Failing the Grade.(teachers as pedophiles in Japan)(Brief Article)

The crime itself was horrible. Last July a 12-year-old Japanese girl named Noriko Kamiie leapt from a moving car on an expressway in Kobe. Handcuffed and barefooted, she was run over by a truck and later bled to death from her wounds. Nearly as disturbing was the identity of the man driving the car--Ken Fukumoto, 34, a junior-high-school social- studies teacher who had met Noriko through a telephone "dating" service. (In November he pleaded guilty to confinement resulting in death.) "Anybody would have been unforgivable, but [the criminal] turned out to be the worst possible one," says Nobuyuki Iwatsuki, the principal at Noriko's school.

Japanese were similarly appalled by the idea that a teacher would apparently seek to rape a girl no older than his students. But what's really shocking is how commonplace sex-related crimes among the nation's teachers have become. In December Japan's Education Ministry revealed that in the last school year, 141 public-school teachers were punished for obscene behavior--nearly twice as many as two years earlier. Just in the last month, a high-school teacher in Kagoshima prefecture was arrested for "sexual contact" with a 16-year-old student, a Saitama teacher was charged with paying a 13-year-old girl $380 for sex, a Tokyo middle-school teacher was sentenced to a year in jail for groping a high-school student on a train and the Osaka education board fired a teacher who had planted a video camera in a girls' bathroom. "We used to call teaching a 'sacred profession,' but today who would?" asks Setsuko Tsuboi, a children's rights attorney in Tokyo.

Japanese schools have never been quite the sanctuaries of orderliness and calm that they seem from the outside. For years teachers have been accused of imposing excessive corporal punishment on their charges, while some students have driven others to suicide with their bullying and taunting. But the rise in the number of reported cases of sexual abuse and harassment is new and, many experts think, related to the increasing sexualization of schoolgirls in Japan. A standard story line in porn films and magazines, including hard-core manga comic books, involves the ravishing of innocent schoolgirls wearing miniskirts and droopy socks. Hostess bars offer up young women dressed in school uniforms, while a rash of breathless stories in the last decade about students' selling their bodies to pay for Chanel outfits has implanted the idea that Japanese schoolgirls are available for sex. Telephone "dating" services, ...