This is Who They Are

February 20, 2013 4:50 PM

Infographic about Japanese teens aged 12-15 (SLYT)

"2.8% are students between 12-15" means out of the entire population of Japan.
"Middle School Recognizes" means the percentage of junior high schools that were aware of bullying problems.
"The Number of School Refusal" means the number of kids who stopped going to school (futoko).

posted by misozaki (19 comments total)

Nicely done. Those Japanes infographics are great.

SPOILER:

Taller, fatter, students with phones eating breakfast and dinner with their family, being bullied mostly at 13 and are aware of it so a lot of them don't go to school because they are spiritless and frustrated and half of them want to get married because they haven't had any sex.
posted by unliteral at 6:21 PM on February 20 [3 favorites]

100% have no necks.
posted by Brocktoon at 7:01 PM on February 20 [3 favorites]

This is great. Someone needs to get on this and make one for American kids. It's helpful at that age knowing how normal the things that you think make you weird are.
posted by phunniemee at 7:23 PM on February 20

This is great. Someone needs to get on this and make one for American kids. It's helpful at that age knowing how normal the things that you think make you weird are.

I'm not American, but will happily rise to the challenge based on what I know from My Three Sons and the Brady Bunch!

99.9% call their father Sir
posted by mattoxic at 7:45 PM on February 20 [1 favorite]

My wife says one of the biggest differences between junior high school life now and when she was in JHS around 1980 is that club activities are basically compulsory now, seven days a week, nearly 12 months a year (as I recall, junior high school kids these days get some of March break off from clubs).

Back when she was a student, school was a wilder place (and probably far fewer kids went on to senior high school), so there has been a real effort to crack down on public morals through the schools over the past thirty years or so, and one way of doing that is by making sure teachers supervise almost every waking moment of their students.

Things have improved - apparently my wife had one crazy high school PE teacher who made all the kids, including the girls, strip down to their underwear to exercise in the snow on a regular basis.
posted by KokuRyu at 8:42 PM on February 20 [1 favorite]

Somewhat disappointed we didn't learn the percentage of dogs that eat dinner with the family. Because now I really want to know.
posted by prinado at 10:22 PM on February 20 [2 favorites]

Strangely enough, I'm at school, which means I shouldn't watch a youtube video*, but out of the roughly 110 students I have this year, two don't come to school at all (one is a first year, and essentially stopped coming two months ago, one is a third year who stopped coming last year, and I've never met him). A student of mine from last year quit the school before the end of the second term to study for entrance exams to a different school (she was in second year, it's very, very hard to switch schools midstream). She'd been studying in a small room by herself for two months or so. She was in that room because she was being bullied, and the bullying stemmed from social or mental difficulties that she was having. The school felt the best way to deal with the problem was to isolate the student being bullied, and this is not the first time they've done that.

Bullying happens in every facet of this society, and it's particularly bad in the schools. One shining ray of hope was that the teachers received a note a couple weeks ago, asking us to come clean on any instance where we ourselves might have bullied students, through physical abuse, mental abuse, or using shame. I'd like to believe that this is a sign of change, but my sister in law, working at a public elementary school, said that her district did the same thing, and it essentially became a way of getting rid of teachers that, get this, weren't popular or well liked by their colleagues.

"Hey, Mr. Sato says he once made a student cry! I never liked that guy, let's hang him out to dry!"

"What about Mr. Nishino? It says here he slapped kids in the face!"

"Nah, he's a good guy, don't worry, he'll change."

* or, of course, read MeFi. Then again, I'm using the professional white background. I'm sure that's okay.
posted by Ghidorah at 10:22 PM on February 20

It's cute, but why do I need the animation? I'm capable of reading this information, easily rendered in just a couple sentences, much faster and clearer. This is distracting and patronizing.
posted by Rich Smorgasbord at 1:30 AM on February 21 [1 favorite]

Clubs 7 days a weak, 12 months out of the year, and you know who also has to be there with the students? The teachers. I wouldn't wish being a junior high school teacher in Japan on my worst enemy. What a shitty shitty job. My wife is a junior high school teacher (art) and she hates it. We have plans to start up a pet walking/dog park service here on our island, and that can't happen soon enough.
posted by snwod at 1:34 AM on February 21 [2 favorites]

It seems to me that the stats on young teens having sex might be a bit deceptive.

If they poll girls who are 12, 13, 14, and 15 and find that 4.2% have had sexual experience... what does that mean, exactly? Hard to tell, without actually looking at the Japanese studies and seeing how they created and administered the surveys. What questions were asked? Were they perceived to be as anonymous? Are young Japanese teens as forthcoming about their sexual activities? Because such behavior could be considerably more alike between countries than many would be led to believe.

I would also wonder how much of the difference might be due to the rate of physical maturity. American girls, in particular, are starting puberty years earlier than their grandparents. The Western diet is presumably a big factor in this... so in Japan, where health effects of the Western diet are less pronounced, you would expect girls to enter puberty later than in the US.

In the US, 5% of teens are sexually active by 12, but that includes *any* kind of physical contact with the genitals of others. Only about 2.5% have had oral or penetrative sex by that age. Likewise, by 16, 41% of American teens have been sexually active with someone, in some form... but only about 28% have had oral/penetrative sex.

In short, while American oranges seem to be considerably larger than Japanese apples... who knows, really?!
posted by markkraft at 1:49 AM on February 21

Here's a safe bet, though: Don't want your very young girl to be one of those who sleeps around with the boy next door? Don't try religion. Try a diet of fish, tofu, seaweed, vegetables, and smaller, more balanced portions of organic whole grain rice. It's more likely to work.
posted by markkraft at 1:56 AM on February 21 [1 favorite]

Thinking about sending this to a friend who was Hikkikomori but it's too shallow in a way... "They feel spiritless ... They also feel frustrated"
posted by yoHighness at 2:34 AM on February 21

Snwod, as a sucker working six days a week, usually ten to eleven hour days, I wish the two of you luck. I love teaching. I love my students. I just don't feel that my entire life and all of my waking hours should be spent either with them or doing work for them. My school, however, disagrees.

That's why I'm looking into other things, too. Schools here aren't suddenly going to become healthy places to learn, let alone work, in my lifetime.
posted by Ghidorah at 2:46 AM on February 21 [1 favorite]

How is twelve a teen?
posted by Decani at 2:55 AM on February 21

while American oranges seem to be considerably larger than Japanese apples
I appreciate the metaphor but thise Japanese apples are huge. I used to get shocked at ¥300 for an apple (for simplicity about $3) in a normal grocery store but have to calm myself by noting that the apple was the size of a baby's head. Now that I put it in words, that should not have been a calming thought either...
posted by whatzit at 2:59 AM on February 21

[Folks it's significantly easier for us to deal with problematic comments than to have you making a THING of it in the thread. Drop us an email, use the flag queue, go to MetaTalk. Thanks.]
posted by jessamyn at 7:59 AM on February 21

I would also wonder how much of the difference might be due to the rate of physical maturity. American girls, in particular, are starting puberty years earlier than their grandparents.

Too lazy to Google the stats for precocious puberty in Japan, but as I recall it is a Thing (girls are experiencing menarche at earlier ages than before, etc).

It could be diet (meat and dairy have taken over a bigger share of diet than in previous generations), but it's also environmental, notably weird hormones released by plastics that trigger puberty at earlier ages - same thing is happening in other industrialized countries.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:45 AM on February 21

Next let's do the world economy as animated stop-motion legos. With an annoying 8-bit video game soundtrack.

Hey, remember when you had that dumb boss who was excited about how to do Powerpoint transitions?
posted by surplus at 11:11 AM on February 21

Hey, if you have the technical expertise to do that (and get people to post about it) more power to you - just make sure you submit a link to whatever you create for critical inspection.
posted by KokuRyu at 11:30 AM on February 21