighbors--and uncommunicative children.

Mrs. F, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, used a device the size of a credit card that costs about $750 and transmits high-quality sound to a receiver up to 1,000 feet away.

Parents can rent a bug from Angle and listen to their children’s conversations for days or weeks. Or they can pay the detectives to do it for them, following the child at a discreet distance, recording evidence against tormentors and sweeping in like guardian angels to rescue a child whose life is taking a dangerous turn.

Recently, detectives burst into a department store restroom after hearing a bully dunking her victim’s head into a sink full of water. And they persuaded a “love hotel” to turn out a schoolgirl who had just rented a room with a middle-aged man, said Angle head Hirotoshi Kohama.

Three days of full-time kiddie surveillance costs $1,120.

“It’s cheap,” Kohama said. Many parents gladly pay more for three months of tuition in cram schools that they hope will help get their children into a good college. “We’ve done hundreds of cases over the last four years.”

In a more acceptable form of teen monitoring, telecommunications giant NTT is selling a mobile phone that allows others to know the location of its user--reportedly a help to parents who want to know where their children are.

NTT said more than 2,600 customers have signed up for the feature since February.

Few Wiretapping Victims Go to Police

Wiretapping telephones is illegal in Japan, but it is not illegal to make or sell tapping devices, and those who use them are rarely caught or prosecuted. Moreover, surreptitious listening, recording or filming are all legal, as long as no crime is committed when planting the bugging device.

And the argument that children have privacy rights is new, and by no means widely accepted, in Japan, legal experts said.

It is impossible to know how widespread bugging has become because few people who discover they have been spied upon complain to the police, and authorities do not keep statistics on the rare wiretapping cases that are reported. Civil lawsuits for invasion of privacy can be filed but usually are not, attorneys said.

Nonetheless, constant media interest, the huge selection of wiretaps, hidden cameras and bug-detecting devices displayed on the shelves of certain electronic stores and the number of magazine ads for mail-order sales of such products suggest a healthy market. The Yomiuri newspaper, Japan’s largest, recently dubbed this “A Bugging Society.”

A listening device was found in March in the bedroom of a resort hotel where Crown Prince Naruhito and Crown Princess Masako were expected to stay, Japanese tabloids reported. A spokesman for the Imperial Household Agency said the royal couple had not confirmed their reservation, so it was not clear whether the bug was aimed at them.

For those who are worried about such eavesdropping, a number of companies will scan homes and offices for bugs and remove them. There are also hucksters who plant bugs and then pretend to find them for grateful clients, said Takashi Nogami, author of a recent book on wiretapping.

Nogami said that when he drives around Tokyo he will sometimes use a scanner to intercept bugging device transmissions.

“On a good day, you can hear 10 or 20 [conversations], on a bad day, one or two,” he said. Wiretaps and microphones that use wires, not transmitters, cannot be detected by such “bug-hunters.”

“I think most people who are being tapped don’t know it,” Nogami said.

Judging from what crosses his scanner, he said, he believes that bugging has increased in the past two years.

Kohama, the detective, said he believes that Japan’s tolerance of bugging is certainly no weirder than the permissive attitude toward firearms in the U.S.

“In America, it’s easy to get a permit to have a gun, but it’s really hard to get permission to wiretap,” said Kohama, who travels frequently to the United States. “What a country.”

U.S. laws forbid interception not only of telephone conversations but also of other oral communication, although police can get court orders to tap both.

Tsuguhide Suzuki, a civil liberties attorney who has successfully sued the police over wiretaps, which authorities are forbidden to do here, said he believes that bugging is on the rise in Japan as the “information society” makes purloined communications ever more valuable.

Corporate espionage is considered a fact of life here. Anecdotal evidence also suggests a rise in political bugging. Recently, a man received a two-year jail term for tapping the phone of the mayor of Mitake in western Japan, and a radical student group was nabbed for tapping a professor who had angered its members.

“In schools, business and politics, and in the relationships between citizens and their government, confidence is quickly eroding,” Suzuki lamented. “The old Japanese value of ‘Let’s trust each other’ is crumbling. . . . Instead, it’s ‘Let’s steal information from each other and use it to get each other.’ ”

In the case of parents, most want to protect their children amid a surge in juvenile delinquency, including a spate of stabbings by junior high students of their peers and teachers. Violence remains vastly less common than in the United States--children do not have guns--but its increase has shattered the sense of security that Japanese are used to.

Surveys also show that stimulant drug use and “compensated dating,” in which girls accept money or presents in exchange for dates with older men, are on the rise. In a recent poll by the Asian Women’s Fund, a nonprofit group fighting violence against women and sexual abuse of children, 5% of high school girls said they had dated for money, and 2.3% said they had had sex with these “dates.”

The Education Ministry reported a 37% increase in violence in middle schools and a 16% increase in high school violence in 1996. The number of reported bullying incidents fell by 8,000 cases, to 52,000 cases nationwide last year, the ministry found. But counselors and scholars say the bullying cases appear to be getting more severe--as have attempts to fight back: Recently, several children have attacked or killed schoolmates whom they accused of beating, threatening or extorting money from them.

Fourteen percent of 11- to 15-year-olds said they had been bullied during the last term alone, said Yoji Morita, a professor at Osaka City University who surveyed 6,096 students nationwide, as well as their teachers and parents, in January. And 17% admitted to having physically or verbally abused others. Fourteen percent said they had not bullied but said they enjoyed watching other kids get teased.

Parents in Dark About Their Children, Woes

Most striking, Morita found, was that only 28% of the parents of those being bullied were aware of their children’s plight, and only 7.3% of the bullies’ parents knew of their children’s behavior.

“The thing they know least about is whether their kids are bullying--and they tend not to care,” Morita said. “And often even when they are told, they don’t believe that their kids are doing it.”

Angle detectives said that bullies’ parents often react with hostility and denial and that they sometimes are forced to play their tapes to the parents as evidence.

Bullied children are generally eager to conceal the fact from parents and siblings, fearing that they will be thought less of for their inability to fight back or make it stop, Morita said. The same tendency to concealment is also seen among bullied children in Europe and the United States, he noted.

But bugging--or sneak inspections of kids’ diaries or telephone calls--is likely to make matters worse, he said. “Children are entitled to privacy,” Morita said, predicting that kid-tapping will never make it to the Japanese mainstream. “Bugging fundamentally destroys human relationships.”

Recognizing Children’s Right to Privacy

Japanese schools--and courts--are gradually beginning to recognize that children do have a right to privacy, said attorney Setsuko Tsuboi, who does volunteer legal and counseling work for children. After the recent stabbings, schools debated searching students’ lockers for knives but ultimately decided not to do so.

This is a new development in a country where rice-paper walls and houses built cheek-to-jowl never allowed a concept of privacy to develop, she said. (In fact, the Japanese language does not have a suitable word for “privacy”; the English word is used here instead.) But Tsuboi argued that schools should not cite privacy concerns as an excuse for doing nothing to protect students’ safety.

“Respecting human rights and privacy and protecting the safety of others are all important, and it’s difficult to balance them, but we must struggle to do so,” Tsuboi said.

Kid-tapping is a big mistake, she said: “If there is not respect for the child as a person, there is no reason to think that the parent-child relationship can be successful.”

Family counselor Shigeo Tatsuki noted that because many parents do not recognize a need for child privacy, bugging their kids may not seem like a violation.

“American mothers tap their babies in their cribs,” Tatsuki said, referring to the electronic monitors commonly used to listen to infants sleeping in another room. “From a Japanese mother’s point of view, it’s the same logic. . . . If you think of your 16-year-old daughter as a 6-month-old baby who is very powerless and needs protection, it’s very understandable.”

Angle’s Kohama blames modern parents for poor child-rearing, permissiveness, disinterest and an inability to talk to their children.

“These parents are hopeless--they have no communication with their kids, and they can’t get a grip on what their kids are up to,” he said of his clients. But he defends bugging as a parental act of last resort in a society where traditional values have eroded and the old rules no longer apply.

“High school students don’t need mobile phones, and they don’t need Tamagotch,” the electronic “pet” game that has swept Japan, Kohama said, adding: “Bratty punks don’t need privacy.”

When parents suspect that something is amiss, they are usually right, Kohama added. Fewer than 10% of the teen cases that he investigates turn out to be false alarms.

The detective’s observations of teen life in the raw would certainly give a parent grounds for paranoia.

The 17-year-old girl whom detectives rescued from immersion in the department store sink, for example, had taken a part-time job in a fast-food restaurant without her parents’ knowledge in order to pay $375 a month in extortion money to her “best friend,” Kohama said. At first, the detectives found no signs that she was being bullied, but then they noticed that the girl’s hair was getting shorter and shaggier--the result of tormentors snipping off chunks of it bit by bit.

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As for Mrs. F, she said she tape-recorded her daughter’s conversation and learned that the girl was being humiliated and ordered about like a servant by several classmates. The girl was made to buy juice and notebooks for the entire gang and was once told to go buy them Chanel lipsticks, Mrs. F said. She ultimately brought the tape to the girls’ teacher, who confronted the bullies and eventually extracted an apology.

Shocked to learn that she had been surreptitiously taped, her daughter eventually forgave her, Mrs. F said.

“She said, ‘As long as you’ve told me now, it’s all right,’ ” the mother said. “She did not want me to know that she was not resisting [the bullies] when she should have been resisting. She didn’t want me to see that part of her.”

Would she recommend kid-tapping to a friend?

Yes--if the parents are prepared for what they hear.

“If your child would tell you, it would be fine, but if they feel they can’t talk to you, the only way to know the truth is to sneak a bug into their things,” she said. “If you don’t do it, you won’t know the real truth.”