This week marks the one-year anniversary of the murder of eight young children at the Ikeda Elementary School in Osaka. Shortly after that, a young man killed a child in a Kyoto schoolyard before killing himself when faced with arrest, thus reinforcing the fear among the general public that Japan's schools are no longer the safe havens they were once thought to be.
"Information Special" (Sunday, TBS, 5:30 p.m.) will look at how the Ikeda murders have changed the way educators, parents and the authorities look at school safety. The main portion of the documentary is about a group of victims' relatives who travel to Littleton, Colo., in the United States, where in 1999 two teenage boys ran amok in Columbine High School, killing 13 students and teachers, before turning their guns on themselves. The families of the Columbine victims have since established a foundation that is building a memorial to their murdered loved ones. The purpose of the memorial is not merely to pay tribute to those who died, but to also spur discussion among future generations of students about the meaning of the tragedy.
The parents of Ikeda and the parents of Columbine meet and discuss what they can do to prevent such tragedies ever happening again.