When my Black son was bullied in the first grade of a public elementary school in Tokyo a few years ago, I was at a loss for what to do.
For weeks, he had been reluctant to go to school, and I did not know the reason. I thought he was just taking time to settle in. He spoke Japanese fluently, so the language was not the issue, and at home, he was his usual happy self.
One day, his teacher called me and asked me to come in for a meeting. She explained that there was a boy in the class who had been bullying my son for a while, but she did not inform me until a couple of months after it first began. She said the school had spoken to the bully, and both he and the boy’s parents had apologized — not to me or my son, however, but to the school itself.
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