Dear Diary Boy by Kumiko Makihara

Author:Kumiko Makihara
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781628728927
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2018-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

The mothers were polite, but no pushovers. They were fiercely protective when it came to the standards of their children’s education. Taro’s homeroom teacher from the third through sixth grade, Harada Sensei, was a novice, straight out of graduate school. Many mothers were suspicious of his competence. When Harada Sensei was directing a class play, one mother offered during a parent-teacher meeting, “You are new and might not be familiar with the plays. Please let us know when you want us to help you.”

In essence, “Just hand the stage over to us.” Later, a group of mothers of children in his math class confronted him about his teaching methods.

“Do you like math?” a mother who was a scientist asked. She spoke politely, using appropriate honorifics, but the connotation was sarcastic and condescending. More like, “Do you even like math?”

Teaching has traditionally been a revered and well-paid profession in Japan with its mission extending beyond just academics to include a shaping of the student as a whole. While the practice is declining, teachers used to visit families in their homes to check on their pupils’ after-school environments. Like his classmates, Taro always sent a postcard to his homeroom teacher during summer break to report on his activities, and he always received a reply. But the dynamics of the respectful relationship between parents and teachers is changing. Some hovering and over-protective helicopter parents, dubbed “monster parents” in Japan, harangue schools with demands such as to change a report card grade, to take sides in playground fights, or to come up with a better yearbook photo. Typically, the parents phone the teachers at school to voice their complaints, but in more extreme cases, they can harass teachers at their homes or file lawsuits against them. Nearly half of Tokyo public school teachers now take out liability insurance policies designed for protection against such circumstances.21

The phrase “monster parent” gained instant notoriety in 2002 after the director of a day care center in Saitama Prefecture, just north of Tokyo, set herself aflame on the property’s playground. She left a note that linked her suicide to the constant complaints she had received from the parents of a boy who had scraped himself in an altercation with another boy at the center. A government survey showed that cases of sick leave due to mental illnesses of public elementary and junior high school teachers tripled in ten years from 1989.22 And dealing with parents was cited as among the top reasons of stress for principals in a separate survey.23

I wouldn’t categorize any of the school moms I knew as monsters. But the feeling at the school was that some parents were extreme enough to fit the bill. At one school-wide PTA meeting the principal went over the teachers’ daily schedules, explaining that their duties included, in addition to teaching class, their own meetings and research projects, work on various committees, and supervision of student club activities. Japanese teachers work long hours, often twelve hours a day.24

“I am not asking you to hold back from discussing issues with us,” the principal said.

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