Naoto Araki, a 15-year-old Yokohama high school student, persistently kicked the chair Bill Pozzobon was sitting on, just to make him mad.
Such actions can often lead to violence. But what the Canadian instructor of a violence-prevention program did instead was look straight into Araki's eyes and calmly say he didn't want the boy to kick his chair.
Pozzobon was demonstrating the "solid guy" model in a role-play in front of 70 male students at Hakusan High School in Yokohama's Midori Ward last week as part of a program to manage fear and anger developed by the Vancouver-based advocacy group SafeTeen.