Absent fathers blamed for teenage violence in Japan

TOKYO (April 19, 1998 11:49 p.m. EDT) - Japan's absent, workaholic fathers are partly to blame for a rash of teenage angst and occasionally shocking outbursts of violence, education experts here say.

"Fathers who do not understand what it means to raise children and who do not cooperate in the process are causing anxiety among many mothers," said a report by an advisory panel to the education minister.

"Fathers should reexamine their lifestyle, which is excessively devoted to work," it said.

The interim report was compiled by the central council for education after a 14-year-old boy strangled and beheaded an 11-year-old, and then displayed the head at the gate of his own school in Kobe last May.

Three months after the murder, then education minister Takashi Kosugi asked the council to find out what was wrong with Japan's children, and to suggest how to educate their "hearts."

The report, released earlier this month, pointed out that Japanese fathers spent less time with their children than their counterparts in other countries.

A 1994 education ministry survey showed Japanese fathers spent an average 3.32 hours a day with their children on weekdays.

That compared to six hours for fathers in Thailand, 4.88 hours in the United States, 4.75 hours in Britain, 3.64 hours in Sweden and 3.62 hours in South Korea.

The ministry's survey covered about 1,000 fathers with children aged up to 12 in the six countries.

"As fathers' presence has been weakened at home, children are inclined to read their mothers faces and make efforts to be 'a good boy or girl' to please their mothers.

"Meanwhile children tend to picture their fathers rather as a friend than a parent, and are not getting enough discipline from them about what is good and bad.

"Fathers need to provide a different kind of influence to their children than mothers," the report said.

A 1996 survey by the Japan Youth Research Institute on 1,000 youths each in China, Japan and the United States showed a relative absence of guilt among Japanese teenagers who peformed acts widely considered as bad.

As many as 84.7 percent of Japanese students said they had the "freedom" to rebel against their parents, compared with 16.1 percent in the United States and 14.7 percent in China.

It also showed that nine percent of Japanese students thought it was OK to extort money from others, compared with 8.1 percent among their U.S. counterparts and 1.6 percent among Chinese students.

Prostitution was not a bad thing for 25.3 percent of Japanese students, compared with 2.5 percent of Chinese. No comparison was given for U.S. students.

With memories of the Kobe murder still fresh, the Japanese took another blow early this year when a 13-year-old boy stabbed a 26-year-old female teacher to death north of Tokyo, after being scolded for being tardy.

The killing triggered a rash of newspaper reports about teenage crimes involving knives, including a murder, an attempted murder of a policeman and several robberies.

A national police agency report showed that juvenile crime in 1997 was up for the first time in six years.

A total of 168,089 teenagers between 14 and 19 were either arrested or briefly detained for crimes, up 4.1 percent from the previous year, with robberies and drug abuse also rising conspicuously, the agency said.

Besides the problem of absent fathers, the education ministry report fingered deteriorating moral standards in society, television and magazine portayals of sex and violence, and excessive pressure on children to study.