Japanese school boards are rethinking strict
school rules that were put in place in the 1980s to prevent delinquency in junior
high and high school students. These rules encourage students to be disciplined
and classes to be “as disciplined as possible.” However, some of these rules,
such as requirements for certain colored underwear, appear to violate basic
human rights. Spurred by the case in which an 18-year-old girl sued Osaka
Prefecture after her teachers forced her to dyed her naturally brown hair black,
some municipalities have moved to loosen the strictness of school rules.
One of the major points that the news article
featured was the fact that male teachers would be able to look up school girls’
skirts in order to check the color of their underwear to see if they are in
accordance with school rules—which is, how to say, sexual harassment. Masayuki
Ishigami, the education board official quoted in the article, said, “at the
very least, we felt it necessary to revise those school rules that affect
students’ human rights.” However, Ishigami only mentioned the underwear color rule
in reference to human rights and not rules such as prohibiting students from
wearing scarves and tights in the winter despite the cold.
Some other rules not shown in the article also
seem arbitrary rather than actively preventing a problem. For example, students
are able to wear V-neck sweaters but not cardigans. The same applies for the
aforementioned rule of no scarves and tights—while there may be some reason for
these rules, such as the conformity argument mentioned in the article, the
sweater vs. cardigan rule seems particularly
arbitrary. The rule against no scarves and tights seems like some sort of human
rights violation, especially considering the cold weather that many students
have to walk or bike through to get to the bus or the train or other forms of transportation.
According to the community piece “School
rules in Japan offer harsh lessons in mindless assimilation” by Colin P.A.
Jones published by the Japan Times, the strict school rules of Japanese schools
sometimes drive students to truancy or to suicide. This, Jones claims, is caused
by the harassment (called “guidance”) from teachers towards “nonconformists.” Similar
to the article discussed two weeks previously on school bullying, school
students sometimes take leaves of absences or are truant—however, in this case,
the harassment comes from the teachers of the school and the school itself rather
than other students.
Another Japan Times article (“Osaka
surveys schools over hair-color rules after lawsuit,” Mizuho Aoki) notes that
the strict regulations eased in the 1990s when more teachers tried to guide students
by “developing trusted relationships.” However, this trend ended when many
failed to gain the trust of students, putting strict regulations back in place.
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