A society bound by rules and obedient people
I’ve always felt that Japan has too many rules and is very strange.
As I’ve written before, rules start at school.
School rules become especially strict from junior high school onwards, and students are bound by regulations on everything from how to wear their uniforms to what they carry and their hairstyles.
We are also taught to fit into a box of common sense created by someone else.
This is what I’ve noticed when I travel abroad: Japanese people are easy to identify.
The first reason is that they, as tourists, walk in tight formations like students.
We Japanese are forced to line up at school to the point of becoming annoyed.
Teachers scold us if we stray from the line even a little.
In the past, some teachers would resort to corporal punishment for just that reason.
Thanks to this absurd education, the majority of Japanese people have become people who fit into a clearly defined, invisible box and follow the rules.
As a teacher, I feel the importance and influence of education every day.
When I was a student in elementary school, I was bullied by my female homeroom teacher, which made me afraid of school and made me stop going.
As a result, I decided as a child that I wanted to become the complete opposite of that teacher.
Because of this terrible experience, I can really understand the feelings of students who are bullied or who stop going to school.
