AsiaFile

Here’s a fascinating story from the UPI, written by Harumi Kawamura Gondo.
Kawasaki, Japan — Japanese “monster parents” – parents who make unreasonable demands of their children’s schools or teachers – have been a hot topic of online discussion in recent times.

For example, an elementary school captured a lot of interest when it put on the play “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” The curiosity of it was that there were 25 Snow Whites, but no dwarfs and no witch. Giving in to pressure from parents, who launched a campaign of bullying and harassment against them, school authorities decided against favoring one girl to play the role of Snow White.

In the past, Japanese parents would apologize to the teacher and school for their children’s behavior. But nowadays, parents view themselves more as privileged customers and horror stories of their behavior abound.

Yoshihiko Morotomi, a professor at Japan’s Meiji University, has recently published a book about the phenomenon. He lists hundreds of incidents that illustrate the behavior of these monster parents. The mother of one child, accidentally injured on the playground by another child, demanded the suspension of the other child – her reasoning was that the other child should not benefit from the lessons that her son would be missing during the duration of her son’s recuperation.

Japan’s Yomiuri newspaper has joined in the fray, publishing actual things that parents have said or done to teachers. Notable among them are the parents who visit teachers and principals at their private residences to address at length problems at school, or the parents who insinuate connections with organized crime in order to accentuate their requests.

A recent television program showed a parent calling a teacher, asking, “My child refuses to take a bath. Can you come over and make my child get in the tub?”

Japanese school teachers have joined in the online discussion, sharing their own experiences. One teacher in Yokohama wrote, “I teach English in Japan and once booted a boy from class for punching a girl after being ordered to stop. He told his mom and she came to school demanding an apology for embarrassing her angel.”

Another teacher in Hiroshima wrote, “Here, students are not failed…If you sit in a test and write only your name and fall asleep you are not given an F for that test, you are given a C. A student who hits a teacher is not suspended or expelled. A student who cannot control himself in class is not removed.”

Indeed, many schools have dropped the traditional “undoukai,” which were sports competitions held annually in schools across the country. The new undoukai consist of similar games and competitions but without a competitive edge, and without winners or losers.

An English language director at a college in north China said the same things were happening there. “I can validate academic standards being slaughtered – a ‘no fail policy’ for the most incompetent and/or lazy students. Parent/student pressure is standard.”

Morotomi identified the more dangerous monsters, the “teacher hunters,” who meet in diners and coffee shops to conspire against certain teachers. Their efforts sometimes end in demands for the teacher’s resignation.

Some have blamed such behavior as symptomatic of deeper social troubles in Japanese society, rooted in the economic crisis in the late 1980s and 1990s, erupting in recent times and visible in extreme bullying in schools, soaring suicide rates and the appearance of shut-ins – mostly men and boys who refuse to leave their rooms for years on end.

Michael Zielenziger, author of a recently-published book, “Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan created its own lost generation,”writes of a conversation he had with Haruki Murakami, one of Japan’s most famous novelists. Murakami commented, “We believed in the strength of the society and the power of our economy. And we believed that things were getting better and better, year by year and day by day…That’s a kind of confidence, but that was lost…Once the Cold war ended, everything changed. We couldn’t adjust to the new situation. It was a kind of chaos and we lost our sense of direction.”

Others have offered other reasons. One online reader reflected, “In Japan, women are oppressed. The mothers are getting together for coffee and talking about their kids’ teachers. If women had more rights in the workplace in Japan, they’d be too busy (and perhaps fulfilled) to waste their time with this kind of nonsense.”

Another reader from the United Kingdom wrote, “Perhaps the Japanese are evolving from a society of silent conformity to one of open discussion and there are, perhaps, many buried issues that need to evolve and develop.”

The behavior of the parents has increasingly captured concern and national interest. Feeding upon the zeitgeist there is even a new drama series, “Monster Parent,” scheduled to air on July 1 on Japan’s Fuji Television. The drama series casts actress Ryoko Yokenura as a lawyer dispatched to the Board of Education to fight parents who make outrageous demands of the schools.

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