When my Black son was bullied in the first grade of a public elementary school in Tokyo a few years ago, I was at a loss for what to do.
For weeks, he had been reluctant to go to school, and I did not know the reason. I thought he was just taking time to settle in. He spoke Japanese fluently, so the language was not the issue, and at home, he was his usual happy self.
One day, his teacher called me and asked me to come in for a meeting. She explained that there was a boy in the class who had been bullying my son for a while, but she did not inform me until a couple of months after it first began. She said the school had spoken to the bully, and both he and the boy’s parents had apologized — not to me or my son, however, but to the school itself.
The teacher then said that, as a result of the bullying, my son had become sensitive. Whenever other kids said anything to correct him (or, I wondered, was this code for “said something unkind”), my son would get angry and throw his pencil case against the wall. The teacher would then send him to the nurse's room to calm down.
I cannot begin to explain how angry, hurt and sorry I felt. I wished I had known earlier and could have protected my son somehow. School is supposed to be fun, especially in the first grade.
On that very same afternoon, I had a chance to observe my son's behavior in the classroom. When I arrived, he had been sent out of class and was waiting for me in the nurse's office. The nurse was a middle-aged woman with a sour expression on her face. When I entered, she neither smiled nor welcomed me — just pointed to a corner of the office where my son sat with his face down. However, when a Japanese girl walked in needing a bandage for her finger, the nurse's demeanor changed to the very picture of sweetness.
If she was treating him this way right in front of me, how much worse was it when I was not around? And what else wasn’t I being told?
Together with my son, we went back to his classroom. Since he had been sent out of the class, he had missed part of the math lesson and had to catch up. All the other kids surrounded him and were yelling out the answers (behavior the teacher observed but did nothing to discourage) before he could finish, which made him angry again. When he stood up for a second to have a better view of the blackboard, there was a chorus of "Jeremy-kun, sit down!" So, in addition to the particular bully in his class who would say mean things to him out of earshot of the teacher, there was this constant vigilance from the other pupils in his class.
After the lesson, I asked the teacher if my son could be changed to a different class. After all, it was a big school with over 200 first graders, but I was refused with no explanation. Both the teacher and the school counselor suggested counseling so that my son could learn to control his feelings and not disrupt the class. But what about addressing the root cause of his anger? What about counseling the bully? When I asked the teacher about this, she said the bully had already apologized and it was up to my son to learn to control himself.
Talking to the school principal and the education section at city hall did not help, either. I was told there was no option to transfer to another school unless we moved houses to a different district or zone, incurring all the astronomical moving costs in the process.
Even so, I knew that the environment at school had become too hostile for my son. He had been othered and isolated from the very start, and I as a mother could not in good conscience send him back to that school. But what options did I have?
So I did what I — and every other adult in my son’s life — probably should have done from the start: I started talking to him about what was happening.
I asked him how he felt about the school. He said he would only go back there if I could go with him every day, which was not possible — parents can’t accompany their children to school every day and besides, I had to work. When he wasn’t at or preparing to go to school, he reverted to his usual friendly, curious and cheerful character. I explained to him that he was loved, and that summer I sent him to Ishikawa Prefecture to spend a few days with my host family parents — a Japanese couple I consider my family in Japan.
If I could go back to 2019, the year my son graduated kindergarten, are there things I would do differently? Yes — not moving to my new home that year would have given my son more stability in his school life as he would have gone to the same elementary school with so many of his kindergarten classmates. He would have had friends already who knew him, and we would already know our neighbors and community, from whom we could seek support if bullying had become a problem.
When we moved to Tokyo, I also settled on a suburban neighborhood close to my workplace that is not very diverse. So the other thing I would have done differently would be to move to a more international part of town, where schools are composed not necessarily of other Black children but of all ethnicities. For other families, this may not be as much of an issue — there are some Japanese schools that have a welcoming environment to children from all backgrounds, so doing research on which schools and where they are located is something to keep in mind. I have many Black friends whose children had no problems at all joining Japanese elementary schools.
Most importantly, though, I would have paid more careful attention to how my son behaved when it was time to go to school. When the bullying started to get more severe, I now realize that he was starting to ask if he could skip school more and more. Now, I ask him every day how his time at school was — a habit I should have started on the very first day.
So when my son came back from his brief vacation in Ishikawa and told me that he wished he could go to school there rather than in Tokyo, I understood then that it wasn’t school in general that was the problem but this school in particular. A change of scenery was the only option.
That was when I learned of an elementary school in Fuchu, west Tokyo, called Calvary Chapel Christian International School (CCCIS). Luckily, we had recently moved houses and were much closer to this new school with a commute under 20 minutes. Since it was small, it did not take long for my son to get used to his new surroundings. More importantly, perhaps, was the fact that CCCIS conducts most of its lessons in English. We speak English at home, so switching to learning in English was not hard for Jeremy either. If I had known of such a school earlier, I would have considered it from the very beginning.
Moreover, Calvary Chapel tolerates no bullying. Since it is a small institution, teachers can pay individual attention to students. In addition, the students are taught Japanese as a subject at grade level, which can enable smooth transition to a Japanese junior high school upon graduation and also helps all students gain an equal footing with language acquisition.
For the last couple of years, I have watched my son thrive at CCICS. Every day, he looks forward to going to school, and whenever I ask him how school was, he tells me it’s great. He has grown in his confidence, sportsmanship and social skills, which is something that home-schooling cannot offer. When I ask him who his friends are, he tells me everyone in his school is like family.
I was never worried about my son’s academic ability. But now that we’ve gotten through a rough patch of social adjustment in his early school days, I have complete confidence in his ability to transition to a Japanese or any other junior high school — no matter how different others might see him.
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