The Ones Who Walk Away from Home Class
When I was in Hokkaido with my friend Mami in 2022, we visited an exhibition in the Sapporo Clock Tower, where we saw some 道徳 (doutoku) textbooks, sets of stories with accompanying discussion points used to teach ethical behaviour to Japanese primary school children. The stories almost always use schoolchildren as the protagonists, and put them in a position where they have a moral dilemma of some kind. You've accidentally cracked the glass in the tank that houses the class turtle - should you own up? That kind of thing.
Anyway, these books piqued my interest, and Mami was kind enough to send me a few afterwards, which I've been enjoying on and off ever since. I think what interested me was the slightly unfamiliar take on both the analysis of these child-sized dilemmas and what might count as a good solution to them.
Take this story, for example. It's about a boy whose classmate has been teased by another boy for his supposed resemblance to a monkey. At first, the teased boy seems to take it in good part, and even acts up by making monkey sounds, to his classmates' amusement. But when the protagonist tells his father about it, the father comments: "Are they really just teasing - isn't it more like bullying?"
Thus sensitized, the boy sees the same antics the next day through a different lens, and notices when the teased boy goes quiet and no longer cares to share in the joke. The ringleader continues regardless, however.
Our hero sits through several classes, wondering what would be the best thing to do. How can he stop the bullying? He has no authority to tell them to lay off, but neither can he sit back and watch this go on. Events come to a head when he is directly invited by the teaser-in-chief to join in, or at least to laugh. He finds he can do neither. Instead, he turns away silently and leaves the class, while everyone else looks on in shock.
As a result, the other boy is never teased again.
I don't say this is great literature, or even optimal ethics, but I do savour the difference from how the story would likely have played out in a Western setting, where some kind of confrontation, or at least a speech laying down the moral law in terms, would have been almost inevitable, I think.