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>From LeMonde_Diplomatique
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YOUTHS SEEK ESCAPE FROM PRESSURES OF MODERN LIFE
Japan's teenage horrors
"Suicide, prostitution and shocking crime: Japan is becoming alarmed at the
explosion of delinquent behaviour among its young. The country may seem to be
functioning normally, but are its young people suffering from an overdose of
video games and TV violence? Or does this upsurge of violence reflect the
pressures of an ambitious society in which the family has collapsed as a
reference point, a highly selective educational system has no time for losers
and money has become the sole - and corrupting - value.
by our special correspondent DAVID ESNAULT
Have Japan's young people lost "the basic notions of good and evil, and a sense
of the sanctity of life"? This question is worrying the Japanese government
after a spate of violent acts committed by teenagers, of a gravity not seen
before.
The first of these appalling incidents involving young adolescents was a triple murder
that took place in Kobe in June 1997: a 14-year-old boy murdered two young girls and
then decapitated an 11-year-old boy. He placed th
e severed head in front of his school, with a note explaining that he wanted revenge
on a society that had "made him invisible". The murders shocked the nation.
Seven months later, in January 1998, public opinion was assailed by a new horror. In
Utsunomiya, a medium-sized town 100 km to the north of Tokyo, a 13-year-old boy,
furious at being told off by his English teacher for be
ing late, stabbed the man to death. A month later, in Tottori, a district 120 km
north-west of Kobe, two 14-year-old twins left their home, attacked an old lady
passing by and stabbed her to death. On being arrested, they
simply said "Now we won't have to go to school any more". Some months later, in
Higashi Matsuyama to the north of Tokyo, a 13-year-old schoolboy suddenly knifed a
classmate who had been making fun of him.
Dozens of similar stories have been reported in the Japanese press. Other types of
violence are also on the increase. Katsumi Miya, police inspector in charge of the
juvenile delinquency section of Osaka police (1), is al
armed at the growing incidence of oyaji gari or manhunts. Teenagers get together for
an evening out, without even necessarily knowing each other, and attack passing drunks
and homeless people. Tokyo police recently arrest
ed a gang of 12 boys of 10 to 17 who had attacked 36 elderly people in five
months. The youths robbed their victims - to the tune of $8,000 - and spent the
money in video arcades. Their leader was not yet 13.
Prostitution among young girls, mostly schoolgirls, is also getting a lot of
media attention. The Japanese call it enjo kosai (2). In the evenings, in
Shinjuku, Tokyo's red-light district, hundreds of flyers advertising so-called
"telephone clubs" are pasted up on lampposts and displayed in phone boxes.
These establishments - some clandestine, others run openly - give clients the
mobile phone numbers of young girls. Clients are usually family men of 40 to
60, often businessmen or office workers, and they pay $240 to $400 for a
meeting. The girls are well-educated and not from particularly poor families.
They are motivated mainly by money, which they spend on designer clothes,
cosmetics and expensive accessories.
According to Yomiuri TV, one of Japan's four national TV channels, one in 20
schoolgirls has been involved at least once in prostitution. The police have
not released any precise figures, but say the phenomenon is underestimated -
and that it is increasing steadily.
Dr Masao Nakazawa, a psychiatrist at the Yoyogi Hospital in central Tokyo, is a
specialist in family violence. He says he is astonished at the number of
households in which children beat their parents. He tells the story of a boy
who failed to get into the high school he was aiming for. He then went on to
fail his university entrance exam. He became depressed and blamed his parents
for his problems, and began to terrorise the entire family. He routinely beats
them and threatens them with a knife. The police refuse to intervene, arguing
that it is a private matter, particularly since the boy behaves normally
outside the home. And this is not an isolated incident. Dr Nakazawa says he has
to deal with this kind of thing every day.
Japan's schools are also a breeding ground for a form of violence known as
ijime. Literally the word means torture, but what it means here is bullying. A
group of pupils will choose a victim and persecute him for months on end
because he "disrupts the harmony of the group". The harassment is mostly
psychological, but it sometimes turns into physical brutality. Teachers turn a
blind eye, even though it goes far beyond ragging or initiation rites. An
inquiry by the ministry of education in 1997 found that a third of all students
say they have been victims of ijime, particularly in junior school where the
problem has become acute. The harassment is sometimes so bad that children have
been driven to suicide, or to the murder of their tormentors.
In 1996 the ministry of education's annual report into problems in schools
found 10,575 separate incidents (3) - 20% up on the previous year. In 1997 more
than 1,300 incidents between teachers and pupils were reported - 50% up on
1996. These figures agree with police figures, which show an alarming growth in
juvenile criminality across the board. The number of assaults and crimes
involving violence rose by almost 50% between 1996 and 1997, and the rise
continued in 1998. Worryingly, girls are just as involved as boys.
What alarms people most is the change in the nature of the delinquent activity
and the age of its perpetrators. The most violent assaults are carried out by
very young adolescents, and they are either gratuitous, or done on the
slightest of pretexts. The ministry of education says "The perpetrators [of the
violence] are apparently normal pupils. They give only minimal warning signs,
such as disproportionate reactions to minor issues, and these tend to go
unnoticed".
All this has led writer Kaoru Takamura to question whether there have been
"fundamental changes in the psychology of young Japanese in the past 20 years.
It's possible that Japanese society is breaking down, even though it appears to
be functioning normally" (4). Does this surge of violent behaviour among the
young translate into something deeper - a disturbance in the delicate balance
of a society that is highly policed and fairly prosperous? People have been
quick to blame TV violence, video games and mangas (5) for wielding an
unhealthy influence on the young. They cite a powerful example - the "butterfly
knife".
This type of knife, with its ornate double handle and strong blade, has been
used in most of the recent attacks. The fashion for using butterfly knives
began with a TV series called Gift, whose hero who was particularly adept with
the weapon. Another TV series, GTO, also available in manga format, featured an
actor much admired by Japanese teenagers. But there is a difference of scale
between carrying a knife and using it for killing someone. If young people are
using this kind of weapon, it is also because they can be bought on any high
street for $15 to $45.
In huge amusement arcades like Umeda in Osaka and Akihabara and Ikebukuro in
Tokyo, most players are in their twenties, not their teens. After hours of the
deafening noise of the gaming machines and repetitive images on a screen, they
emerge comatose rather than aggressive. "There have been no conclusive studies
into the dangers of video games," says Junichi Seto, a journalist who covers
juvenile crime for Mainichi Shimbun newspaper. The idea that young people have
lost the ability to differentiate between fiction and reality is just
speculation.
The deep causes for the upsurge of violence lie in the breakdown of family
life, the education system and the consequences of Japan's all-out pursuit of
economic growth since 1945. Since the second world war the Japanese have put
their time and energies into work and their companies, to the exclusion of
their families and community life. The damage this does to society is evident:
human relationships have deteriorated in a culture dominated by community
(unlike Western society, which has long been individualistic), and traditional
values have gradually declined. Young people today have lost their bearings.
The nuclear family, often with only a single child, has replaced the large
family of days gone by. In this over-urbanised country, grandparents and
cousins sometimes live a long way off, and long journey times mean that they
rarely come to visit. The other traditional basis of solidarity, the network of
neighbours, is also fast disappearing as a result of urbanisation and the
disappearance of traditional community values. Once parents would leave
children with their neighbours when they went out. Today they simply leave them
on their own.
Parents - who represent authority - are spending less and less time with their
children. "The Japanese have a house, but they do not have a home," says
Naritada Nishioka, deputy director of the juvenile crime section of Osaka
police. And it is becoming hard to give young people a sense of moral values
when standards are collapsing all around. You only have to look at the
political and financial scandals that have been shaking the country for the
past 10 years - often involving the kind of people who would once have been
role models: chief executives, politicians, senior civil servants.
The voluntary prostitution of schoolgirls bears witness to the national
obsession with money. Education has not escaped this influence. The system is
going through a period of deep crisis: the post-war model that saw education as
the driving motor of economic growth no longer works. "The aim now is to get
into the best high school, go to the best university, join the best company,
have a good job and get rich," says Junichi Seto; "it is an entirely
materialist view of things." Selection starts early. At 15, pupils take an
exam, after three years of junior school, that decides their futures. There is
only one way for them to get jobs in big companies or in the upper reaches of
the civil service: via half a dozen prestige universities which they can only
access via top-class high schools, where entry is also by examination.
To meet the challenge, children start working incredibly hard at a very young
age. After six hours of lessons a day they spend one or two hours at the sports
or cultural club attached to the school, which is more or less compulsory. Two
thirds of them then go to juku, private tuition, two to four times a week.
Parents huge considerable financial sacrifices to pay for the juku, which
increases the pressure on the child. Repeating a year is not allowed. "Teachers
try to help the less bright students, but to be honest you cannot do a lot,"
says Mr Saeki, headmaster of Sendai school. Schoolchildren are under such
pressure from their parents and from the education system that they often
become violent, or simply refuse point-blank to go to school. Everyone involved
in the educational system recognises that this is becoming a major problem.
Voices from all sectors of society are clamouring for a change in the law on
juvenile delinquency. The present laws, passed 50 years ago, are based on the
American model of reinserting young offenders into society. The Association for
the Victims of Youth Crime, set up two years ago, is calling for the age of
criminal responsibility to be lowered from 16 to 14. They are also calling for
a state prosecutor to be involved in trials, and for hearings to be open to the
public. A change in the law would answer the need for justice felt by victims
and the population as a whole. But it is not likely to check the rise in youth
violence, as the United States' example shows (6).
"It is not the young people who are out of control," says Dr Nakazawa. "It is
the adults. ... Look at the development of the country over the past 50 years,
and look at the situation today. The government is sinking huge sums of money
into bailing out banks, but almost nothing into social action."
* Journalist and winner of Japan's 1998 Reporter prize.
(1) Levels of youth crime are above average in Osaka, Japan's second largest
city.
(2) Enjo means "help" and kosai means "going out with".
(3) Taking in the whole range of problems, including ijime.
(4) "La soci�t� japonaise et le psychopathe", by Kaoru Takamura and Masaaki
Noda, Cahiers du Japon, Paris, spring 1998.
(5) Japanese comics, sometimes featuring sex and violence, which sell in
millions of copies.
(6) See Lo�c Wacquant, "Penal common sense comes to Europe", Le Monde
diplomatique English edition, April 1999.
Translated by Ed Emery
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED � 1999 Le Monde diplomatique
{{<End>}}
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