Regarding the Dec. 6 editorial, "The reality of bullying": Ever read "Lord of the Flies"? Put a lot of people together in a small space with few external constraints and you will have bullying. It happens everywhere, irrespective of age or gender.
Reducing it is straightforward: fewer people, more space and more external constraints. In the case of Japanese schools, immediate improvement could be achieved if teachers spent less time in the teachers' room and more time supervising the students. Clearly this would mean a large increase in work for teachers, so there would need to be an increase in the number of teachers relative to the number of students in the schools. It shouldn't require too much imagination on the part of education administrators to figure out how this could be achieved.
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