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Traditionally, violent acts against children in Japan were considered private, isolated incidents largely outside the reach of government policy and legal action (Upham, 1989). Increasingly, however, public perception in Japan, mainly driven by the mass media, has shifted away from such complacency. A few well-publicized attacks on children have forced Mombusho (the Ministry of Education) to address the issue openly. This represents the beginning of a significant change in Japan, which long has considered itself to be an oasis of safety far removed from the dangers of the larger world.

In this article, we will document the incidents behind this shift in perception and examine how national policy has evolved in response to the growing sense of unease. We suggest that although the Ministry of Education, by its authority, is empowered to address such issues, it has not clarified its directives or provided sufficient funding for safety programs. As a result, communities and parents, mostly organized under the auspices of the local PTA, have been left with the bulk of the responsibility for securing the safety of their neighborhoods.

The Evolving Concept of School Safety

In Japan, children's safety, to the extent that it falls within the purview of the state, has long been considered the responsibility of local schools. Safety, in this regard, was considered primarily a matter of avoiding accidents and being prepared for natural disasters. In practice, this has meant that schools are charged with teaching children "the proper skills and attitudes for safe conduct" so that they "understand what causes accidents, discover where danger is concealed in the course of everyday life, . . . and develop the skills required for taking the appropriate course of action during accidents and disasters" (Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture, 1991).

Until the 1990s, any issue considered a threat to the safety of the entire school was delegated to the school's parent-run organization on traffic safety. This committee was not set up to deal with incidents of bullying, however, nor was it intended to respond in those rare instances when a person not connected with the school acted with intent to bother or harm school children, either en route to and from school, or within the school grounds. When a problem like bullying or violence did occur, the school's principal and teachers typically would deal with the problem first, consulting parents and parent groups (like the PTA) only if absolutely necessary (Henault Morrone, 1999).

In Japan, a problem may be openly ignored for years, until the Ministry of Education officially acknowledges an issue and creates some policy and directives to deal with it (Fujita, 1989). This reluctance to take action may be a characteristic of bureaucracies everywhere, but it is particularly endemic to Japanese bureaucracies. A long, laborious process of ministerial consensus-building often leaves schools to fend for themselves with little official guidance when a crisis occurs (Goodman & Phillips, 2003).

A case in point is the Kobe beheading that shocked the country in 1997, an incident in which a 14-year-old boy strangled an 11-year-old boy, decapitated him, and placed the head on the gate of the killer's junior high school the following morning. This was the murderer's protest against the bullying and oppression that he felt Japanese schools tacitly encouraged through their regimentation and intolerance of difference. After some debate within the Ministry of Education, officials labeled the incident a unique crime that should not be the basis for any nationwide school safety policies. Therefore, parents and PTA members throughout the country took it upon themselves to organize programs to ensure that children had adult supervision to and from school, at least until the initial sense of panic abated.

The considered response of the Ministry of Education to the Kobe case was a research report in support of the idea that the primary responsibility for the crime lay with the parents and society, not with the school system. Consequently, officials decided, safety concerns lay outside the Ministry's jurisdiction. Three months after the murder, then-education minister Takashi Kosugi asked the education council to find out what was wrong with Japan's children in general and to suggest how to educate their "hearts." The following year, the Ministry of Education released a report suggesting it was absent fathers who were to blame for the increase in psychotic behavior involved in cases like that in Kobe, suggesting that the fathers' devotion to work was undermining their traditional role as disciplinarians.

Incidents of School-Related Violence-A Look at the Record

After the Kobe incident, cases of violence by children and against children appeared with increasing frequency in media reports. Contrary to public perception, however, official statistics do not show a great increase in documented incidents of school violence during this period. Table 1 shows the number of victims of vicious crimes in Nagoya (N-City). N-City is one of the biggest cities in Japan, with a population of over two million people (293,000 under 15 years old). It is a growing area, consisting of both inner-city and newly created suburban areas, and includes a diversity of industries-financial, retail, and industrial-making it an ideal sample of contemporary Japanese society. According to the table, the number of victims has not been increasing significantly, although some people question the validity of the statistics and suggest they do not represent the actual number of cases, citing the tendency among school officials not to report cases officially.

In this era of increased public scrutiny, the Ministry of Education has been pushed to address the issue of violence and bullying against children. Table 2 documents the major crimes that have served as catalysts for Ministry action.

Changing Attitudes on the School Safety Issue

The turning point in the response to violence against children came with the Ikeda Elementary School attack of 2001 (see Table 2). A 37-year-old man with a history of mental illness walked into a school in Osaka and began stabbing schoolchildren. In the end, he killed eight children, wounding another 13. Most of the victims were only 6 or 7 years old. The horrific nature of the attack and the fact that the school is an elite institution attached to the Osaka University of Education attracted special attention to the case. Moreover, Ikeda School is directly run by the Ministry of Education, which ensures it special consideration, even under normal circumstances (Imazu et al., 2006). The Ikeda incident forced the Ministry to reconsider the issue of school safety.

Until this event, the Ministry of Education took a broad view of school safety, dividing it into three basic categories: 1) daily security, or seikatsu anzen (...), which covers general issues of student safety at school; 2) traffic safety, or kotsu anzen (...), which covers commuting and traffic safety within a school district; and 3) safety from natural disasters, or saigaianzen (...), which deals with natural disaster preparedness (Ishige, 2002; Kobayashi & Nagaoka, 1995).

Within only six months of the Ikeda incident, the Ministry of Education redefined the seikatsu anzen category to include the requirement that schools provide "daily security, in particular regarding the prevention of crimes such as murder at school and other places frequented by children" (Ministry of Education, 2001). This new definition has helped to shift the emphasis in school safety programs away from the traditional concerns of reducing accidents and responding to natural disasters and toward the prevention of the assault, kidnapping, and murder of children.

The Public/Private Divide

Now we will look more closely at how local schools, both private and public, are implementing the Ministry of Education's official guidelines for the creation of school safety programs. It should be noted that the safety policies discussed are mainly focused on elementary school-age children. There are, as yet, no official policy guidelines concerning preschools.

Public Schools. While the Ministry of Education has provided guidelines on school safety, it has not provided funding. Local school districts have had to respond creatively to the demand for greater protection for their children by calling on the assistance of the PTA and the local community. The owners of houses and shops along the route to school are encouraged to allow their places to be listed as designated safe havens for children during their commute. A placard is placed on the outside of a so-called "#110" residence so that children know it is safe to enter. (In Japan, #110 is the emergency number for calling the police.) To cite a typical case, I-School, an elementary school community of 220 students in N-City, began implementing the following measures in the spring of 2006:

1. Parents were asked to increase patrols to and from school.

2. All parents in the chonai (neighborhood organization) were given laminated cards with PATROL #110 written on them, to display on bicycle baskets whenever they were out on errands during the day.

3. The PTA and the chonai asked local police officers to stand on duty near the school during commuting times.

4. The PTA asked the chonai to recruit community members with free time, retirees mostly, to help escort the smallest children-1st- and 2nd-graders-home safely every day.

5. Special jackets and safety belts were issued to all the community members on patrol to dissuade potential attackers.

6. The local PTA, under the directive of the city PTA, organized an explanation session in which a policeman talked to the children about safety issues and what to avoid if someone dangerous approached.

7. All extracurricular activities at school became strictly monitored, again calling on community members like retirees to "be around" as the eyes of the community and requiring parents to pick up smaller children if they stayed in school past a certain time.

8. The crossing guard of the school (appointed by the city) was asked by the neighborhood to pay particular attention to straggling children and to insist that the children leave school in groups and stay in groups all the way home.

This safety program is typical of the kind of safety programs put into place in schools around the country in the wake of the Ikeda incident. The particular directives listed above came from the city PTA, under the guidance of the National PTA and the Education Ministry, but the responsibility for setting the program in motion lies with concerned parents in the community. Elderly members of the community also have been instrumental in maintaining the program (Nagoya City PTA Handbook on Safety, 2006).

Private Schools. Private schools in Japan have responded somewhat differently to the growing safety concerns. To these schools, parents are customers rather than local residents. In addition, the school is not tied to a local community, so asking for neighborhood volunteers is considered unreasonable. In lieu of relying on local volunteers, private schools utilize their own resources to create safety programs.

S-School, a private elementary school with 356 students in N-City, depends on private security guards and various safety devices for its school safety program. According to school safety guidelines published just four days after the Ikeda incident, S-School adopted the following safety measures:

1. A security guard is provided by a private security company from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. each day. The guard stands at the main gate when students come to school in the morning and go home in the afternoon. During school hours, the guard circulates within the school building and the gate remains locked.

2. Security alarms are placed in each classroom.

3. Security sensors are placed at all points where potential trespassers can enter the school grounds and buildings.

4. All visitors must sign in before entering the school and must be accompanied by a teacher or other school official throughout their stay.

In addition to these precautions, the school has students carry a security buzzer (bouhan bell), or asks that parents provide their children with a cell phone with GPS. The school even hosts promotions for security products offered by private security companies so that parents can further ensure the safety of their children. This you-get-what-you-pay-for ethos has given private schools an advantage in allaying the fears of parents, who are inclined to believe that their tuition payments somehow guarantee their children's safety.

As we have seen, public schools and private schools differ distinctly regarding their approaches to school safety (see Figure 1). The public schools depend on human resources from the local community, the establishment of safe havens, and the identification of dangerous areas. Private schools use economic resources to hire security guards, put up security cameras, and purchase various safety devices. Each type of school utilizes its resources, human and economic, to maximize school safety for its children. Although it is hard to say which approach is, in fact, more effective at ensuring child safety, a gap clearly exists between private and public schools in the financial resources they can bring to bear on the problem. This, in turn, has helped create the impression among many parents that private schools are safer - because they can afford to be.

Conclusion

The Ministry of Education was forced to confront the school safety issue following the Ikeda incident in 2001. However, its policy recommendations have tended to rely excessively on stopgap measures and community volunteerism. While the local efforts of volunteers have been lauded as a triumph of civic activism, they still remain temporary measures in the eyes of many of the volunteers, to be replaced at some point by long-term, nationally funded policies. Increasingly, local volunteers are expressing interest in relinquishing the burdens they have been volunteered for, as they believe that the schools and the Ministry are taking extended advantage of the crisis atmosphere surrounding the safety issue. To date, however, the Ministry of Education has made no serious efforts to overhaul the somewhat ad hoc security measures taken at the local level soon after the Ikeda incident and now in place for more than five years.

From the Ministry of Education's point of view, social ills can be solved by the return of the traditional family and the revival of traditional neighborhood values. This line of thinking tends to see almost all modern social trends-higher unemployment, the increase in the number of foreigners, the emergence of working mothers, the absent father phenomenon, lack of two-generation households, reduced curriculum standards, overindulged children, the breakdown of tightly connected neighborhoods-as threats to the traditional order and the starting point for such antisocial acts as violence against children. As a result, the Ministry's policies tend to rely heavily on suggestions for social renewal and reforms of the "heart," areas clearly outside its jurisdiction, while soft pedaling the specifics affecting its main charge-the public schools of Japan.

Although the Ministry of Education's current approach to the school safety issue has the advantage of costing the government next to nothing, it is slowly exhausting the activist energies and goodwill of the volunteers who make it work. At the same time, private schools have managed to open a perception gap between themselves and the local public schools. Increasingly, the public has come to regard private schools as safer, precisely because they have wellfunded security systems in place that do not rely on the vagaries of volunteerism.