Beating…

Japanese television in general pretty much sucks, since 80% of its programs consist of silly game shows and people eating whatever crap on TV and screeching “oishii” = tastes good. However, there are a few programs that display a reasonable amount of intelligence. One of them is “close up gendai” (with gendai meaning: “modern times” or “present-day”). That program is on more or less every weekday after the NHK news at 19:30 for half an hour and deals with all sorts of society related issues (mostly, but not exclusively, Japanese topics).

Recently they had a program about physical punishment in sports in Japanese schools and universities that I found noteworthy.

Last year, the suicide of a teenage boy in Osaka who, as one of the reasons for killing himself, cited the physical punishment he received during his basketball classes in his farewell note, brought the topic into the spotlight. That was shortly followed by the revelation that also in the Japanese women’s Olympic Judo team physical punishment was widely practiced.

In the half hour TV program they more or less stated that physical punishment during sports lessons in Japan is not an isolated phenomenon at all but happens country-wide, all the time.

I am rather shocked by this, since in German schools stuff like that is not allowed and if it happened it would result in a major scandal. Teachers are not allowed (anymore) to beat up their students. Physical punishment was officially abolished in Germany only in the year 2000 (according to Wikipedia), but ever since the 1970ties such punishments were not practiced anymore, at least not that I know of. I wonder what’s it like in the US for example or at other places in Europe?

The tone of the program was weird, to say the least. Sorts of, hell, we didn’t know stuff like that was happening at our schools. Aren’t we more evolved than that? It shouldn’t be happening. It can’t be good. How shocking that it’s still rather normal.

The program did not, however, outright condemn the issue and did not make a strong statement like: hell, this has to stop right here and now. It remained in the elusive area of: stuff like that should stop…

Weird. I would have wished for a much stronger statement.

However, coming to think of it, I guess the nations where there is no physical punishment of any form in schools, be it at sports or normal classes, is probably quite rare and not a matter of course as I had thought prior to watching that program.

It’s a sad thing that someone needed to commit suicide here before people started to talk about this topic, but at least now they do. I hope there will come a day when thinking that physical punishment in schools as a thing of the past will be a matter of course for many more people. Japan needs to address this much more aggressively and openly, but alas, change like that has the tendency to happen awfully slowly…