i-sako.com

Whenever there is any talk of moving back to the States, my mother-in-law worries about the safety of our family in such a “dangerous country.” After all, kids kill each other in American high schools all the time, right?

Incidents like the one at Columbine paint a very bad picture of what it is like to be a young person in the U.S. (Admittedly, it doesn’t help when I mention that a girl at my high school shot her boyfriend or that a friend of mine took his own life with a borrowed shotgun.) But that is not to say these things are unheard of in Japan. In fact, this recent news story caught my attention in part because it comes from my wife’s hometown:

Net posting drove girl to kill

SASEBO, Nagasaki--An 11-year-old girl of Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, who allegedly slashed her female classmate to death with a box cutter Tuesday told police that she “didn’t like” what the victim wrote about her appearance during a chat session on the Internet, it was learned Wednesday. The board of education distributed computer software to municipal primary schools in the city to allow them to build homepages.

There have been a few other news stories involving murders in Japanese schools as well (Mamoru Takuma’s case springs to mind immediately). These, coupled with the pandemic bullying problem and the alarming phenomenon of ”classroom breakdown,” sometimes make me wonder if our children wouldn’t be better off in American schools.

It’s a tough call on many levels, but I think it is safe to say that “safety” can be scratched off the list of advantages of the Japanese educational system.