Bullying and youth suicide become a national emergency in Japan

TokyoFor years, Kazui Sato unsuccessfully explained what was happening to him at school. Some classmates shot him with air rifles, sprayed insecticide in his face, and even threatened him with a knife. They also extorted hundreds of thousands of yen from him. But the school dismissed those episodes as simple "pranks" among teenagers. It took Japan fourteen years of legal proceedings for an independent investigation to officially recognize that Sato was the victim of severe bullying.

Today, he is 26 years old, still requires psychological treatment, and barely leaves the house alone. The case has once again put the spotlight on a crisis that has been growing silently in Japan for years: the difficulty many victims face in recovering a normal life after suffering violence and isolation within the education system. During the last academic year, the Japanese Ministry of Education registered almost 770,000 cases of school bullying – the highest figure since official statistics exist – alongside a sustained increase in youth suicides, prolonged absenteeism, and complaints against schools accused of minimizing or concealing aggressions.

The official recognition of Kazui Sato's case has reopened an uncomfortable debate about the internal workings of many schools in the country. Although the phenomenon of ijime" – the Japanese term for school bullying – has been a concern for families and experts for decades, there are increasingly more voices denouncing the structural difficulty of the education system to address these cases transparently. The pressure to preserve schools' reputation, avoid open conflicts, and maintain harmony within the classroom leads many complaints to end up diluted in unclear internal processes or directly reduced to minor incidents among students.

The figures also reflect the extent to which the problem is no longer marginal. Added to the historic record of bullying cases is another worrying statistic: nearly 354,000 students missed class for more than a month due to reasons related to anxiety, fear, or psychological problems linked to the school environment. This phenomenon, known in Japan as futoko, has become one of the main concerns of the Ministry of Education. In parallel, "school problems" recurrently appear among the causes associated with juvenile suicides, which also remain at particularly high levels.

A devastating plague

According to preliminary statistics from the Ministry of Health and the National Police Agency, in 2025, 532 students of compulsory and secondary education, up to eighteen years of age, committed suicide, the highest figure since comparable records have been kept. If university students are added, the total rises to 1,074 young people, a figure that the Japanese government's "White Paper on Suicide identifies as one of the most worrying in recent decades.

The document underlines that suicide is already the leading cause of death among adolescents and young people in the country. These figures, which break all historical records, have reopened the debate about the capacity of the educational and health system to detect and prevent risk situations, and about the need for a faster and more transparent institutional response.

Behind these statistics are increasingly extreme cases. In Niigata, a student caused burns to two classmates after making them ingest caustic soda, passing it off as candy. In Fukuoka, a teenager died after suffering humiliation and assault recorded by other students. And in Hokkaido, a fourteen-year-old girl ended up committing suicide after reporting harassment that her school had described as a simple "joke". In many of these episodes, families accuse schools of having reacted late, of having tried to avoid public scandals, or of having prioritized institutional protection over the safety of the victims.

This feeling of helplessness has also begun to spread to social networks. Given the perception that many complaints end up being diluted in internal procedures or slow investigations, some families have opted to publicly expose cases on the internet. In recent months, videos of school assaults have multiplied, circulating on platforms like X, TikTok, or LINE – the most used messaging application in Japan, similar to WhatsApp – showing humiliations, beatings, or scenes recorded by the students involved themselves.

The virality of these images has opened a delicate debate within the country. The Ministry of Education warns that the dissemination of videos of minors can provoke new rights violations and lead to other forms of harassment. But many families maintain that, without this public pressure, numerous cases would remain hidden within educational centers. In some recent episodes, police investigations only accelerated after the images went viral, which reinforced the feeling that the system continues to react late. Meanwhile, Kazui Sato's story continues to serve as an uncomfortable reminder.