In a recent interview on the Barnes & Noble Review website promoting his latest book, historian Jared Diamond mentions how treatment of the young "varies among traditional societies just as it varies among industrial societies," and gives examples of how some of the former use corporal punishment for discipline purposes while others "consider it utterly unacceptable to hit a child." Such violence, Diamond points out, is culturally determined, and when prompted he says that he has never struck his own children. "It is not a good idea," he says. "I see a lot of harm to hitting a child."

Attitudes toward corporal punishment have generally become negative in industrial societies as they have evolved, but Diamond is clear that the practice is and always has been a bad one, so if a particular society revises its approach, it has to do more with force or persuasion than with a shift in cultural orientation. Slavery was abolished because people who considered it morally wrong convinced or compelled those who practiced it to quit. Nowadays, no one would argue that slavery was ever right.

One of the arguments that has emerged from the current controversy surrounding the suicide of a high school basketball player in Osaka after he was beaten by his coach is that times have changed. Corporal punishment, or taibatsu, this argument goes, was considered acceptable in school sports in the past, but not anymore. Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto, an avowed traditionalist and former rugby player, wept on camera when he described reading the suicide note left by the dead student and said he had come around to the belief that taibatsu is bad, but last Monday at an Adult's Day ceremony he had a change of heart and told the assembled young people that under some circumstances it is acceptable, as if admitting his emotions got the better of him earlier.