Oh my fucking Og.
Please allow me to apologize to all of you: I am sorry I began this thread as I did.
Had I had more complete information, this thread’s OP would have quite a different tone and would have been in the Pit.
Except school bullying (often to the point of trying to get people to commit suicide) is featured in approximately 95% of all manga, anime, and live-action dramas based in pre-college schools. (It is right up there with the transfer student, the cultural festival, and the beach episode.)
Oh, people in the U.S. apologize constantly.
What’s rare almost everywhere are genuine apologies, as opposed to “I apologize to anyone who might have been offended”.
I don’t know is this has been reported in the English news, but the Olympic Committee has decided to not use his music in the opening ceremony. There was apparently a four-minute composition which was to lead off the ceremony and now they are scrambling to replace it.
Still is, not just traditionally, the Tokyo district court ruled recently (this year) in a school bullying case that some amount of bullying of students by a teacher is normal. Like calling a biracial student smelly and cutting their hair in the middle of the classroom while the other students watched. It’s all A O K.
Nobita covered this in some depth. It’s (the situation, no the video) pretty bad.
A side note that rings to me with some kind of irony, although I can’t quite figure out what kind:
One of NHK’s* prestige programs, a 6-month series of programs that run in 15-minute segments 6 days a week, and that ended last summer just before the Olympics would have started, was all about the composer of the 1964 Olympics theme music, from his early adulthood to the climax at the '64 Olympics. He was, of course, an NHK-perfect character (and he may have actually been in real life, but we never see much of the truth in these programs). I think NHK is perhaps feeling lucky that the series ended a year ago and is not in the forefront of the public’s memory.
(*NHK (Nippon Hoso Kaikan) is the Japanese-government funded group of television and radio stations, somewhat analogous to UK’s BBC. They are dedicated to keeping the polish on the country’s and the world’s image of Japan, and burying anything sordid and unpleasant, which they only report on when they have to due to their competition doing so.)
I believe @TokyoBayer was referring to bullying of students by students. Bullying of students by teachers is, I think, a separate issue, that would be easier to resolve if the authorities were so inclined. My personal opinion that this kind of bullying by teachers is tolerated as a tool in training the populace in docility and conformity.
Hard to separate these two. If the teachers are bullying the weak and out of favor, the other students will join in.
Yep, and I think this thread has morphed into one of them. 
Absolutely!
The thing is, what he did is so freaking over-the-top, I don’t see how an apology could rectify anything. He should make a real gesture, like giving up his worldly possessions, re-distributing his future income from his music and living a life dedicated to helping others like those he hurt. That would be a start.
Now that’s an apology!
That’s certainly what the headlines would tend to indicate.
The percentage of Westerners that I’ve run into ones that last almost 40 years who read or watch is a tiny fraction of the population.
There was a good apology on our evening news, sorry if the link doesn’t work!
London Knights defenceman Logan Mailloux withdraws from 2021 NHL Draft - sportsnet.ca
Basically he withdrew from the NHL draft, (probably #1 or #2), because of some bad behaviour in his recent past.
Anyway, it was a pretty good apology.
F@ck, don’t try to reply while still have asleep. Let’s try that again.
In my almost 40 years of living on or being involved with Japan, I’ve found that the percentage of people who are that familiar with Japanese manga, anime, TV shows is still quite small as a percentage of the population.
Both are indeed a problem. The video that @Machine_Elf linked to discusses some of the issues but doesn’t dive deeply enough into the motivations of the teachers for ignoring, allowing, encouraging or even actually participating in or even leading the bullying.
Japanese society is unbelievably conformist and any deviation is often met with considerable pressure to submit. Japan is famous for being a group society, but what really hit me was how deeply it run. After my daughter was born, we were able to get day care for her and were told that we needed to have her there by 9:00 am for the morning meeting. She was two months old! She wouldn’t even be aware of being there, but no, she was part of the group and needed to attend the meeting.
Japanese has an expression murahachibu 村八分, literally 80% of the village. The idea was the 20% of the village was shunned.
Japanese teachers tend to be conservative people, often unkindly called unimaginative. I know there are good teachers in the system, but they are also part of the overall society. One of the purposes which the murachibu is the promote group cohesiveness by selecting a common enemy. This is one reason that bullying in Japan if often by an entire group or class, rather then just an individual.
One feature of Japanese society is that the a small number of elites are allowed more freedom and are allowed to break the rules as the leaders of society. It seems that Japanese teachers may allow these kids to lead the bullying as a way of ensuring the cohesiveness of the group.
Japanese classes stay together the entire day, with the different subject teachers coming in to teach the class, rather than the students going to different classrooms and having subjects at different times. Consequently, there is a much higher cohesiveness within a school class.
The school Oyamada went to was a private school which has an elementary school, junior high and high school as part of the same system. Normally, there are rigorous tests to get into good junior highs and high schools so this type of school is highly desired, but expensive. They often (if not usually?) are associated with a particular elite university, so that helps avoid “exam hell” for college as well.
Not really. While people in America do apologize, the number of times that happens is only a tenth or a hundredth of the frequency of Japanese. I have to teach Japan to not apologize in English because people assume that you did something wrong where in Japan it’s used when clearing up misunderstandings, for example, even if the other person is clearly at fault.
Manga and especially anime have exploded in popularity in the US. It may not be as popular as the MCU, but it is a long way from obscure.
https://sandbox.spcollege.edu/index.php/2019/10/the-rising-popularity-of-anime/
It could be. As I said, I’m just talking from my personal experience. It’s a really minor side issue to this horrific story.