Fed up. In the Land of the Rising Sun, overly strict regulations in some schools requiring students to wear everything from head to toe, “black hair” and “white shoelaces”, are the subject of growing criticism and lawsuits reported the electronic journal journaldemontreal.com.
This concerns: “the length of hair, the prohibition of ponytails and braids, as well as low socks, and the obligation to have white shoelaces”.
“This type of school regulations is contrary to respect for individual freedom and human rights which are guaranteed by the Constitution”, told AFP Mr. Kusumoto, a lawyer who intends to launch a judicial arbitration procedure with the school and the municipality to obtain a revision of the regulations.
However, reforms are already under way in Tokyo, which recently announced that strict rules on matters such as “hair color will be abolished in public schools in the capital from April”.
+ The misfortunes of a high school girl +
Mr Kusumoto remembers being angered by certain regulations himself as a child and hopes his action will lead to deeper societal change, according to the newspaper.
As a reminder, this kind of regulations generally begin to apply from the start of college, around the age of 12.
They emerged following the 1970s, when “violence once morest teachers had become a social problem, with schools trying to control the situation through rules”, explains Takashi Otsu, professor of education at the Women’s University of Mukogawa (west) in Japan.
“Certain types of rules are necessary (…) but decisions should be made with transparency and, ideally, involving students, which would allow children to learn democratic decision-making,” he says.
+ “This regulation destroyed the life of a high school girl” +
In 2017, a Japanese high school student from Osaka County (west) who had been forced to dye her naturally brown hair black filed a lawsuit seeking damages of 2.2 million yen (17,000 euros) for suffering psychological, according to the same source.
This case caused a stir and led the Ministry of Education in 2021 to order boards of education to check whether school regulations were adapted to real life.
However, the court and then the Osaka Court of Appeal both ruled that schools might require their students to dye their hair black, for “various educational” purposes. “This settlement destroyed the life of a high school student,” her attorney said.
The young woman, now 22, did not give up and appealed last November to the Supreme Court.
+ “Children who no longer think” +
It should be noted that other actions have been launched, including a petition submitted in January to the Ministry of Education by the high school student branch of the advocacy organization Voice Up Japan, it asks the ministry to encourage schools to discuss the change in the rules with the participation of their students, according to the newspaper.
“We started this campaign because some of our members had unpleasant experiences with school regulations,” said Hatsune Sawada, 16, one of the high school girls behind the initiative.
And to add that: “The petition gives the example of a young girl regularly humiliated by a teacher because she had let her bangs grow which, once flattened with her hand, covered her eyebrows, which constituted a violation of the rules”.
In the city of Oita, public school students are also required to wear gender-varying uniforms, with pants for boys and skirts for girls, the newspaper added.
Source: journaldemontreal.com.
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