いじめ ijime-bullying

いじめ ijime Bullying was and I am certain still is a topic of great social concern in Japan. The kinds of pressure put on the working classes by superiors bears striking resemblance to and perhaps has its roots in schoolyard bullying to which I was privy on several occasions. Due to Japan's highly competitive natural social consciousness, I suppose that いじめ could be seen as a means to an end, that end being the elimination of possible competition. However, いじめ can occur for any variety of reasons, including being too good in school subjects or being too unlike others in a homogenous and conformist society. いじめ could also take on a variety of forms, from simple name-calling to violent and sinister acts, similar to severe hazing activities seen on university campuses in the States (now illegal) such as physical torture and vandalism to personal property.

It is extremely sad to say that each year several young people, usually middle-school aged, fall victim to such radical degrees of いじめ that they commit suicide. In Japanese society, the admission of いじめ is seen as a weakness, that one cannot handle his/her own problems and an admission to the shameful state of being different.

One of my thirteen-year old students, a girl, was a victim of いじめ during my years in 中之条 Nakanojo. She went to the neighboring town's train station and, one afternoon jumped off the bridge over the tracks in front of an oncoming train, was struck and died.

I remember thinking, wondering, wracking my brain in retrospect, if I had ever realized she was experiencing the difficulties with which she was faced. Was there ever a situation in which I could have intervened? Could I have ever showed her that someone did care? Would it have made a difference if someone had? Was it too late? All questions nobody would ever be able to answer, and the situation was never spoken of in the school besides in the normal morning teacher's meeting.

In the past five years or so the Japanese media has adopted the issue of いじめ and thrust it into the spotlight in order to address what has become a serious problem among young people. Incidences of suicide due to いじめ are down and reported いじめ situations are down as well...which does not necessarily mean anything significant; いじめ may be called by a different name in a toned-down manner much like some large metropolitan areas lower their homicide rates by utilizing other terminology in the "naming" of the crimes.

My experience with the sad effects of いじめ carries into my life here; I am extremely sensitive to the issue of bullying at whatever level in schools or in sports. Teaching my children to be more empathetic towards others is, at this most basic level, how I try to train them to not fall into the trap of poking fun or pushing others around in any way. Yet I don't want my children to fall victim, either. When my daughter was younger, we unfortunately had a couple of playmates that would seek her out just to hit her on the head with some blunt foreign object. Why her, I don't exactly know. Parents were around, but she was singled out and hit. Granted, there were either developmental or possibly emotional issues those children were dealing with and I so wanted to try to keep an open mind so these other children could learn to play well and cooperatively...but not at the expense of my daughter's well-being.

I found myself wondering how much I should teach my daughter to tolerate, and how much I should teach her to fight back, which falls contrary to my ethics. It is funny, though, how this evokes a memory of Girls State, in the summer going into my senior year in high school, I was chosen from my county to vie for Girls Nation and the impromptu speech topic we were given 30 seconds to think and speak on was "Terrorism: Tolerate or Retaliate?" In a way, bullying can be seen in this same light, and the moral decision to stand up for oneself and fight back or to tolerate the abuse so as not to stir up more trouble is a decision that has obviously been too much to bear for those young students in Japan. It is a decision we all must make at some level or at some point in our formative years, be it during a recesstime scuffle on the playground, the stealing of lunch money, or even being teased or bearing witness to others being teased. What does one do? What must one do?