THE double suicide of a school headmaster and his deputy has plunged the Japanese education system into crisis and highlighted the disaffection of the county’s youth.

Rising levels of government intervention in education and attempts by teachers to resist it have been blamed for the deaths in Hiroshima of Kauhiro Keitoko, the headmaster, and Shokichi Yamaoka.

The two men voiced public objections to the compulsory raising of the national flag and singing of the national anthem in their school, both elements of a desperate effort by the Government to persuade the nation’s youth to believe once again in Japan Inc.

The deaths, along with underlying concerns over the education system, have prompted a series of emergency meetings between Education Ministry officials and Cabinet members to thrash out new Bills to be presented to the Diet after the summer.

The meetings, Cabinet sources said, focused on a drive to “win young people back to education”. The campaign has seemed necessary only recently in response to children “opting out” of a system that was once praised for producing the country’s economic miracle.

Rising truancy and bullying are among signs interpreted by teachers and the Government as evidence that the system is due for reform. Yet the direction of that reform has become controversial. The message that has reached Japan’s youth is that the authorities and the educators have run out of ideas.

“With every year that passes, I find it harder and harder to imagine becoming part of the same society as my parents,” Mei Ikuda, 15, a schoolgirl from a state school in central Tokyo, said. “We are being taught the same way they were, but then going out into a completely different world.”

So far the Government’s strategy has been to channel that blame through teachers and parents. Yoshiro Mori, the former Prime Minister, has blamed “leftist” educators for rising juvenile crime — part of a wider drive caused by a spate of violent youth crime and the murder of a four-year-old boy by another boy aged 12.

“Parents who have not been taught to be responsible for the State have grown up,” he said. “It is a matter of course that children brought up by them become bad.”

One of the main issues concerns patriotism and the renewed efforts to foster “proactive participation” in Japanese society.

After calls earlier this year by an Education Ministry panel for the first revision of 1947 Fundamental Law of Education, the bureaucracy is taking a more hands-on role in dictating the way in which schools are run. The ministry justified this by pointing out a “siege mentality” in schools. Teachers are strongly resisting the intervention and many have taken a stand.

Teachers in Fukuoka have refused to fill in the section of the report card where children are graded on their patriotism.

Teachers blame problems that the Government knows it cannot tackle properly — the ageing population and unemployment — for the disaffection of the young Japanese.

Takeo Suzuki, headmaster of Asahi Junior High School in Tokyo, said: “The so-called golden days of Japanese education — when people around the world admired our system — were all based on intense competition.

“Now look at the situation. In some parts of Japan, the number of children applying for the top high schools is 50 per cent what it was ten years ago because the young population is shrinking as the older population grows. The kids can afford to relax and they know it.”

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