Osaka City's Board of Education announced Jan. 8 that a 17-year-old, second-year senior high school boy hanged himself at his home on Dec. 23. He was the captain of a basketball team at the municipally run Sakuranomiya Senior High School.

Apparently behind the suicide was the physical punishment inflicted on the boy by a 47-year-old male teacher — the coach and adviser for the team. A letter the boy left for the teacher mentioned the physical punishment he had received from him, and his mother quoted her son as saying the day before his death that he had been struck 30 to 40 times by the teacher that day. This kind of incident should never happen again.

The coach may have had the habit of inflicting corporal punishment on members of the team. A Dec. 27 survey of 50 members of the team conducted by the school showed that 21 of them — 12 boys and nine girls — said they had received physical punishment from the coach. The board of education and the school should find out in detail what was going on and take steps to prevent the recurrence of such acts.