The Language Teacher
October 2001
Stress, Disempowerment, Bullying, and School Non-attendance: a Hypothesis
Yoneyama Shoko
Adelaide University
Peer victimisation (ijime) and school non-atten-dance (futoko) are the two most prevalent student-related problems in Japanese education. Although there is a general understanding that being bullied at school can be the reason for students to stop going to school, ijime and futoko are usually regarded as separate issues, and the relationship between them has not been fully explored. At the same time, it is widely understood that both ijime and futoko are to do with the high stress level among students, and that futoko students often suffer from physiological symptoms and impairment of health. How exactly all these phenomena are related, however, has never been clarified. Moreover, there is a question as to whether the social structure and climate of school might not somehow be connected to these problems among Japanese students.
This paper presents a hypothesis about the relationship among these phenomena -- the social structure of school, stress, ijime, futoko, and impairment of heath -- by introducing "control" (or lack of it) as the key concept cutting across all these areas and issues. The word control is used, first, sociologically as in social control, which may lead to the disempowerment of individuals. In the field of psychology, disempowerment is the same as an individual's lack of control, and sense of control is used to mean the ability to take action and/or interact with the situation, that is, a sense of empowerment.
In order to explain the interrelatedness of the above phenomena, three kinds of literature are drawn upon: (a) existing literature in Japanese which touches upon the relationship between ijime and futoko, (b) empirical studies in English which focus on the relationship between peer victimisation and physiological health; and (c) literature which explores body-mind interaction, or more specifically, how stress affects physiological health.
The lack of sense of control among Japanese students
A comparative study of students' perceptions of secondary schools in Japan and Australia (Yoneyama, 1999) has shown that Japanese schools are characterised by authoritarian teacher-student relationships, teacher-centred pedagogy, unimaginative curricula, a positivistic and instrumental view of knowledge, and pervasive rules and regulations. Each of these institutional aspects contributes to a hidden curriculum in Japanese education: namely, to silence students. This makes school an alienating place for students, where they are generally disempowered and have little sense of control as individuals. It is likely that school is a source of stress for many students in Japan.
Sense of control as the key to understanding stress
In the field of psychology, stress studies show that a sense of control is the key to determining the nature of stress. To put it simply, there are three kinds of stress experiences. In normal stressful situations, as in daily hassles, where a person feels stressed but makes an effort to overcome the situation, two main stress hormones, catecholamine and cortisol, work in harmony, to generate energy to meet the demand (i.e., fight or flight), and to unwind when the situation is over (see e.g., Selye, 1956; Cox, 1978). When a person undergoes only positive emotions (e.g., a sense of challenge) in the face of a potentially stressful situation that requires effort or action, it leads to an increase of catecholamine and suppression of cortisol. This is the experience of eustress (i.e., good stress). However, when a person is unable to take action to change the situation, s/he experiences distress (i.e. bad stress), which is associated with an increase in cortisol secretion but not in catecholamine (Frankenhauer, 1981).
In other words, the sense of power plays a crucial role in determining the nature of stress experience, which is explained by different workings of stress hormones. More recent studies show that having little control over work, when workload is high, can lead to high cortisol levels (Fox, Dwyer & Ganster, 1993); and that "exposure to uncontrollable stress has specific neurochemical and neuroendocrine consequences that include central catecholamine depletion" (Kaye, Morton, Bowcutt & Maupin, 2000), which causes the mood of depression and a lack of energy and spirit (Miike & Tomoda ,1994).
To put it simply, secretion of catecholamine is like a source of energy, spirit and resilience. Stress studies suggest that when a person is exposed to a situation where they are deprived of the sense of power and control for a long time, the level of cortisol is kept high, which in turn suppresses catecholamine. In this situation, the person experiences lack of energy and spirit.
Reason One for Futoko: Lack of Energy
Apathy or spiritlessness (mukiryoku) and lassitude (kentaikan) were found to be some of the most common reasons for students' "being fed up with school" (gakko ni ikuno ga iya ni natta) in the 1988 study by Morita (1991). The study found that over 70 percent of some 6,000 junior high school students surveyed had the experience of "being fed up with school" in the preceding year. "Being sleepy and tired" was experienced by about three out of four students who had experienced futoko in the broadest sense, including being late to school, being absent from school, or leaving school early because they did not want to be at school (Morita, 1991, p. 149). Furthermore, it was found that lassitude and lack of energy affected all the other reasons for not attending school (Morita, 1991), suggesting that they exist as the precondition for futoko irrespective of what actually triggers it. While there could be many reasons for students to be spiritless and tired, it is possible that these conditions are indicative of low catecholamine and high cortisol levels. This, in turn, could be the result of having much stress but little sense of control at school.
Reason Two for Futoko: Ijime
In the Morita study, the most important factor explaining students' being fed up with school was "friendship anxiety factor," consisting of not "getting along with friends," "being bullied by friends," "being scared of or anxious about school," and "something very upsetting (shokku na koto) happened to me" (Morita, 1991, p. 170-2). Among the students who had some futoko experience, about one in four mentioned not getting along with friends as the reason for being disenchanted with school (Morita, 1991, p. 151). Of the students who had missed school because they were scared of it, over 70 percent were the victims of ijime (Morita, 1991, pp. 155-6). Moreover, the reason for not going to school, "something very upsetting happened," strongly correlated with "friendship anxiety factor," suggesting that the upsetting incidents often occur in the area of peer relations.
The relationship between the general lack of energy, ijime and futoko suggested by Morita's study is well illustrated by the following account from 14 year-old Tomoko Kanbe:
I myself do not know why I stopped going to school I was a good docile child both at home and outside home. Unable to be myself anywhere made me feel very tired...While everyday I felt so tired, my classmates began to bully me a little. Although it was an insignificant ijime, it gave me a great shock, and I stopped going to school the very next day. I felt as if everything suppressed inside me was unleashedFirst, I thought that my tokokyohi [i.e. futoko] was caused by ijime, but in retrospect, it was just triggered by it (Ishikawa, N., Uchida, R. & Yamashita, E. 1992, p. 441).
Needing to bully: restoring a sense of control and recharging catecholamine?
Why, then, do students bully others? One of the most common reasons given by students is simply that it is fun and possibly the only fun they have at school (Tsuchiya et al., 1995, p. 195). At the same time, a sense of "needing to bully someone" is often mentioned. Another 14 year-old girl explained:
[w]e do not feel better or refreshed, until we do something nasty to someone who is sick [mukatsuku]. The more we do something that annoys the person, the more we feel cleansed in our hearts [kokoro]. Whatever people say, this is our real motive (Tsuchiya et al., 1995, p. 190).
How does the "needing to bully someone" arise? Fifteen year-old Uchida Yoko, who returned to junior high school after two years of futoko explained:
Frankly, when you go to schoolyou project your stress at others who are weaker than yourself. This is quite obvious in school...After my long absence from school I could no longer follow this method... I was really shocked to see the horrific way my friends bullied someone. But now I suppose it is natural for them to become like that when they go to school everyday. If you do not abuse others and release your stress, you yourself get squashed (Ishikawa, Uchida & Yamashita, 1993, p. 488).
She points out that ijime is the only stress-coping mode readily available to students. Why is it then that bullying someone helps release stress? It could be because for some students only ijime can provide the sense of power and control in the school environment, as Ohtorii Yuko, a 16-year-old futoko student, explained:
I have bullied someone... I did not enjoy bullying. I just felt relieved by watching someone being bullied and suffer. My action creates a response -- this is such a matter of course. Yet I could confirm it only by bullying someone and by watching the victim suffer. In the place called school, which is put in a rigid framework, ijime might have been the only thing we could create (Ohtorii, 1995).
There are many factors contributing ijime in Japanese schools (Yoneyama, 1999, p.157-85). As far as students are concerned, however, it is likely that ijime is one of the few expressions of power they have in the social environment of school which otherwise curtails their sense of power. In such an environment, it seems that students often feel the need to bully someone to restore their sense of power and to release stress, which in turn is felt to be fun.
Naito (1999) argues that ijime is a quest for the ephemeral feeling of omnipotence by students who are engulfed by the sense of void (ketsujyo), which threatens their very existence. This sense of void causes indefinable irritation, anger, restlessness and or chronic apathy (Naito, 1999). However one defines it, ijime seems to be adopted by some students as a stress-coping strategy and means of empowerment. In light of the information on hormonal reactions in stressful conditions, it is more than possible that the need to bully someone stems from the fact that it provides limited opportunities to release catecholamine in a physiological environment where it has been depleted while cortisol has become predominant.
Ijime victimisation and futoko: pushed into a cortisol cul-de-sac?
Just as ijime can function to supplement the bully's sense of control, it can completely deprive the victims of it. Ijime usually makes victims feel totally powerless for two reasons. First, ijime is usually committed by a group of students, supported or approved either actively or tacitly by others, and left uncontested by the rest of the class (Morita & Kiyonaga, 1994). Second, for many students, peer relationships are the only area that can constitute a school life not directly dictated by teachers. To be the ijime victim means to lose what little is left of a breathing space in the generally stifling institutional environment of school.1 According to Miike & Tomoda (1994) catecholamine depletion is the underlying factor cutting across all the symptoms experienced by the futoko students they examined. This finding, together with the accounts given by students themselves, suggests that to many students futoko signifies a state of burnout which follows the long period of pushing oneself hard, whether it be academically, behaviourally, physically, or in relation to their peers and/or teachers (Yoneyama, 2000).
The teacher factor
Not all futoko students are the victims of ijime. Still, it would be safe to assume that the majority of them are exposed to the social environment where ijime is part of everyday life. Additionally, it is possible that, in the eyes of students, there is an overlap between their experience of peer bullying on the one hand, and that of teacher-student relationships, on the other. Students seemingly do not hesitate to apply the concept of ijime to what teachers do to them (Yoneyama, 1999). A second-year junior high school student wrote:
When students do not go to school, I think it is because there are things like ijime. But ijime is not just by students. Things like being ignored or being picked on by a teacher are also ijime. I want teachers to be mindful about it (Takekawa, 1993, p.173).
It should be noted that the third factor explaining futoko in Morita's study (1991, p. 169) was "the teacher factor," which consisted of "not getting along with teachers" and "being scolded by teachers a lot." Moreover, according to Morita, when "teacher factor" is the reason for futoko, it tends to develop into long-term school non-attendance (1991, p. 167).
Ijime victimisation, damage to health and futoko
If the physiological account presented in this paper provides a connection between ijime and futoko, it is not surprising that students are not always aware of why they one day become unable to go to school. While some students in Japan stop attending school to avoid being bullied, others, contrary to their wish and intention to go to school, are prevented from going by physiological causes (Yoneyama, 1999, pp. 186-241). Outside of Japan, empirical studies have shown that bully victimisation impairs not only mental but also physical health of primary school children (Williams, Chambers, Logan & Robinson, 1996) as well as secondary school students (Rigby, 1999). It has also been pointed out that physiological symptoms are the result of bullying, rather than the cause of bullying (Kochenderfer & Ladd, 1996). When applied to Japan, these studies suggest that there is possibly a stronger causal link between ijime and futoko than is commonly understood, or indicated by students themselves.
Conclusion
This paper has attempted to explain the link between ijime and futoko by integrating literature in fields that normally remain separate. A lack of control was employed as the key concept weaving through ijime and futoko, peer victimization and physiological health, and stress. While this paper does not directly deal with meritocracy, it is the role meritocracy plays in school that binds the majority of students to the alienating and stressful aspects of school. What has been discussed here, then, can be interpreted as another aspect of the meritocracy, and the aspect may be summarised as being pathological.
The hypothesis presented here may also be expanded and consolidated by incorporating the effect of stress in nervous and immune systems, as well as endocrine systems. Likewise, although this paper has focused on student related issues, the same perspective can be adopted to investigate the health and illness concerns of teachers. Plainly, it will be difficult to change the social structures of school without changing teacher-to-teacher relationships, or the larger administrative and social structure that define them. It is hoped that many more studies conducted in multicultural, multilinguistic and multi-disciplinary environments will help to solve many of the school-related problems in Japan, which are damaging the health of students and teachers alike.
References
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1 In reality students have often internalised institutional values and behavioural patterns learned in schools. They themselves function, often without being aware of them, to enhance school norms. Thus, ijime can be seen as the school-floor peer surveillance system (see Yoneyama, 1999,169-70).
Yoneyama Shoko is Senior Lecturer in Asian Studies at Adelaide University, Australia, and the author of The Japanese High School: Silence and Resistance (1999). Her research interests also include the sociology of food, development and the environment. She can be contacted by e-mail at shoko.yoneyama@adelaide.edu.au
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