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News I Thought This Was a Thing of the Past

Mike Cash

骨も命も皆此の土地に埋めよう
15 Mar 2002
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I thought schools quit this ridiculous forcing Japanese kids to dye their black nonsense years and years and years ago. Apparently not.

学校側は生徒の代理人弁護士に「たとえ金髪の外国人留学生でも規則で黒染めさせることになる」と説明している。

How silly and uptight can you get?
 
色合いを数値化? 地毛証明書?! What on Earth... Placing a ban on green or purple hair is one thing, but this?

I'd suggest mandating colored contact lenses next. You know, to prevent foreign students from stirring up the school order with their freakish blue eyes.
 
Have you ever been in the hair dye section of a Japanese drug store and marvelled at the rich selection of indistinguishable gradations of black on sale?
 
How silly and uptight can you get?
The rules are the rules, because the rules are the rules, Mike. Do you not know how to Japan?

This stuff shouldn't be any surprise. Schools were always designed to be robot factories (especially so in Japan). So if they are primarily concerned with imposing order, what relevance does "help students reach their full potential" have to do with anything? That's not order. That's individual flourishing. And individualism to a robot factory means "defect".

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Have you ever been in the hair dye section of a Japanese drug store and marvelled at the rich selection of indistinguishable gradations of black on sale?

I have. Makes me wonder what they would think of a similar section here in the states at any local Walmart.
 
Even 12 years ago when I left a teaching job in a private HS in Sapporo, they conducted occasional inspections of boys' and girls' hair. However, certain students were known to have naturally non-black hair, and they were not reprimanded. The others were told to dye their hair back to normal. Case closed.

What I find disturbing about this news story is that the entire school seems to be in on it.
A school representative allegedly told the girl's attorney, "Even if we had a blond foreign exchange student, we would force them to dye their hair black."
Unbelievable! Would this be "yellow nationalists"?
 
I love the "similar threads" pinned to the bottom of this:
"The N.Korea thing"
"Communism... Thoughts?"
"Air Force Serviceman Punches 13 yr Old Boy.... Thoughts?"
"Japan, & "Thought Control"?
 
That was in 2007. Nothing has changed.

Because it would take rebels and visionaries to change it; and they've all been neutered real early by BS like the hair police. Perhaps that's why Japan was such an explosive powerhouse of industry, culture and innovation after the war: the existing hold-you-down power structures had been annihilated, so Akio Morita & Toyoda & crew were unshackled to produce their Walkmans and dominate automotive production etc.

That's why I think opinionated foreigners can actually be useful to the Japanese. Not the grumblers like Debito, but the visionary types. A foreigner can point out stupidity and appeal to reason and a vision for the future much better than a Japanese (since they're all afraid to say something out of place); then all the Japanese can group-reassure-grumble "ohh... that foreigner is behaving strange isn't he...", but at least the idea has been planted in all of their heads. An effective technique on this front is not to say "we (foreigners) do it like this", but to refer back to Japanese from previous decades (e.g. "did Masayoshi Son do as he was told to reach the heights that he did?"); then they can't weasel out of it by saying "that doesn't apply to Japan".
 
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