`Different' Children Are Bullied To Death In Japan

TOKYO - From the day he entered junior high school last fall, Yuhei Kodama had been the target of cruel pranks and endless teasing. And now seven classmates had the 13-year-old cornered in the crowded gym of Meirin Junior High School in Shinjo City. They demanded that he mimic a bear-wrestler from Japanese mythology, a way of making him play the fool.

Yuhei refused. So his classmates killed him.

The sheer viciousness of the Jan. 13 crime made it unusual. But police and educational specialists say the relentless and often brutal persecution of students deemed strange or different by their peers is an everyday occurrence in thousands of schools across Japan.

Called ijime, or bullying, the phenomenon seems to reflect the intolerances of a conformist society where the unofficial motto is: Deru kugi wa utareru, or "The protruding nail gets hammered down."

"Children bully other children everywhere, of course," said Masatoshi Fukuda, head of the All-Japan Bullying Prevention Council, an organization recently formed to lobby on behalf of ijime victims. "But in Japan it is worse because the system itself seems to encourage the punishment of anyone who does not conform to social norms."

Bullying has been a serious problem in Japanese schools for at least a decade, but recently it has turned far more violent, with unprecedented numbers of assaults resulting in serious injuries and death. At least 13 bullying-related murders reported in junior and senior high schools last year.

In addition, Fukuda says there were about 300 bullying-related suicides among junior high school students last year.

None of the 50 or so other students in the Meirin Junior High School gym last week intervened or sought to summon a teacher as Yuhei Kodama was punched and kicked in the head. After all, the first-year student had long since been branded itanshi - odd or different - by other pupils.

He was bookish and, worse, poor at team sports. He was clever with words and would ask questions in class, showing a streak of individualism that stuck out like the proverbial protruding nail in an educational system where test scores - not initiative, creative thinking or inquiry - are the sole standard success.

"For reasons we do not understand, this boy was targeted and bullied for a long period," a police spokesman said. "The murder was a savage crime. But most shocking is how many students who took no part in the attack tried to cover up for the bullies."

Eventually police learned the identities of all seven assailants, who ranged in age from 12 to 14. The three 14-year-olds face murder charges and possible incarceration in a juvenile-detention center. The four other attackers are too young to be prosecuted under Japanese law.

School officials at first vigorously denied Yuhei was the victim of anything more than a spontaneous fight that went too far. Finally, after the arrests, the principal conceded that "there may have been invisible bullying. We should reflect on that possibility."

"Bullying is at least as widespread and possibly even more pervasive than ever," said Toyokichi Endo, a retired teacher and well-known commentator on educational issues.

In Toyonaka City, for example, a 15-year-old girl was beaten to death after months of enduring insults for wearing hand-me-down public-school uniforms from her older sister because her family could not afford new ones.

"She was an irritation in our faces . . . she dressed poorly when all other students have new uniforms every year," one assailant, a 14-year-old boy, told police.

True bullying, Japanese-style, is the systematic, long-term abuse of a schoolchild by his or her peers. What all ijime cases have in common, specialists said, is that the victim is isolated from the mainstream, made a friendless pariah. Physical violence is not always involved.

The family of a 15-year-old Tokyo student recently filed suit against his school, charging he had been harassed by teachers and classmates because his English-speaking abilities surpassed even the skills of language instructors.

The boy, son of an American woman married to a Japanese, achieved top scores in nationally administered language exams. However, his English teacher at No. 7 Middle School issued him a failing grade.

"He was going beyond the curriculum and advancing too fast," the teacher informed the mother, making clear that this was harsh criticism, not praise for a gifted child.

The boy also was hounded by classmates because of his mixed race. A small mob of students would follow him home every day, chanting, "Stinking foreigner! Your mother is an American so you must have AIDS!"

School officials offer little sympathy. "Perhaps this student would be more properly placed in a private school for foreigners," said a spokesman, ignoring that the boy was born in Japan, possesses Japanese citizenship, speaks Japanese fluently and excelled in all classes.

In Japan, where the individual is almost totally defined by his or her relation to a group, be it a mammoth corporation or a junior high school homeroom, shunning can be the most devastating form of bullying.

An 11-year-old boy in Eniwa City became the target of relentless peer abuse last year. But so long as he was able to tag along with classmates, he endured insults, shoves down stairs and cruel practical jokes.

Then the insults stopped, replaced by contemptuous silence, his fellow students refusing to speak to him, staring through him as if he were invisible.

"I am so sorry. Everyone seems to hate me," he scribbled on a death note before hanging himself from a tree. "I am a bother to everyone. I won't be a bother to anyone anymore."