After our discussion in class today, I found an article on bullying in Japan among school-age children and how sociologists use the homogenous society of the country to examine a different set of interactions. Unlike the United States and most of Europe as well, the population of Japan is almost completely made up of native people without any other ethnic, lingual, or cultural backgrounds. While the genocides that we have studied thus far have centered around one ethnic group targeting another, usually a minority, there are no such groups in the hallways of Japanese schools. Yet children still manage to find differences among one another and use them to exert power and authority over victims.
The author of the article, Charlie Atsushi Inoue, identifies the main characteristics of bullying in Japanese schools. First, Inoue cites the conditions of when academic pressure is at its highest. The social structure that surrounds Japanese school-age children is one of intense competition where value is measured by success. In this sense, looking at Dadrian's argument of the local analysis as being key to understanding the dynamic of a people is applicable because the society of Japan is an individual one that would be lost in a both a macro and microhistorical viewpoint. However, Atsushi Inoue also refers to the home life and family of both victim and bully as being triggers for their behavior, which goes against Dadrian's dismissal of personal psychoanalysis of those involved in genocide as a window into why it occurs. Perhaps the combination of these two different lenses provides the best viewpoint in the case of the Japanese.
Atsushi Inoue then identifies the victims as transfer students that are targeted before they can fully integrate into the new school system. He argues that the ethnic diversity of the US makes it far more accepting of outsiders, and that bullying is usually restricted to group-on-group of differently identifying people, whereas in Japan, those who are considered different do not have that other group to identify with because of the homogenous setting. Thus, the bullying is more group-on-individual. It is interesting how this relates so intensely to Dadrian's point of minorities being vulnerable in multiple ways, mostly because they do not have a home country to stand behind them. In the case of the Japanese, they all have the same background but the transfer students Atsushi Inoue sees as the common victims do not have the stability of the school life. They are the vulnerable minority in the homogenous setting.
http://educationinjapan.wordpress.com/education-system-in-japan-general/our-children-are-being-bullied/bullying-behavior-in-japanese-schoolsdiscrimination-in-a-homogeneous-society/
The article and response undoubtedly reminded me of numerous articles we discussed in class. However, I thought the article identified more with Staub, not Dadrian. Atsushi Inoue channels Dadrian when he identifies the vulnerability of most bullying victims in their minority status as a transfer student. Yet Inoue emphasizes the unique cultural characteristics that lead to bullying. More specifically, he notes the extreme academic pressure to succeed. Staub would agree, arguing that the cultural pressure to succeed leads to a individual psychological drive to establish oneself as superior; bullying is a way of coping with the desire to “be better.” Similarly, Staub would site the homogenous nature of Japanese society as a cause of the psychological need to defend ones group against intruders, which, likewise, links to bullying.
ReplyDeleteInoue also connects, to a lesser extent, to Rummel. Inoue describes bullying as a “dangerously addictive power game,” which directly mirrors Rummel’s assertions that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In the world of bullying, as the bully gains increasing power over the victim, the bully coerces the victim into committing increasingly embarrassing acts. Likewise, in the case of genocide, as the perpetrator’s power increases in the nation-state, so too does their ability to act against a minority group without repercussions.
In the increasingly technology centered world, cyber bullying threatens children’s lives in tangible ways. I would be interested to see if cyber bullying occurs in Japan. If so, I wonder if, in the anonymity of the internet, the homogenous population taunting the transfers would continue to hold true or if the bullying degrades to less visible factors.