"The biggest problem in Japanese education is the idea that you can eliminate bullying by reforming the system."
That provocative statement opens an article in Shukan Gendai by the eminent Catholic novelist and conservative thinker Ayako Sono. It is provocative because the prevailing view is that bullying, not the effort to eliminate it, is the problem. Bullying, Sono maintains, is a fact of life — school life, professional life, social life. It arises in turn from another fact — that the human heart is not and never will be purely good; that evil is an ineradicable part of our nature. Her solution, imperfect but realistic, would be to strengthen individuals to cope with adversity rather than to struggle against the grain to build an adversity-free society.
The suicide in December of an Osaka high school basketball player physically abused by his coach is the latest evidence of something rotten beneath the polite and considerate surface of Japanese life. No doubt every society has its own variety of rottenness beneath, if not actually on, the surface. One point substantiating Sono's position is that the flurry of hand-wringing and reform talk attendant on the Osaka incident will seem as repetitious and predictable to a long-term observer as will the incident itself. To go back no more than 27 years, in May 1985 a 16-year-old high school boy from Gifu Prefecture was beaten to death by his teacher while on a school trip. The boy had been using an electric hair dryer. That was against school rules. The teacher beat him as a disciplinary measure. The boy went into shock and died. There was talk then too of reform. Twenty-seven years is a long time. Maybe Sono is right. Maybe the problem is simply eternal.