Nearly half of Tokyo’s public high schools require students whose hair is not black and straight to submit ad hoc certification to prove that their hair is natural and not dyed or permed. Last month an Osaka court awarded a former student US$3,000 for having experienced “emotional distress” immediately after she was kicked out of high school because her hair did not reflect the dark shades of black required by the school protocol (but the court upheld the institution’s legal right to enforce this rule). Yet in recent years critical voices have emerged in support of less austere rules, possibly oriented toward respecting everyone’s personality. But that’s not the case when we focus on a specific set of regulations for school pupils.įrom forbidding students from dyeing their hair to establishing the obligation to wear all-white underwear, there are plenty of apparently bizarre policies that modulate the requirements of the educational system.
Japan is notoriously known to be the land where rules, laws and regulations are so well imprinted in the people’s conscience that there’s hardly any space for chaos to breed.Īs one would expect, most of the rules are self-explanatory and nobody would really have to struggle to comprehend them.