Spanking In Japan

Spanking In Japan

By Kate Lewis
| February 17, 2021 | Families

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How are Japanese families disciplining their children — and how are they eliciting good behavior in the first place? I wasn’t the only American mother asking this question.
One of the great misconceptions I had upon moving to Japan was that its children were perfectly self-disciplined from birth. I pictured tiny automatons, listening to their parents with respect, quietly following all the rules with innate obedience and precision.
From our early trips on the trains, this certainly seemed to be the case. Children younger than my two-year-old son sat in silence and stillness on the plush train seats, whereas my child treated the captive audience of the car as his own private performance arena: dancing, jumping, doling out charming smiles to the indulgent passengers who (thankfully) never truly seemed to mind his antics. While I whispered urgent reprimands, the Japanese mothers seemed to radiate calm serenity, their children seated beside them in well-behaved glory.
My son wasn’t behaving badly, exactly. There was simply an obvious cultural difference in how he was expected to behave and what his Japanese peers were taught. I began to wonder: how exactly are Japanese families disciplining their children? How are they eliciting such perfect behavior in the first place?
I wasn’t the only American mother asking myself this question. Finding a misbehaving Japanese toddler became something of a game with other international mom friends whenever we took our children to parks and museums. If we caught sight of Japanese toddlers having an elusive tantrum in public, we would sigh to ourselves in relief. It wasn’t just our children. It was everyone’s. Yet the Japanese parents seemed not to intervene at all. The child would sit on the ground, crying and screaming at the playground or park, and the parents seemed relatively unconcerned.
The child would sit on the ground, crying and screaming at the playground or park, and the parents seemed relatively unconcerned.
During one of my son’s epic tantrums, where we cleared out a train car on the Yamanote line from Shinjuku, I was at a complete loss. He decided he most emphatically did not want to ride the train home, but we absolutely needed to do so. Unable to fully restrain him because I was cradling my newborn daughter, my son tried with all his might to leave the train before it departed, and I whispered a sincere Gomennasai (I’m sorry) to all the passengers brave enough to remain on the car with us. At that moment, I would have wholeheartedly welcomed someone else intervening — none of my disciplining tricks worked.
I spoke to my Japanese language teacher about the tantrum later, mentioning we have a phrase in English that describes this age in a child’s life: the terrible two’s. She nodded. “We do as well,” she laughed. “ Ma no nisai . The Evil Age.”
Yet when I asked how people in Japan handled the ‘evil age,’ she just smiled mysteriously and moved on.
One day, I inadvertently discovered why I’d never seen a Japanese child disciplined. Another day, another busy train, and this time it was another child throwing a tantrum about riding home. The father quickly pulled his entire family from the train car and as doors closed and the train sped away, I saw him crouch down on the now-empty platform to the misbehaving child and begin to scold. It was a revelation.
Where I’d focus on stopping the behavior as it happened, Japanese parents seemed to wait until a private moment to discuss. I began noticing this everywhere – parents crouched behind pillars in train stations, at the edges of parks, having quiet conversations as the children were packed away into cars.
Where I’d focus on stopping the behavior as it happened, Japanese parents seemed to wait until a private moment to discuss.
Aside from maintaining the pride of the child, disciplining in private also spares the pride of the parent. In Japanese, discipline is shitsuke —which also translates roughly into training or upbringing. I like the thought of it as training. Parents are expected to model the behavior their children should emulate. In my case, quiet consultation in private certainly seemed better than waiting out a tantrum in the middle of a crowded train.
To be sure, some discipline measures are extreme everywhere. One family in Japan made international headlines when their seven-year-old went missing in bear-country Hokkaido after they’d put him out of the car and driven away as a punishment for his misbehavior. When they returned minutes later, he’d vanished (and thankfully was found, albeit several frantic days later). Child psychologists worldwide seem to agree that it’s always best to punish the behavior—not the child.
The overall focus on training as discipline—teaching children to behave by repeatedly modeling the appropriate behaviors and privately correcting them when they veer from that course—is also apparent from my visits to watch my son at his kindergarten . The students follow a strict schedule, repeating the same songs, games, and polite behaviors like putting shoes away neatly and sitting quietly until it becomes routine.
The students follow a strict schedule, repeating the same songs, games, and polite behaviors like putting shoes away neatly and sitting quietly until it becomes routine.
But in the end, we all just do what works. One sunny afternoon at yochien pickup, the sensei stopped me after class. Through a friend helping translate, the sensei said she’d had trouble disciplining my two-year-old that day. She didn’t know how to explain to him to stop in English, and he mistook her admonishments as a new game, mimicking her when she tried to reprimand him.
Finally, she told me, she just yelled at him like I did . I was slightly awed and also embarrassed. “How do I yell at him?” I asked. (And how often did I yell at him in her presence, I wondered).

She demonstrated, saying his name quickly and full of low, unmistakable warning—exactly as I do when my patience runs thin—and laughed. “It worked perfectly,” she told me.
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See Every Country Where Spanking Is Still Legal in One Chart

➞ Click to enlarge | Sources: Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children; Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence against Children
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E very time a new controversy erupts about parents who use spanking to discipline their kids, such as the Adrian Peterson story , there’s a whole new round of discussion about the most appropriate way to discipline kids.
This week Time for Family takes a deep look at the best way to discipline kids : who really spanks their kids, under what circumstances and whether it works. And, most critically, whether there anything else works better.
So far 43 countries have outlawed spanking, and two more are about to. Here’s a map with some surprising ways different countries are handling corporal punishment of children.

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Published
11:08 PM EDT, Mon March 12, 2018

Who invented spanking? Christians point to Proverbs 13:24: "Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him." However, Olivier Maurel, a retired French teacher author, said the practice appears to be universal in history: "From Sumer to Egypt to China, from ancient India to pre-Columbian America, from Athens to Rome, children were hit," he wrote .
A whipping or "cobbing" was also historically used as a punishment for adults. This etching shows Bishop of London Edmund Bonner punishing a heretic in "Foxe's Book of Martyrs" from 1563. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Bonner was characterized as a monster who enjoyed burning Protestants at the stake during the reign of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I, who was known as "Bloody Mary."
The tools of spanking are varied. In this vintage image, a man uses a paddle. For adults administering punishment, the use of switches, belt straps, paddles and the like delivered increased punishment while saving their hands from the sting of the swat. In the slave trade, there was a crueler reason for the use of a paddle or strap. In his book " Flagellation and the Flagellants: A History of the Rod in all Countries from the Earliest Period to the Present Time ," the Rev. William Cooper explains that straps were used to keep from scarring slaves and reducing their value: "It is said that with this instrument a slave could be punished to within an inch of his life, and yet come out with no visible injury, and with his skin as smooth as a peeled onion."
Spanking reaches across many races and cultures. Elizabeth Gershoff , an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has been studying corporal punishment for 15 years, said research shows that spanking is more common among African-Americans than among other racial and ethnic groups in the United States, including whites, Latinos and Asian-Americans.
An 1879 drawing from "Cole's Funny Picture Book," one of many created by Australian E.W. Cole, billed as the "Cheapest Child's Picture Book ever published." The drawing illustrates "the macabre Snooks' Patent whipping machine for flogging naughty boys in school," says the National Library of Australia .
Spanking was common in Europe, as well. This illustration from the weekly French youth publication La Jeunesse illustre, published between 1903 and 1935, shows a teacher spanking a student while two others wait with faces to the wall. Today, a growing body of research shows that spanking can lead to aggression and mental illness later in life; one 2009 study showed that "harsh punishment" -- defined as being struck with objects like a belt, paddle or hairbrush at least 12 times a year for a period of three years -- produced less gray matter in the brains of children.
In an apparently staged performance whose date is unknown, a teacher "strikes" a child over her knee while the rest
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