11 ms·

A while ago I read a french news article that talked about bullying in japan and what was mentioned in it was way beyond what counts as bullying here (except fo

A while ago I read a french news article that talked about bullying in japan and what was mentioned in it was way beyond what counts as bullying here (except for the most severe cases). Bullying is always really bad and even just "mild" verbal or physical abuse can scar a child for life. But what apparently counts as "regular" bullying in Japan truly gave me the chills. Mentioned were things like stripping others naked, throwing away their clothes, burning their stuff, hitting them with sticks, spitting among other horrible things. The article also mentioned that this went on just as a bad online with encouragements for suicide being a frequent part of the cyber bullying. Does someone here have any experience with japanese school life? Is it really that bad? Or did they just pick a number of the worst cases?

emadabdulrahim 5y ago
This reminded me of experiences I wish I could forget for when I was bullied from 2nd grade to 8th. What made it worse was by puberty, I realized I was gay, which made me feel the bullying was justified because of how reprehensible my sexual orientation was. While I don't believe this anymore, I do feel those experiences have left a deep scare that won't simply go away.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
  I'm sorry this happened to you. I actually find it terrible how bullying in general is seen as "part of growing up" and other nonsense or sometimes even heavily played down with lies or fabrications like "the bully himself is actually suffering/has a bad life thats why he does it" (which is in no way generally true). Or even worse: blame is put on the victim.
  - rabuse 5y ago
    I was a bully during my teenage years. Honestly, did it for the attention from peers, and especially the girls. It's sad to say, but girls definitely favor that mentality at that age range.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Similar experiences here. If you haven't, really can't emphasize the value of a good therapist, and gay men's group therapy if you can find it. 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.
aidenn0 5y ago
> Mentioned were things like stripping others naked, throwing away their clothes, burning their stuff, hitting them with sticks, spitting among other horrible things. All of these things happened to at least one person I know growing up in the US.
joeberon 5y ago
> The article also mentioned that this went on just as a bad online with encouragements for suicide being a frequent part of the cyber bullying. 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.
- Loughla 5y ago
  I find that interesting, especially for countries like Korea or Japan. The stereotype of those cultures is sort of passive, and accepting of the status quo. And yet, when anonymous, the fangs come out, if not even more pointed. 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?
  - joeberon 5y ago
    I think it's precisely because of that collectivism, which leads to much harsher punishment of outliers.
    - ekianjo 5y ago
      Yes, accurate, with tacit approval of the masses, too. Which makes things even worse.
    - kelseyfrog 5y ago
      Hmm, I always thought conformity-culture was the cause of social accountability of outliers. My go to example for this is the highly individual valuing, yet Patagonia vest wearing finance bros. Conformity without collectivism. It's a thing and it's much more insidious than the collectivism-conformity script we got growing up.
  - elzbardico 5y ago
    I always thought that the more you repress aggression and competition, specially in human males, the more it will end up being expressed anyway, but in bursts or in passive-aggressive ways. Of course, this is just a personal hypothesis.
new299 5y ago
This is probably something that varies a lot by area but based on my observations of elementary school students (who I’ve seen the most of) and others. The situations you describe sound like pretty strong outliers. I would want to see pretty strong (non anecdotal) evidence to think otherwise.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
  Yeah it is always hard to get a proper picture of something like actual school life based on one (or a few) articles when in reality often not even parents of the children themselves know what is really going on.
noobermin 5y ago
This sounds inline with bullying in the US honestly, at least in the rougher schools.
Raztuf 5y ago
Watching anime (yeah yeah I know) I used to laugh at the absurdity of the bullying and how sexual it all was. I had no idea that bullying is really that bad in Japan. That's extremely sad.
- ganzuul 5y ago
  OP said 'appears to'. You are saying 'is'. Sharpen up.
- dartharva 5y ago
  The frequency of how much of what appears to be outlandish bullying gets portrayed in Japanese shows could be an indicator of how normalized it has become there. I have watched some anime too, and I cringed every time they showed those cartoonishly evil bullying scenes. They appeared so unrealistic to me, but reading this discussion it seems it might have actually been a quite relatable theme for Japanese audiences.
svara 5y ago
I don't have any particular insight on bullying in Japan specifically, but having lived there for a big chunk of my childhood I can say for sure that you have to be very, very skeptical of the "Look how weird Japan is" trope which is super common in Western media. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuzegom#Death_of_Sanda_Dia
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  The modern media landscape is sub-optimal. 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.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
  You are right, even asking people from a country directly can give a really false impression due to the pattern you describe. As someone who has lived both in the US as well as two european countries for equal parts of my life I know very well how easily views can become distorted by listening to single cases that are not representative.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  In Japanese society, historically, ritual suicide was accepted as an "honorable" way to die under otherwise shameful circumstances. It seems pretty natural that, with such a cultural legacy, Japanese people (including children) would be more willing to resort to suicide. 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.
white-moss 5y ago
I’m Japanese (24). In my own personal experience, I've never seen bullying that severe. There may be regional differences.
theprotocol 5y ago
> a French news article [about Japan] 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.
ekianjo 5y ago
> Does someone here have any experience with japanese school life? No direct experience but heard stories of bullying of children of friends/colleagues living in Japan and that was scary enough.
breadsphere 5y ago
There was a recent scandal in Japan where a musician named Cornelius was chosen to preform at the Paralympics and had an old interview resurface where he bragged about this type of bullying: stripping naked, force feeding someone their own feces… sadly it sounds like this was done to a handicapped person. 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-bullying-history-resurfaces/114349/ https://aramajapan.com/news/cornelius-apologizes-after-bully...
tkgally 5y ago
My two daughters went through Japanese public schools in Tokyo and Yokohama, and I now teach and do research about education-related topics at a university in Tokyo. My research focus is not student behavior, but I sometimes visit schools and I hear a lot of anecdotes about elementary and secondary schools from teachers and college students. 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.
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  This isn’t very unique to Japan. Or at least I’ve seen schools in the US 5 min apart that had the same class discrepancy. Brawls every day and learning is for nerds in one, constant tutoring and homework in the other.
  - tkgally 5y ago
    You’re right. Something I meant to say but didn’t in my comment above is that Japanese schools are more diverse than they seem to many people, including Japanese. 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%A1%E3%80%80%E6%95%99%E5%AE%A4&hl=ja&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1444&bih=1191&ei=7dxoYZLSEoKIxc8Ps4uQoAQ&ved=0ahUKEwjS_M-opcvzAhUCRPEDHbMFBEQQ4dUDCAc&uact=5&oq=%E5%B0%8F%E5%AD%A6%E6%A0%A1%E3%80%80%E6%95%99%E5%AE%A4&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgARQ9AhY9Ahg9AtoAHAAeACAAVGIAVGSAQExmAEAoAECoAEBqgELZ3dzLXdpei1pbWc&sclient=img 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+classroom+California&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwig9-GppcvzAhVBdJQKHVoJCVoQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=elementary-school+classroom+California&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzoFCAAQgARQ8boBWPG6AWDovQFoAHAAeACAAVmIAaIBkgEBMpgBAKABAaoBC2d3cy13aXotaW1nwAEB&sclient=img&ei=79xoYeDDKsHo0QTakqTQBQ&bih=1191&biw=1444&hl=ja https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=elementary-school+classroo...
euske 5y ago
Probably it is overblown, but I wouldn't be surprised if this actually happened somewhere (certainly not regular though). 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!)
csa 5y ago
I lived in Japan for 8 years (not in Tokyo), and this sort of stuff was very rare and often newsworthy. 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.
srvmshr 5y ago
> Does someone here have any experience with japanese school life? Is it really that bad? Or did they just pick a number of the worst cases? 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.

emadabdulrahim 5y ago

This reminded me of experiences I wish I could forget for when I was bullied from 2nd grade to 8th. What made it worse was by puberty, I realized I was gay, which made me feel the bullying was justified because of how reprehensible my sexual orientation was. While I don't believe this anymore, I do feel those experiences have left a deep scare that won't simply go away.

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
I'm sorry this happened to you. I actually find it terrible how bullying in general is seen as "part of growing up" and other nonsense or sometimes even heavily played down with lies or fabrications like "the bully himself is actually suffering/has a bad life thats why he does it" (which is in no way generally true). Or even worse: blame is put on the victim.
- rabuse 5y ago
  I was a bully during my teenage years. Honestly, did it for the attention from peers, and especially the girls. It's sad to say, but girls definitely favor that mentality at that age range.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Similar experiences here. If you haven't, really can't emphasize the value of a good therapist, and gay men's group therapy if you can find it. 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.

aidenn0 5y ago

> Mentioned were things like stripping others naked, throwing away their clothes, burning their stuff, hitting them with sticks, spitting among other horrible things. All of these things happened to at least one person I know growing up in the US.

joeberon 5y ago

> The article also mentioned that this went on just as a bad online with encouragements for suicide being a frequent part of the cyber bullying. 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.

Loughla 5y ago
I find that interesting, especially for countries like Korea or Japan. The stereotype of those cultures is sort of passive, and accepting of the status quo. And yet, when anonymous, the fangs come out, if not even more pointed. 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?
- joeberon 5y ago
  I think it's precisely because of that collectivism, which leads to much harsher punishment of outliers.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    Yes, accurate, with tacit approval of the masses, too. Which makes things even worse.
  - kelseyfrog 5y ago
    Hmm, I always thought conformity-culture was the cause of social accountability of outliers. My go to example for this is the highly individual valuing, yet Patagonia vest wearing finance bros. Conformity without collectivism. It's a thing and it's much more insidious than the collectivism-conformity script we got growing up.
- elzbardico 5y ago
  I always thought that the more you repress aggression and competition, specially in human males, the more it will end up being expressed anyway, but in bursts or in passive-aggressive ways. Of course, this is just a personal hypothesis.

new299 5y ago

This is probably something that varies a lot by area but based on my observations of elementary school students (who I’ve seen the most of) and others. The situations you describe sound like pretty strong outliers. I would want to see pretty strong (non anecdotal) evidence to think otherwise.

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
Yeah it is always hard to get a proper picture of something like actual school life based on one (or a few) articles when in reality often not even parents of the children themselves know what is really going on.

noobermin 5y ago

This sounds inline with bullying in the US honestly, at least in the rougher schools.

Raztuf 5y ago

Watching anime (yeah yeah I know) I used to laugh at the absurdity of the bullying and how sexual it all was. I had no idea that bullying is really that bad in Japan. That's extremely sad.

ganzuul 5y ago
OP said 'appears to'. You are saying 'is'. Sharpen up.
dartharva 5y ago
The frequency of how much of what appears to be outlandish bullying gets portrayed in Japanese shows could be an indicator of how normalized it has become there. I have watched some anime too, and I cringed every time they showed those cartoonishly evil bullying scenes. They appeared so unrealistic to me, but reading this discussion it seems it might have actually been a quite relatable theme for Japanese audiences.

svara 5y ago

I don't have any particular insight on bullying in Japan specifically, but having lived there for a big chunk of my childhood I can say for sure that you have to be very, very skeptical of the "Look how weird Japan is" trope which is super common in Western media. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuzegom#Death_of_Sanda_Dia

mensetmanusman 5y ago
The modern media landscape is sub-optimal. 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.
2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
You are right, even asking people from a country directly can give a really false impression due to the pattern you describe. As someone who has lived both in the US as well as two european countries for equal parts of my life I know very well how easily views can become distorted by listening to single cases that are not representative.
jkhdigital 5y ago
In Japanese society, historically, ritual suicide was accepted as an "honorable" way to die under otherwise shameful circumstances. It seems pretty natural that, with such a cultural legacy, Japanese people (including children) would be more willing to resort to suicide. 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.

white-moss 5y ago

I’m Japanese (24). In my own personal experience, I've never seen bullying that severe. There may be regional differences.

theprotocol 5y ago

> a French news article [about Japan] 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.

ekianjo 5y ago

> Does someone here have any experience with japanese school life? No direct experience but heard stories of bullying of children of friends/colleagues living in Japan and that was scary enough.

breadsphere 5y ago

There was a recent scandal in Japan where a musician named Cornelius was chosen to preform at the Paralympics and had an old interview resurface where he bragged about this type of bullying: stripping naked, force feeding someone their own feces… sadly it sounds like this was done to a handicapped person. 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-bullying-history-resurfaces/114349/ https://aramajapan.com/news/cornelius-apologizes-after-bully...

tkgally 5y ago

My two daughters went through Japanese public schools in Tokyo and Yokohama, and I now teach and do research about education-related topics at a university in Tokyo. My research focus is not student behavior, but I sometimes visit schools and I hear a lot of anecdotes about elementary and secondary schools from teachers and college students. 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.

reducesuffering 5y ago
This isn’t very unique to Japan. Or at least I’ve seen schools in the US 5 min apart that had the same class discrepancy. Brawls every day and learning is for nerds in one, constant tutoring and homework in the other.
- tkgally 5y ago
  You’re right. Something I meant to say but didn’t in my comment above is that Japanese schools are more diverse than they seem to many people, including Japanese. 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%A1%E3%80%80%E6%95%99%E5%AE%A4&hl=ja&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1444&bih=1191&ei=7dxoYZLSEoKIxc8Ps4uQoAQ&ved=0ahUKEwjS_M-opcvzAhUCRPEDHbMFBEQQ4dUDCAc&uact=5&oq=%E5%B0%8F%E5%AD%A6%E6%A0%A1%E3%80%80%E6%95%99%E5%AE%A4&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgARQ9AhY9Ahg9AtoAHAAeACAAVGIAVGSAQExmAEAoAECoAEBqgELZ3dzLXdpei1pbWc&sclient=img 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+classroom+California&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwig9-GppcvzAhVBdJQKHVoJCVoQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=elementary-school+classroom+California&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzoFCAAQgARQ8boBWPG6AWDovQFoAHAAeACAAVmIAaIBkgEBMpgBAKABAaoBC2d3cy13aXotaW1nwAEB&sclient=img&ei=79xoYeDDKsHo0QTakqTQBQ&bih=1191&biw=1444&hl=ja https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=elementary-school+classroo...

euske 5y ago

Probably it is overblown, but I wouldn't be surprised if this actually happened somewhere (certainly not regular though). 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!)

csa 5y ago

I lived in Japan for 8 years (not in Tokyo), and this sort of stuff was very rare and often newsworthy. 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.

srvmshr 5y ago

> Does someone here have any experience with japanese school life? Is it really that bad? Or did they just pick a number of the worst cases? 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.