Court Gets Tough With School Bullies

Yo Hirano’s nine classmates sprinkled chalk dust on his desk and chair, left thumbtacks on his seat, wrote “drop dead” and other nasty epithets in his books and punched him when he lost at the rock-paper-scissors game.

Were the actions that preceded Yo’s 1994 suicide “playing,” as local school officials still insist, or “bullying”? In a landmark verdict, a district court this week ruled the latter. The Yokohama court ordered Kanagawa prefecture, the town of Tsukuimachi and the bullies to pay a total of $350,000 to the boy’s parents.

Though Japan’s courts have in two previous cases ordered schools and municipalities to pay damages for failing to prevent bullying, it is the first time a court has ordered the bullies to pay restitution.

The nine tormentors--all now about 20 years old--together will have to pay about one-third of the award, or nearly $13,000 apiece.

“I hope this court decision will help bullied kids and convey a lesson to the bullies,” the victim’s mother, Kimie Hirano, said in a telephone interview.

Such hopes may not be realistic. The amount each of the bullies has to pay is not considered big money in Japan, whose capital, Tokyo, is considered the world’s most expensive city in which to live.

Moreover, Tsukuimachi, where Hirano attended school, plans to appeal. The comments of the town’s education director reveal how far Japanese officials may need to go in simply recognizing, let alone combating, the bullying that is so pervasive in schools.

Kazutoshi Inoue acknowledged that Yo Hirano was hazed. But he agreed with the bullies that they were simply “playing.”

“Bullying means a specific person taking certain actions or saying harsh things continuously and intensively to inflict mental and physical pain,” the education director explained in a telephone interview when asked to define the difference. “This wasn’t bullying because it wasn’t done continuously; it just happened several times.”

Takashi Ota, professor emeritus of education at Tokyo University and chairman of Japan Society for Child Protection, called Inoue’s comments shocking.

“This fight in the courts is totally based on the adults’ egoism to make their situation and status look better, no matter how slight that would be,” Ota said. “There’s no consideration for the boy who committed suicide.”

The court ruled that the school should have foreseen that bullying could cause the boy to kill himself.

Although bullying occurs in schools and playgrounds throughout the world, it is often tacitly condoned in Japan. Victims who don’t stand up to bullies are widely seen as weak in a society that values group conformity perhaps above all else. New strains of “super-bullies” have emerged lately who virtually enslave their targets and extort huge payoffs.

The victims often hide their torment from their parents. Some become withdrawn and depressed. Others, such as Yo Hirano, show no outward signs of their internal pain.

The Hiranos sued in May 1997 for about $1 million in damages. The bullying by the six boys and three girls started when Yo transferred to Nakano Middle School, about 30 miles from Tokyo, in April 1994. Yo’s mother, Kimie, said the school had never informed her about the hazing.

On July 15, 1994, Yo found thumbtacks and chalk dust on his chair and margarine on his desk and textbooks. The 14-year-old returned home and hanged himself in a closet.