Japanese were similarly appalled by the idea that a teacher would apparently seek to rape a girl no older than his students. But what’s really shocking is how commonplace sex-related crimes among the nation’s teachers have become. In December Japan’s Education Ministry revealed that in the last school year, 141 public-school teachers were punished for obscene behavior–nearly twice as many as two years earlier. Just in the last month, a high-school teacher in Kagoshima prefecture was arrested for “sexual contact” with a 16-year-old student, a Saitama teacher was charged with paying a 13-year-old girl $380 for sex, a Tokyo middle-school teacher was sentenced to a year in jail for groping a high-school student on a train and the Osaka education board fired a teacher who had planted a video camera in a girls’ bathroom. “We used to call teaching a ‘sacred profession,’ but today who would?” asks Setsuko Tsuboi, a children’s rights attorney in Tokyo.
Japanese schools have never been quite the sanctuaries of orderliness and calm that they seem from the outside. For years teachers have been accused of imposing excessive corporal punishment on their charges, while some students have driven others to suicide with their bullying and taunting. But the rise in the number of reported cases of sexual abuse and harassment is new and, many experts think, related to the increasing sexualization of schoolgirls in Japan. A standard story line in porn films and magazines, including hard-core manga comic books, involves the ravishing of innocent schoolgirls wearing miniskirts and droopy socks. Hostess bars offer up young women dressed in school uniforms, while a rash of breathless stories in the last decade about students’ selling their bodies to pay for Chanel outfits has implanted the idea that Japanese schoolgirls are available for sex. Telephone “dating” services, in which callers register themselves and their cellphone numbers under pseudonyms and the host computer matches male and female members, have “considerably lowered the psychological barrier against prostitution among Japanese, and teachers are no exception,” says Yoko Kunihiro, a sociologist at Tokyo’s Musashi University.
Some observers think the quality of Japan’s teachers has declined, too. Tsuboi says that schools increasingly pay too much attention to the academic qualifications of potential hires, rather than to their character or morals. A bigger problem may be the insular, tradition bound nature of the profession. Teachers who make sexual comments or even touch their female students are still often laughed off as being fun-loving characters. Fellow teachers face pressure to protect their colleagues. “I sometimes see acts that I might describe as borderline sekuhara [an abbreviation of the phrase sekushuaru harasumento],” says a female teacher in Kanagawa prefecture, “like making sexual jokes in a classroom. But if I protested, I might be singled out as a troublemaker, not a team player.”
As in the West, that conspiracy of silence too often goes unchallenged. “In many cases, young children don’t even understand what is happening to them,” says Akiko Kamei, a former health teacher who heads the National Network for the Prevention of School Sexual Harassment. “It is common for them to suddenly remember years later what their teacher did and realize it was harassment.” Even when students recognize that they’re being victimized–by being fondled, for instance, or told to strip down to their underwear for health checkups, or even, in some cases, raped–many kids are afraid to talk back to their teachers, let alone accuse them of indecent acts. Often parents hesitate to take action, too, for fear that their child may receive bad grades or become a target for bullying.
Part of the rise in the number of teachers convicted of harassment may reflect a greater openness about the subject. In the past, says children’s advocate Yuri Morita, “Japanese taught kids to avoid danger, not how to deal with” abuse–which meant that the child was often partly blamed if anything happened to him or her. Now, through a program Morita herself imported from the United States in 1985, schoolchildren are taught in workshops how and when to say no to unwanted attention, to run from danger and to talk openly to trustworthy adults. For Japanese to learn about more such crimes may not be a bad thing.
