Two recent student suicides due to bullying -- one in the town of Chikuzen, Fukuoka Prefecture, and the other in the city of Takigawa, Hokkaido -- have raised questions over the attitudes of educators. Teachers, principals, board of education officials and officials of the education ministry need to do some soul-searching and ask themselves whether they are consistently aware that bullying is a serious problem and whether they have squarely and sincerely dealt with it.

The education ministry may have been lulled into complacency by statistics submitted by local education authorities that reported no bullying-related suicides among students from fiscal 1999 through 2005. Local education authorities may have been trying to hide the truth in their reports to avoid trouble with the ministry. And the ministry may have neglected to take a closer look at the schools themselves. The least educators can do now is to unravel the details surrounding the two recent suicides and work on how to prevent such tragedies happening again.

On the night of Oct. 11, a 13-year-old second-year student at a Chikuzen junior high school was found to have hanged himself. In one of his four suicide notes, he wrote: "Bullying is so severe that I cannot live any more." It is believed that the behavior of and certain comments made by a 47-year-old male teacher, who was the boy's homeroom teacher when he was a first-year student, triggered the bullying of the boy by other students. On one occasion, when the boy picked up a classmate's eraser that dropped onto the floor and handed it to the latter, the teacher called him a "hypocrite who cannot even become a hypocrite."