Those stories always follow the same pattern - pick out the most extreme example of something that you can find, then spin some superficially insightful theory around it relating it to some essential difference between Japanese culture and other cultures.

There is no such thing as essential differences. And if all that reaches your attention about a faraway place is the extremes, you are bound to come to some weird conclusions.

It's just too easy to apply this recipe to anything you don't understand well. Just imagine the stories you could tell about European student culture if you started from the Belgian Reuzegom hazing story [0], and generalized from there.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuzegom#Death_of_Sanda_Dia

Making a generalized story from cherry-picked anecdotes is an incredibly common strategy for journalists writing about anything. Sometimes it might actually match more general trends and sometimes not; you can't say without real statistics, which in most cases don't exist or aren't accurate anyway.

No one's tracking it carefully, so who knows if bullying in Japan is actually worse or just picked up in the zeitgeist more. But it's ridiculous to pretend like Japanese school culture isn't drastically different from that of most western countries.

Reinforcing your comment, the fallacy here is in assuming that the factors affecting suicide rates among Western children are identical to the factors for Japanese children, and therefore bullying in Japan must be particularly atrocious to cause the high baseline suicide rate.

Does it really? Do you feel the same way about western society and, say, duels to the death? The many old practices regarding marriage and the church all around?

I don't think suicide as an honorable death is any more of a real thing in Japan nowadays than ninjas are.

Yes, I would. Such societal norms don't just die, they remain in the "ether" so to speak.

For example, americans might not be as religious, or sticking with the church. They might not even be born in the US, or just be first or second generation. But the culture, and this includes immigrants as they integrate, contains all kinds of protestant ideas.

And it's easier for something like a suicide norm to survice that a practice of the duel (which takes two to survice, plus has the law against it, even if you come out alive).

Maybe not so nowadays, but you'd be surprised how often it was a solution to societal shame in Italy up to the 1950s or so...

Considering how common a form of retribution gun violence is in the US nowadays, yes, I'd say yes.

Could there be a case to be made in comparing American school shooters and Japanese student suicides? Maybe we'd find they had similar school experiences prior to their final moments.

The 'suicide for preserving honor' theory has been long abandoned & mostly outlawed, even. No one in the modern generation thinks that way. The causes for suicide are mostly due to economic imbalance & high credit/ loans/ failed businesses (sadly). Children have easy access to credit cards from family, and rack up huge debts by indulging in things as part of peer pressure. I saw several case studies highlighting this when I was part of influencer marketing business.

Ritual suicide was done by seppuku - slashing out your guts, as a final act of bravery. No one does anything remotely similar.

You can’t purge a cultural heritage—everyone in Japan learns Japanese history and ritual suicide is a notable part of that history. The point is not that people commit suicide today for the same reasons or in the same way that they did 500 years ago, but that it is more likely to be accepted as a way out than in a culture that e.g. considers suicide to be a one-way ticket to the spiritual inferno.

Not sure where you get this idea, but this is grossly inaccurate.

Japanese culture is strongly revisionist. People don't talk about the war, much less teach about it. The 'old ways' and 'samurai heroism' was faulted for the mess in '40s. People make a sigh whenever such touchy topics come up. New Japan is a different beast.

As a consequence, we are seeing a generation which is severely confused on why WW2 happened. American pop culture is embraced with open arms, but they can't explain why Hiroshima happened at the hands of US. It's all faulted to grave mistakes on the 'old thinking' which is best left behind. Japan adopted modernism & became America's best buddies, ignoring the blemishes over 3 decades of Imperial japanese horrors. Older generation, who used to teach from experience of pre-war and neo-modern Japan, are dying off due to age. A significant chapter of history is being ignored by looking the other way. Look up the editorials of any Japanese weekly, and on any random week you will find some discussion on how they bemoan the growing dissonance between the post-war values of peace & the cultural change alongside the pseudo-aggression of some political parties, which eventually aims to remilitarize Japan at some point. (That's a story for another time or another thread)

Everything is essetially the same with some limited number of levers being pulled a bit further: girls want to marry a little bit earlier, parents are a little bit more worried abt kids, politicians a bit more corrupt, racism is targeted at different colors in a different hierarchy, all that jazz, but all the patterns I was used to in France simply fit China very well and I didnt find it so difficult to just brush off the odd difference and adapt.

My Chinese parents in law also discovered I have the same strengths and flaws any other Chinese guy their daughter could have found :D

You're assuming you can "see" the cultural differences.

Sometimes you can easily see it, but often it's really hard to figure out, because they are going to express themselves in edge cases that you have to run into, which takes time and then it takes time to run into enough of them to be able to see a pattern.

Seeing all these surveys that show that the more you consume media the less you know is extremely sad. I don’t think there are any short term solutions.

My impression is that, overall, the bullying is probably not significantly worse than in other countries, but that perhaps more media attention is focused on the issue than elsewhere. There was a major moral panic in the mid-1980s about school bullying, and the media continue to report regularly on statistical trends and extreme incidents.

Anecdotally, there seems to be a lot of variation among schools. More than one public school teacher has confided to me about how different the kids are in different neighborhoods. Japan may seem homogeneous, but there’s a lot of local variation by social class. In the tougher schools, there can be fighting, stealing, and bullying, while in other schools that might be practically unknown. Private schools can be very different from public, too, and there are a lot of single-gender schools, which have their own dynamics. Certain aspects of Japanese culture, such as age-based hierarchies, may be stronger or weaker or play out differently in different types of schools as well.

In the U.S., people tend to be keenly aware of school differences, because public schools have a lot of local autonomy and are typically locally funded. In Japan, because the curriculum and many other education-related matters are determined by the Ministry of Education, there is a large degree of apparent nationwide uniformity, especially between grades one and nine. For example, in every elementary and junior-high-school classroom I have been into in Japan, and in almost all that I’ve seen in photographs, all of the desks face the front of the room and the outside windows are on the students’ left-hand side [1]. There doesn’t seem to be any similar uniformity at least in California [2], where I went to elementary school more than fifty years ago.

This apparent uniformity can give people who have experienced Japanese schools only as students the impression that whatever they happened to experience in school—a lot of bullying, say, or none at all—must be typical of the entire country.

Of course, people in other countries might overgeneralize their individual educational experiences, too.

[1] Google image search for 小学校 教室 [elementary-school classroom]

https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=%E5%B0%8F%E5%AD%A6%E6%A0%A...

[2] Google image search for elementary-school classroom California

https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=elementary-school+classroo...

That said, I think the deep scar analogy is apt. While therapy has helped me immensely in dealing with some of my issues, those issues will always be there, so it's hard not to feel an immense amount of regret and "if only" thoughts wishing I had never been bullied in the first place.

Or even worse: blame is put on the victim.

He was forced to resign and ultimately put a lot of pressure on prime minister Suga because he was his pick. Suga had to also step down after this and other similar incidents.

https://aramajapan.com/news/cornelius-apologizes-after-bully...

Interestingly I experienced persistent bullying that included physical assault and mental abuse (it was always successfully passed off as a joke when they did something to me) in the French system.

It was so bad that I still relive it daily every single day now, many many years later.

I imagine it does happen, but more often than not at urban school, at schools that are less academically oriented (e.g., construction high schools), and overall in lower socio-economic areas. The abusers are probably from abusive families.

If you’re in the burbs or the provincial parts of Japan, bullying at this extreme level is very unlikely to happen. The more common type of bullying is verbal abuse — still bad, but not like the examples you gave.

All that said, there is a form of hazing that is common in Japan that would probably be considered abusive, and that’s with high school baseball clubs. The new players on the team sometimes get boot camp-like treatment, and some folks (and sometimes coaches) take it too far. It’s theoretically all in fun and/or character building, and there are often checks and balances in place by the senior players, but I’ve heard some stories. That said, I don’t think that there are many baseball players who would not do it again.

That doesn't surprise me at all. Back in the day 2ch, which was the forerunner of 4chan in Japan, was extremely popular, but basically just as toxic and awful as 4chan. I think in Asia generally there is a LOT of aggression online.

In Asia? You haven't seen Twitter yet in the US.

Yes I have, and there is much more of a culture to be taken care of and get emotional support there than I've seen in other countries. Even British twitter is way harsher lol Americans are generally very kind and soft

You probably aren't exposed to the same kind of feed then.

Also, I think people should feel free to share whatever life experience / observations / anecdotes they have because it's not like what we write here is going to get cited in some journal.

Anyway, looks like I replied to the wrong post originally. And I botched my delivery. It was a poor attempt at encouraging more substantive discussion. I, for one, would have been interested in seeing an example that points out how much more ruthless a different country was, and I would have hoped that someone would show a counter example, and then a n interesting discussion pop up.

I'm sure there's something there, but I'm not a social scientist. Anyone with experience in sociology/psychology have an idea what that's about?

Is being successful in school good? yes. Is being successful in later life good? yes.

So you cannot consider the "successful school dropout". "risk taking" is the missed nuance, or "it has to get worse before it gets better"/"break a bone to set the leg" etc. Instead you have the only "feminist" path as (cherry-picked populations of) girls doing well in school and successes later in life, even if those don't necessarily/naturally correlate.

If you really wanted to capture that nuance, you need the kind of discussions Jordan Peterson has wrt personality/behavioural traits and their impacts on differences in outcomes; but you can clearly see how much hostility (in the name of feminism) he receives for that.

The funny thing is how he's accused of (sex/gender) essentialism, even if backed by stats/data, despite the advocated feminist alternatives being also full of essentialism (and just-so narratives), just ones seen as more culturally palatable.

I think because can be a better replacement for yet in this sentence. Repression very often leads to higher intensity.

Good thing we wouldn't introduce such a thing in the west.

I sincerely believe these instances were cherry picked. If such things happened regularly, it would have made an awful amount of noise in an otherwise law abiding society. Mixed raced (hafu) children do get more bullying from anecdotal evidence, but that is more of name calling or poking some fun at visual attribute. My knowledge about the situation is limited to Tokyo & Osaka, but that is pretty much where most of the foreigners/ mixed race families are to be found.

That said, I'll say that bullying in Japan is different in that it is orchestrated. Peer pressure is enormous in Japan. When someone is being bullied, very few of us can raise an objection because doing so would make you the next target. So everyone is becoming an enabler. (Actually, this is not just kids' matter. It's pretty much how the whole society functions here. No wonder adults can't stop kids bullying - they're just imitating adults!)

All of these things happened to at least one person I know growing up in the US.

I would want to see pretty strong (non anecdotal) evidence to think otherwise.

No direct experience but heard stories of bullying of children of friends/colleagues living in Japan and that was scary enough.