A new education ministry survey shows that elementary, junior high and high schools saw about 125,000 bullying cases in fiscal 2006 — up 6.2 times from 2005. The increase is mainly attributed to the ministry's making the definition of bullying less strict.

The ministry has dropped descriptions such as "continual" and "serious" and put more emphasis on how victims of bullying feel. If they suffer emotionally from physical and psychological attacks from a person with whom they have a certain relationship, these attacks are now regarded as bullying.

Efforts to get a truer picture of bullying by adopting a looser definition marks a step forward for the ministry. Many schools also have made efforts to understand bullying by sending questionnaires to students and arranging meetings between teachers and students. The ministry should seriously consider that its past definition was so strict that it left the ministry and school authorities unaware of the real situation. Apparently due to the old definition, bullying-related suicides were reported as zero for the past seven consecutive years — a far cry from the reality. Under the new definition, of fiscal 2006's 171 suicides, six were found to be related to bullying. Education officials must rid themselves of the mind-set that the fewer the reported cases of bullying, the better the situation.