Bullying 02 Suicide 05

Male member of cheerleading squad at Meiji University (one of the highly rated private universities around Tokyo) among other members beaten by senior students… kills self.

More sad news. Why do they have to beat people? I also think it should be easier for these kids to quit clubs. They get advised to stick it out…

There is an old word in Japanese – keiko. The word means training, but it implies a kind of hard hard training. This word becomes the excuse for violence during training sometimes, as with the case of the 17 year old Sumo apprentice who was killed during what his trainers claimed was keiko, but what courts finally determined was just plain old violence. I’ll discuss the story in my next blog entry, but hey… how can hitting a 17 year old kid over the head with a beer bottle be considered “training”?