At least I hope that by the end of the series he'll be dropping that iron mask of his, and who knows, maybe those tender feelings that seem to be budding will actually blossom? To everyone who is wondering about the students' bad attitude and their stubborn reluctance to trust adults/teachers being exaggerated, look what a very quick bit of Googling shows us:chickenruns wrote:sometimes japanese school dramas make me feel very confused. are highschoolers in Japan always be that naughty and powerful ? maybe they just exagerate the situations
Read entire article here.Andrew Pollack @ The New York Times wrote:For more than a year, four of his classmates had been demanding money from him, sometimes hundreds of dollars at a time. Once, when he would not comply, they held his head under water in a river. Another time they forced him to undress and left him in the gymnasium in his underwear.
Finally, Kiyoteru Okouchi could not take it any more. On Nov. 27, the 13-year-old eighth grader hanged himself from a tree in the family garden, leaving behind a suicide note detailing the extortion, a poignant diary that named his tormentors and a note promising to pay his mother back the roughly $11,000 he had taken to give to the bullies.
[...]
What has disturbed the nation is not only the bullying, which has long been a problem in Japan. It also appears that the victims did not, or could not, turn to their parents or teachers for help, so the only way they could tell the world of their suffering was to take their own lives.
Read entire article here.Sam on Passage-To-Japan @ blogspot wrote:A female student in a Japanese school was being pressured by a group of fellow students routinely to hand over money to them. Up until her suicide she had collectively given them a large sum of money. She didn't sit quiet while all of this happened. Instead she complained to the school administration. When the principal reviewed the case he labeled it as not being a case of bullying. When the girl finally failed to get the school's help, from teachers and from other faculty members, she committed suicide.
Read entire article here.James @ Japanprobe wrote:Yesterday, a ’shocking’ news story was reported by Mainichi. A 13-year-old junior high school student in Miyagi Prefecture committed suicide because he was being bullied at school.
[...]
Based on what I have seen on Japanese news programs and my own personal experiences as a junior high/elementary teacher in Japan, it would seem that bullying is a serious problem in Japanese schools. It would also seem that most bullying is passively encouraged by teachers intentionally ignore bullying and fail to discipline bullies.
[...]
Almost every case of bullying I have witnessed in class, from verbal abuse (”shut up”, “ugly”, “drop dead”, etc.) to outright physical violence, was clearly visible to the Japanese teachers present, who did nothing.
Read entire article here.Richard Lloyd Parry @ Times Online wrote:The first letter arrived nine days ago, sent to Japan’s Education Minister by an anonymous schoolboy in a state of extreme distress.
Bullies were making his life a misery, and he could bear it no longer. He was going to kill himself by the weekend.
[...]
Just over a week later, the government has been overwhelmed with similar unsigned letters from persecuted children, announcing their intention to die.
[...]
The original message arrived on Monday last week at the office of Bunmei Ibuki, Japan’s minister of education, and nothing about its origin was clear, even the postmark.
It contained seven letters, addressed to the minister, to a teacher and to classmates - but neither they, nor the sender, were identified.
"Why d’you have to bully me?" he asks his tormentors. "Because I’m disgusting? Because I stink? Why d’you have to pull down my pants?"
To his teacher, he writes: "I’ve told you over and over that I’m being bullied, and so have my parents. Why don’t you help me?"
[...]
It was on Thursday that the suicides began, with a 17-year old girl who jumped four floors to die on her school playground in the southern city of Kokura.
On Saturday, a 12-year-old girl, who had been tormented for being small, jumped to her death from an eighth floor apartment building in Osaka.
The next day, a 14-year old boy in Saitama prefecture hanged himself in a shed at his home, after telling his teachers that a bully was demanding 20,000 yen (£90) from him.
The following day, a boy of the same age hanged himself in the city of Nara, and yesterday a 17-year old girl jumped from the fifth floor of her school.
[...]
"Recent years, I can see the children thinking that adults cannot be trusted," said Yukiko Nishihara, who runs a suicide prevention centre in Tokyo.
"We have fewer phone calls from children. They think there is no point of consulting the adults about their troubles."
Ijime, or bullying, has already been the subject of sociological research and writing.
In English, there is the book "The Japanese Highschool: Silence and Resistance", by Shoko Yoneyama. You can read the first few pages on Amazon.
Here's a few lines from a description of this book:
I also found a paperpresented in 1999 at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. Here's an excerpt:incidents of bullying, suicide, dropout, and violence of one kind or another proliferate. The growing sense of educational crisis came to a head with the 1997 incident in which a child was murdered and decapitated, apparently by a fourteen year old student. When the child killer of Kobe claimed that he had been avenging himself against school which 'threatened his existence', many students were reported to have expressed understanding and support for his views. For large numbers of school students in Japan, school has become a battle field.
Ijime problems are prevalent in Japanese schools, and it has been reported that over 80% of primary and secondary students had been involved in ijime.
So it really seems what we've seen depicted in Seito Shokun! may actually not be far at all from a very sad day-to-day Japanese reality... Children being hurt by their peers and by the adults/teachers who were supposed to protect them and help them develop and flourish...
Maybe to us a teacher who leaves a student to fall to his probable death, and abandons his class in the middle of nowhere, taking away from them, by force, even their basic means of survival, just to save his own skin, and a whole school who then treats those students as liars just to save face, is unthinkable.
But I doubt it would be so for those Japanese teenagers for whom no-one stood up to protect them, as we could read in the articles I quoted above!
There must be a reason for all the school dramas being churned out by Japanese television, and for me Seito Shokun! is one of the series which offers some more insight than usual into the problems of Japanese education, and into some possible solutions...
Anyhow, chickenruns, please do feel free to make up your mind and stop watching this "very weirrrd" and "too silly" drama, I think I can assure you that no one will sue you for that!
Probably you can use your time much better than watching it and writing three posts on one discussion page about a drama that you "really hate"... 
