Alienated in Classroom

Classmates forced her eating insects. The Board of Education in Nagasaki city revealed a result of investigation on the suicide of a girl student in her sixth grade last year. There were a lot of cruel behaviors of her classmates in it, indicating that might have caused her suicide. Bullying in schools in Japan is always pushes victims into the corner of total alienation. It must be reflecting illness of Japanese society.

The report indicated a number of inhumane things done to her. Forcing to write a paper pledge absolute obedience to her classmates, alienating in grouping for school trip, hiding her shoes, and stabbing her arm with a sharp pencil were what they did on her.

She committed suicide last July and died next month after suffering unconsciousness without leaving letter to her families or friends. What her classmates did to her was silent murder. The board interviewed her classmates and exercised a survey for all students from fourth to sixth graders. Although the survey revealed two incidents, eating insects and paper pledge, the family did not believe that only those two were reasons for her suicide. The family requested the board thorough investigation with signatures of fifteen thousand people who supported it earlier this month.

One typical phenomenon of abuse in classrooms in Japan is lack of a sense of justice. All students understand that collective abuse on one person is wrong. However, no classmate intervenes in abusing with an exercise of justice, while U.S. students, for instance, would not so hesitant in supporting one abused student regardless he/she is minority of majority.

That reflects Japanese tradition of discrimination. In an environment of dense population in small islands, the Japanese had willingly been alienating minority, low-class citizens or foreign oriented people, excluding from normal society. In addition, discriminated people sometimes left their community voluntarily. Suicide is one of the actions they chose to erase themselves from the society. Those kinds of elimination have been welcomed as virtue that lighten social burden.

But, we cannot withstand growing number of kids to kill themselves as reflections of social apathy. If community is cruel to the weak, it should be reformed to be kind. Because the land is too small for people to live comfortably, this nation once sought broader space in foreign countries, the strategy which resulted in failure in the World War II. Now, the Japanese have to regain its own culture of helping each other, which had been ordinary in old society. Otherwise, this nation will be memorized as internecine people.