Yuri Project
joined Jul 14, 2016
Is bullying in Japan really that bad? I feel like there are so many stories where there the "outcast" and the clicks. Is that all just commercial?
(I know we have it here not that I've ever seen it up close)
I remember reading a cross-national comparison of bullying in the US, UK, Netherlands, and Japan once. I don't recall the details, but one of the major conclusions was that bullying is more common in the Western countries, but that the bullying that takes place in Japan is much more intense. In the US, UK, Netherlands, for students who were bullied, the median number of bullies targeting them was quite low, around 2 or 3, so you have one or a few students harassing another. In Japan, students who were bullied were targeted by much larger groups, sometimes over 10. On top of that, bullied students in Japan were completely ostracized by all of their peers far more often than in the Western countries.
I imagine then that the subjective experience of Japanese students is far different than American or English ones. If there's that one guy who bullies you, but otherwise your life is okay, then you don't feel trapped the same way you would if there were a bunch of people constantly out to get you and everyone else pretended you weren't there. This also contributes to the high teen suicide rate in Japan.
The high awareness of the problem is probably part of the reason bullying is so prevalent in Japanese fiction. Also, anime and manga are about middle and high school students disproportionately often. If there were more works about college students, working adults, etc. then presumably bullying would be less salient.