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A comment on Tokyo public schools will stop forcing students to dye their hair black (2019). Parent comment

Re:Tokyo public schools will stop forcing students to dye th... by riffraff on Sunday January 24, 2021 @01:09PM (#25894177)
> Did a pierced bald boy with a ring once torch a school? Do teachers have some kind of phobia for specific hairdos?

I can't say this was the case for your school, but often certain events or changes in culture cause rules to be established that end up being incomprehensible years later.

For example a shaved head was ok when I started school, but when neo-nazi skinheads became popular in the '90s the haircut became unwelcome (though not strictly prohibited).

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Re:Tokyo public schools will stop forcing students to dye th... by elric on Sunday January 24, 2021 @01:23PM (#25894308)
You would think that the logical thing to rally against would be neo-nazi behaviour instead of hairdos. Of course the former is much harder to detect & enforce than the latter. So instead we pick a terrible proxy to identify unwanted behaviour. A few iterations later, anyone who doesn't fit a narrow set of criteria is immediately suspicious.
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