[The quality and elan of primary and secondary education have long been regarded as among the achievements of postwar Japan. Journalist Hiratate Hideaki uses the window of increasing teacher suicides to probe recent changes in education that have placed many of Japan’s finest teachers on a collision course with their principles, supervisors, and ultimately the Japanese state. The author shows how a combination of the new nationalism, neo-liberal criteria for teacher assessment, and increased demands on teachers have brought about a situation in which large numbers of teachers are succumbing to mental illness, committing suicide, or taking early retirement. These articles appeared in the July 4 and August 29, 2003 issues of Shukan Kinyobi.]
Part 1: Why Are Teacher Suicides Increasing?
“Yumiko, I’m sorry. I’m a bit tired from work at school.”
It was on January 24, 1983 that Kikuchi Akinori, then 29, a teacher at Heita Elementary School in Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture, left his wife this note and took his own life.
This was the day he was to deliver the final draft of the teaching plan for an open session of a class in moral education that was scheduled for February 4. But when Akinori left his home that morning he did not head for school, but instead went missing. Two weeks after his disappearance, on February 6, he was founded hanging by the neck in a mountain forest in a neighboring town.
In 1987, his wife Yumiko, now 52, filed an application with the prefectural branch of the public employee accident compensation fund to have his death recognized as a work-related accident. She maintained that the cause of the suicide was Akinori’s forced participation in the public moral education class, which violated his educational philosophy, and that he suffered from “reactive depression” due to an excessive workload.
However, the following year the death was ruled nonwork-related, and requests for the branch office of the fund to reexamine the case were rejected. Then in 1992, Yumiko filed suit in the Morioka District Court to overturn the nonwork-related determination. This administrative case represented the first time that the courts would rule on whether or not a teacher’s suicide from overwork constituted a work-related accident.
Distress over the Open Moral Education Class
Akinori was assigned to Heita Elementary School in April 1982. It was his seventh year of teaching and the first time he had been given a first grade class to teach.
Heita Elementary School had been designated a trial school for moral education by the city board of education, and open sessions of the moral education class had been held during the 1980 and 1981 school years. The principal at the time placed a great deal of importance on moral education and decided on his own initiative to hold open sessions again during the 1982 school year. The session scheduled for February 4, 1983 had been assigned to Akinori.
What distressed Akinori was the approach used in the moral education class. This had been dubbed the “Heita method” and involved dividing the class into groups of “good,” “bad,” and “normal” children, and then conducting the class with children from each of the groups. Akinori had serious doubts about this discriminatory approach. However, the evaluation of the school depended on the success of the public sessions. Under this psychological pressure, Akinori had begun to suffer headaches and low-grade fevers in the first term of the year.
During the second term, in addition to a daily workload that exceeded eight hours without a break, there were preparations for the school excursion and class performances. On top of this, there were 26 meetings of an in-school study group to prepare for the open sessions, and Akinori led study classes in Japanese and moral education in November. Beginning around this time, he was often up past one in the morning preparing teaching materials, and he was unable to get sufficient sleep. His appetite diminished and his weight fell from 57 kilos (125 pounds) to 52 (114). Yumiko encouraged him to see a doctor but he refused, saying that everything “would have to wait until after the moral education class.” He began to show his agony over the class, saying, “Dividing [children] into superior, average, and inferior is something I can’t do.” When asked about the opening ceremony for the beginning of the third term [in January], he responded with a dull “What?”
Two days before he disappeared, on Saturday, January 22, Akinori had been ordered by the principal to revise his teaching plan. Afterwards he was observed by a colleague, standing alone on a landing of the school stairs. Then on Monday the 24th, carrying the teaching plan he had polished the day before, he disappeared.
Despite the fact that Akinori was missing, the open session took place as planned on February 4, with another teacher in the lead. It is easy to imagine, given the coldness of the school’s response, that their sole purpose was to successfully carry off the public class.
In 2001, the district court determined that Akinori’s death was work-related on the grounds that he “had been assigned duties against his wishes” and that “he suffered depression and committed suicide as a result of an excessive workload.” It was a victory for Yumiko, and an epoch-making decision that recognized the qualitative side of teaching as a profession.
However, in December of 2002, the Sendai High Court overturned the lower court decision. “Teaching plans for moral education classes had been developed even by inexperienced teachers, and this burden was not just placed on Akinori,” the court reasoned, applying the “collegial standard.” One wonders if the heavy responsibility of a teacher in forming children’s character or a teacher’s internal anguish is something that can be measured by a collegial standard.
Last year, nineteen years after Akinori’s death, a male junior high-school teacher in his 30s hanged himself in the same city of Kamaishi. He had been diagnosed with anxiety depression. Psychological disorders among teachers have gotten progressively more serious.
Victims of Managed Education
According to statistics released by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, and Culture, the number of teachers on temporary leave for psychological disorders has more than doubled in the last decade–from 1,017 in 1990 to 2,503 in 2001, which represents an increase from 27 percent to 48 percent of all medical leaves.
Meanwhile, since the total number of employed teachers decreased by more than 70,000 over the same decade, the percentage of teachers taking medical leave for psychological reasons has increased even more dramatically (from 0.10 percent to 0.27 percent of the total teacher workforce).
Ota Hiroyuki (a pseudonym for a teacher in his 50s) developed depression soon after being appointed senior teacher [an administrative position] at a junior high school. During his years as a teacher, he had never been depressed, even when his ribs were broken as a result of student violence. Dealing directly with children had always buoyed his spirit.
Ota was a dedicated teacher and, with the encouragement of his principal, he decided to pursue an administrative position. However, in his training prior to his appointment as senior teacher, he was drilled in the proper administrative frame of mind, which included directing teachers to display the national flag and require the singing of the national anthem, and putting an end to teachers’ at-home training [a practice whereby secondary school teachers are allowed stay-at-home days to conduct individual research or study]. Ota sensed a wide gap between these directives and his own philosophy of education. As an individual educator, these demands from the administration were the very things he had always had a hard time accepting.
Having assumed the position of senior teacher, Ota no longer had direct contact with students. The senior teacher’s job was to take care of all the complicated tasks that were not covered by other job assignments in the administration. He found himself swamped with work, even on weekends, negotiating with the PTA and the district and taking care of office work that had little to do with education. He rarely got a day off.
The anguish he felt increased when, with the introduction of a merit-rating system, he was required to rank the teachers on the school’s staff. He was increasingly unable to sleep and began taking tranquilizers.
According to Ota, “I didn’t know how I could divide the teachers [according to their performance]. I hadn’t actually seen the teachers at work, so it would be just an impressionistic evaluation. It was painful to think that [because of my evaluation] a good teacher could be destroyed.”
About two years after assuming his post, Ota became psychologically stressed and began to suspect that he suffered from depression. He lost interest in things, and his smile disappeared. He had no difficulty with mechanical paperwork, but he was entirely unable to perform tasks like writing. He became unable to think. Finally everything he saw began to appear sepia-colored.
He was diagnosed with depression and hospitalized, which only increased his suffering. He began to think, “[It’s my fault] that the burden on the principal has increased. It’s my responsibility if I collapse.” He fell into a state of distraction with anxiety and impatience about returning to work. It took an entire year before he recovered. Today, Ota has been allowed to step down from his administrative position and to return to the classroom as a teacher.
“[Having returned to the classroom,] I feel the pleasure of teaching. Without freedom and responsibility, you can’t have good education. But nowadays, everything is supervised . . .” The words of Ota, a man who has struggled with managed education.
With managed education, which robs teachers of their discretion, free education is not remotely possible. This kind of workplace environment is a breeding ground for depression.
Teachers Face Serious Health Problems
“It is a big mistake to label teachers who are on leave [for psychological disorders] as unqualified. Teachers have a strong orientation toward model behavior; they think, ‘If I try hard, I’ll manage.’ [Nearly all of the teachers who come for treatment] think only of the children. They are trusted by the students and their parents. Lazy teachers don’t get sick.”
These are the words of Nyu Seiji, a doctor at Oita Kyowa Hospital who is knowledgeable about psychological disorders among teachers. According to Dr. Nyu, most of these dedicated teachers suffer from chronic fatigue. That they try to accomplish the physically impossible is not unrelated to an educational system that encourages their exertion. This is the context that results in the most serious and sensible teachers developing psychological problems.
For example, it is not at all unusual for a doctor to prescribe complete rest and tell a teacher, “I’ll write you a medical report,” only to be told, “I can’t rest until I’ve finished my report cards.” In the end, the teacher collapses and has to be hospitalized. These teachers have fallen into a desensitized state, where they are unable to recognize their own exhaustion.
Consequently, treatment also takes longer for teachers. Complete recovery in six months is considered fast, and some take as long as two years. Patients hospitalized with severe cases will, under medication, sleep fifteen hours a day for a month. This is an indication of how much their fatigue has accumulated. Dr. Nyu works at getting the patients to recognize the limits of their physical strength and to develop “the courage to rest when they’re in pain.”
Behind the spread of chronic fatigue among teachers is the problem of increased workloads. The introduction of the five-day school week last year has meant that work that was accomplished in six days must now be taken care of in five, resulting in the congestion of the class schedule. During the hours children are at school, there are effectively no breaks or rest periods. Teachers are on their feet all day, in some cases unable even to get a drink of water between classes. Paper work, meetings, and planning sessions are concentrated in the hours after school, so the job doesn’t end during work hours. As a consequence, the preparation of handouts and grading of papers have to be done at home, and the long hours of work become an everyday matter. Saturday and Sunday are filled with preparing teaching plans and materials for the following week.
According to a survey conducted in October 2002 by the Japan Teachers Union (Nikkyoso), teachers averaged ten hours a week of service outside of regular work hours (not including compensated extra duty for such things as school events), and an additional nine hours of catch-up work at home. Further, 74.4 percent of teachers responded that they were unable to rest during their break time.
Teachers are also unable to obtain sufficient sleep. In an All Japan Teachers and Staff Union (Zenkyo) survey, teachers average six hours, eleven minutes of sleep a night, with about 40 percent reporting less than six hours. In addition, more than 80 percent reported feeling “anxiety, distress, or stress” about their work.
As a result of lack of sleep, there are many accidents such as slipping on the stairs at school and breaking bones. And the reality is that, when teachers’ fatigue accumulates they are unable to take time off because of the shortage of substitute teachers. Given this state of affairs, increasing numbers of teachers now retire before retirement age because they reach their physical and psychological limits. The Zenkyo survey reported that 53 percent of teachers think about quitting sometimes or often; the most commonly cited reasons were “I am too busy with work” and “I can’t take it physically.”
One elementary school teacher (a man in his 50s) reported, “There have been teachers who collapsed in the classroom or in the toilet at school. Last year, among only people I know, four teachers died. It strikes very close to home.” In the ZenkyOo survey, some 58 percent of teachers reported feeling anxiety about death from overwork.
A work environment that robs teachers of healthy body and spirit is abnormal. The fact that teachers are worked as if they were pack horses gives us a glimpse of the intentions of a country that wants to have its own way with education.
* * *
Last December, Kikuchi Yumiko appealed, moving the stage for the suit over Akinori’s accident compensation to the Supreme Court. “I don’t want anyone else to suffer what we have gone through as a family,” comments Yumiko, who is herself an active-duty teacher.
The history of the recognition of workers’ accidents is, at the same time, the history of many victims. In the effort to sound a warning over the severe working environment that teachers are placed in, Akinori’s death must not be in vain.
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