Japanese Schools Court Controversy with Draconian Hair Regulations

Japanese Schools Court Controversy with Draconian Hair Regulations

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How school regulations regarding students' hair harm those whose natural appearance doesn't fit the mold, including foreign and biracial kids.

It was summer of 2006 in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture. The cicadas blared their telltale whine across the city; steam rose off the streets near Dogo Shopping Arcade, obscuring the hilltop castle that looms over the city center. To the east of the downtown area, I walked the halls of Matsuyama Higashi High School. As an exchange student, I was being given a brief tour of the school; its grey concrete structure, dusty grounds, and surrounding green foliage looked much like those of any school in the country.

(In reality, the school’s history is anything from ordinary. Matsuyama Higashi was the setting for one of the most famous novels in the Japanese canon, Soseki Natsume’s Botchan. Soseki taught at the school for a year in 1895; other famous teachers or pupils include director Itami Juzo, haiku master Masaoka Shiki, and author Oe Kenzaburo.)

The tour ended and I sat down in a small office room with a kindly school representative besides my host mother, Kanako. After explaining some of the daily schedule I’d adhere to while at the school, the representative suddenly sucked in her breath and put on a concerned face. Looking me over, she said, almost regretfully, “there’s the issue of your hair.”

I can’t say I didn’t expect the topic to come up. During high school, I’d grown my naturally curly hair to impressive lengths; brown ringlets cascaded down past my shoulder. This affectation was perfectly acceptable at my school back in Minnesota; in Japan, however, I knew things were different. Kosuku (校則), strictly enforced regulations governing the personal appearance of students, meant that, among other things, male students were disallowed long hair. I’d worried that my dream stint as a Japanese high-schooler might come at the cost of my trademark look.

I needn’t have fretted; in my (markedly temporary) case, some wiggle room was granted to the otherwise strict regulations. Just as I was allowed to wear a simple store-bought white shirt and navy pants rather than the expensive school uniform of my peers, my hair could remain long. There was only one proviso; I’d have to keep my hair elevated in a ponytail. With stray ringlets now falling past my ears, the result was to make me look like some sort of long-lost Jane Austen heroine.

I spent the next few months with my hair as one of my main “exotic” attractions to fellow students, who enjoyed pulling on my curls and seeing them elastically bounce back. In a sea of standardized hair cuts and colors, I alone was allowed to stand out. Of course, this was only because of my transient nature at the school. In order to fulfill my brief purpose as a foreign enculturating force, I was given some leeway; leeway that other students, even those who might possess naturally curly or brown hair, would not have been allowed.

The author with classmates during his 2006 exchange – demonstrating a hairstyle uthinkable for full-time students.

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Hair-Raising Rules

In truth, I was merely brushing up against the controversial school regulations which in recent years have scandalized the media and resulted in major lawsuits. Schools often dictate even minute aspects of physical appearance: what clothing their pupils can wear, if they’re allowed to pluck their eyebrows, how long their socks can be. Unsurprisingly, makeup, piercings, nail polish, and tattoos (still very taboo in Japan, despite local histories of tattooing traditions) are banned. Many schools even ban layered haircuts on female students. Some even engage in underwear color checks.

Current controversies go beyond issues of personal choice in appearance. These include the forced dying of students’ naturally non-black hair, requiring children to provide documentation proving natural hair color, and even photoshopping biracial pupils’ hair black in school yearbooks.

Interestingly, the recent round of discussion regarding the negatives of school regulations is far from the first; nor are the regulations themselves as old a tradition as we might imagine, having mostly been implemented in the 70s and 80s. But with minority communities in Japan becoming more visible, the discussion – once based around the perceived constitutionality of regulating personal appearance – has shifted. Ideas of an applicable Japanese “standard” now more obviously fail to account for those who cannot so easily fit, including the international and biracial children who call Japan home.

Japanese high school students sporting regulated haircuts and school uniforms.

Regulation Nation

Japan as a whole is often seen as a well-regimented machine, its education system designed to output standardized citizens who can fit easily into a homogenized society. In many ways, this is indeed the purpose of the modern education system. Too much individuality is worrisome, since gaining employment is so often tied to presenting as malleable and being an unobtrusive, self-sacrificing team player. This is why, after a few years of relative freedom during university, job-seekers taking part in shushoku katsudo (就職活動, mass job hunting, usually during junior and senior year of college) don matching navy suits and dye any previously colored hair back to black.

Teachers want the best for their students; if leading a life perceived as successful requires blending in, then teachers will attempt to make sure that’s what students do. However, the actual history of school appearance regulations goes beyond mere “nail that sticks out gets hammered down” mentality.

The Crackdown

Strict, military-style regulations were present in the schools of the Empire of Japan (1868-1947). However, the US Occupation government completely rehauled the school system following WWII. Education was to be the domain of all citizens. High school attendance soared from 42.5% in 1950 to 91.9% by 1975. Primacy was placed on ideas of fostering individuality and a democratic spirit; strictly regulating student’s lives and appearances would have flown in the face of this new paradigm. Students and faculty were often so invested in ideas of individual rights that the 1960s saw mass protests and school sit-ins when educational reforms seemed to be targeting the democratic atmosphere of Japanese schools.

The student protests of the 60s and 70s gave way to less ideological school violence in the late 70s. With the economy and quality-of-life skyrocketing, educational competition became ever more fierce. Stressors on students to do well on entrance exam tests, or be doomed to a life of perceived drudgery, greatly impacted attitudes and mental health. Students, feeling confined or directionless, lashed out at classmates and teachers alike. With a new culture of student gangs emerging, school began to be seen as a dangerous place; a crackdown on personal freedoms by school officials soon followed. These regulations often extended past school hours, with students banned from holding part-time jobs, visiting cafes, staying up late, or being involved in certain social groups or activities.

The new rules were applied school-by-school; to this day, enforcement remains lumpy and differentiated between individual institutions. Different students will have different experiences. Teachers, too, have reacted differently to having to enforce regulations.

Stereotypical silhouettes of Japanese student delinquents from the 1980s. Such boys were often called Bancho, while girls were called Sukeban. The general term for delinquent is furyo.

Clash of Ideas

In 2004, Tamura Yuichi published a study on teacher/student feelings towards kosoku regulations. Reactions were diverse; competing claims were made about how regulations harmed students or benefited them. Of course, there were the ubiquitous claims of the importance of preparing children for working life. However, teachers also often felt that school regulations had helped end the endemic school violence of the 70s and 80s.

“Many veteran teachers remember the experiences of the late 1970s and the early 1980s. Those were terrible times. We don’t want such conditions to reappear, so there is a pervasive hesitancy about changing rules.” 

Quote from a Junior High School principal in Kyoto. 1999.

Others, however, believed the need to constantly enforce overly specific rules regarding student appearance wastes valuable time and energy, harming relationships between faculty and pupils.

“Increasingly, there was realization that we were making tremendous efforts in non-essential parts of schooling. How important is the color of children’s socks? Who cares about whether students’ hair touches their eyebrows a little? Time and energy consumed in the enforcement of these rules could be directed to more meaningful matters.”

Quote from an assistant principal at Joyo High School, 1998.

Rules Rule?

Still, other teachers believed school rules provided a beneficial standard baseline that established equality and helped teachers notice when something was wrong with a student’s home life. School uniforms and standardized hair could help hide class differences. (Even helping prevent bullying of Burakumin, the descendants of the historical Japanese underclass.)

“Our school district includes a residential area predominantly occupied by the Buraku people. Their economic status is not as high as that of other families. So it is important for us to make sure such inequality is not reflected in students’ school life. Differences among students stemming from family background seem to lead to bullying. School uniforms and other standardization serves to eliminate the differences and their negative consequences.”

Also present were a wide range of slippery slope arguments. Since teenagers feel the need to rebel, it was said, better they rebel against arbitrary and unnecessary regulations than anything truly important. And, of course, there was the issue of simply conforming to society:

When students finish school and start working, they have to go to work on time, get along with superiors and co-workers, and cannot have a hairstyle or dress that is repulsive to others. At schools, we try to teach students these requirements of society.

Kyoto area Junior High teacher. 1999

Non-Intentional Non-Conformity

In all these arguments, however, there lies an assumption: there is some standard that all students can naturally default to. Boys can simply keep their hair short; both genders can simply wear their assigned clothing and fit in. Beyond issues of gender identity (an area in which some Japanese schools are making headway), there lies a truth that more and more news stories and scandals portray: that for many students in Japan, the “standard” is actually the deviation from their default selves.

For those with hair naturally of a different color or shape than black and straight, the attempt to create a flattened “equality” at school requires actively erasing their natural selves. And for biracial and international kids, already likely to experience othering because of physical differences, the burden of the system also forcing them to conform by dying their hair or worse can lead to a feeling very far from “equality.”

Follicle Follies

“I believe what I experienced was both a human rights violation and racial prejudice.” These were the words of Nishida Ai, book reviewer, model, and runner-up for Kodansha’s “Miss ID” award. Nishida is also a Japanese citizen whose mother is Japanese and whose father is white American. It was a particular moment during her middle school career in Fukuoka that triggered this reaction; the day after the graduation ceremony, she and her classmates received their yearbooks.

“I was pretty shocked… We were all having a good time, signing each other’s yearbooks. It was when I took another look at my own photo in the book that I noticed my hair had been altered. I was at a loss for words. “

Quote featured at Yahoo News.

Nishida’s naturally brown hair hadn’t been slightly darkened, either. In the school photograph, it was now entirely, unnaturally black. “To my teenage self, the photograph was incredibly off-putting. I hated it.”

Yet she felt the need to hide just how hurt she felt, passing it all off as a joke. In previous years, Nishida noticed how she appeared different from classmates, but had rarely been bullied as a result. In fact, the school had discreetly avoided reprimanding her for her brown hair, despite other (fully ethnically Japanese) students being yelled at over even slightly lighter hair. So, the yearbook photoshop came as a shock – as did being made to submit a “personal hair certificate” (地毛証明書) upon entry to high school.

“…Looking back on it now, ‘personal hair certificate’ is such a strange phrase. I was shocked to be made to produce such a thing. Recent news has played a major part in making me realize how much of a problem this all was. People discuss how there are all these problems with school regulations, but I used to think that all had nothing to do with me.”

The More Things Change

But when Nishida tweeted about the yearbook photo in April, she found that numerous people had experienced similar things. Despite the Fukuoka Municipal Board of Education’s protests that “firstly, we do not currently alter hair color” and that “we cannot know what middle schools in the city were doing as of the time of the incident in 2007,” it only took a brief glance at the media environment for Nishida to see that little had changed in Japan.

A recent survey has found that 57% of Tokyo schools require the same natural hair certificate Nishida was made to provide upon her entry to high school. While some argue these help shield students with non-black or even just wavy hair from constant scrutiny from teachers, the very fact that they’re required at all is often perceived as a burden. At the Tokyo high schools in question, the number of students required to provide such certificates ranges from a few to a few dozen.

The issue is made markedly worse when teachers and staff make it their duty to harass non-conforming students over their natural hair. The Japan Times has reported about a Brazilian-Japanese student named Nicola who received repeated harassment from teachers over her brown hair.

Nicola’s sister, Maria, spoke on the subject. “Every week teachers would check if Nicola was dyeing her hair brown. Even though she said this is her natural color, she was instructed to straighten and dye it black. She did so once a week. But the ordeal traumatized her. She still has a complex about her appearance.”

Courting Controversy

Being repeatedly singled out in such a way can be devastating for students. This is an especially fraught issue for Brazilian-Japanese. According to the Asahi Shinbun, somewhere between 20 to 40% of Brazilian-Japanese children in Japan have dropped out of school or have never enrolled. Issues with language and othering are leading reasons for this – and being constantly hounded by teachers over one’s own hair can hardly help.

Conflicted Homecoming: How the Japanese Brazilians Returned to Japan

The epic tale of the 300,000 cousins the Japanese welcomed home from Brazil and insisted they needed – until they suddenly didn’t.Part 2 of a 2-part series o…

Watch our video essay on the history of the return of the Brazilian-Japanese community to Japan.

And it’s not only biracial and international students who suffer. A highly publicized court drama recently played out in Japan in which an ethnically Japanese student with brown hair was made to constantly dye and re-dye her hair black by teaching staff at her Osaka high school. When the dye didn’t prove enough, she was disallowed to attend some classes and a school trip. The student, whose hair was permanently damaged, was so distraught that she stopped attending her classes; teachers removed her desk and took her name off the class register.

The court case produced a split ruling; it found the school to be within its rights to enforce school regulations. However, the student was also awarded the equivalent of $3000 for emotional distress. For many observers, this appears to be a non-committal conclusion, if ever there was one. Interestingly, this case harkens back to those of the 70s and 80s, where the very constitutionality of such appearance-based regulations was called into question. Then as now, it appears the schools still wield the power.

The Debate Goes On

Such highly-publicized cases as the above have helped bring the issue of natural hair back into the spotlight. Japanese Human rights groups have emerged to take on school codes deemed as overly draconian; prominent professors and others have used the Osaka case as a basis to discuss the right course for Japan to take as it enters an increasingly interconnected world. Professor Oshima Kayako of Doshisha University was one who took to television to say that “the hair guidance caused the girl to avoid going to school and took away a learning opportunity. In this era, when there are global interactions with people who have different eyes and hair, is it reasonable for schools to ban dyed or permed hair? We have to reconsider.”

Some things have indeed changed. As of 2018, 40% of Osaka high schools had edited previous hair regulations to more directly target “intentionally” altered hairstyles. The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education has also banned schools from forcing students with naturally lighter hair to apply black hair dye. This came after a human rights group submitted a petition with 19,000 signatures to the Tokyo BOE condemning such forced hair dyeing.

So, public discourse and internationally publicized scandals have helped shift policy, at least in some areas. Yet, expectations of what the “standard” is for appearance in Japan remain deep-seated. Time will tell whether or not breaking from said standard – even by dint of one’s default physical appearance – will become more accepted by society at large, and by a system that still aims to produce young adults that fit a singular societal mold.

Thanks to Jeff Krueger of the Deep in Japan Podcast for pointing us to the story of Nishida Ai.

Main Sources:

Tamura, Y. (2004). Illusion of Homogeneity in Claims: Discourse on School Rules in Japan. The High School Journal, 88(1), 52-63.

Matsuda, Ryohei. (1993). Kōsoku: School Rules and Regulations in Japan. University of Hawai’i at Manoa, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.

Yahoo! Japan. (April 18th, 2021). 私の髪は真っ黒に塗りつぶされた。卒業アルバムを加工された女性のショックと違和感

May, Tiffany. (Feb. 19, 2021). Japanese Student Forced to Dye Her Hair Black Wins, and Loses, in Court. New York Times.

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Noah Oskow

Serving as current UJ Editor-in-Chief, Noah Oskow is a professional Japanese translator and interpreter who holds a BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures. He has lived, studied, and worked in Japan for nearly seven years, including two years studying at Sophia University in Tokyo and four years teaching English on the JET Program in rural Fukushima Prefecture. His experiences with language learning and historical and cultural studies as well as his extensive experience in world travel have led to appearances at speaking events, popular podcasts, and in the mass media. Noah most recently completed his Master's Degree in Global Studies at the University of Vienna in Austria.

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