Indiscriminate stabbing of a high school sophomore in front of Todai… A shuddering background to the incidents involving students of a prestigious school

January January 15 On January 15, around 8:30 a.m., a second-year high school student committed the murder on the sidewalk in front of the University of Tokyo’s Yayoi Campus.

On that day, students in their coats were coming one after another to the University of Tokyo to take the Common Entrance Examination. Some were trembling with nervousness, some were listening to English words with earphones, and some were clutching charms to pray for success.

In front of all these students, a boy named A, a sophomore in high school living in Nagoya, appeared.

Not long ago, he had attempted to set fire to several places on the train and in Todai-mae Station, but failed. He then headed for the sidewalk in front of the main gate of Todai.

At this time, he had a blade length of 12cm knife, a folding saw, a knife, and a total of 11 plastic bottles and jars filled with flammable liquid.

In front of the main gate, a group of students who had also come from the station to take the exam were walking in a line. Boy A was in possession of 12cm He attacked the people nearby indiscriminately.

The first to be attacked was 72 years old. The first attacker was a 72-year-old man. He was stabbed in the back and seriously injured. A female high school student from Chiba Prefecture who had come to take an entrance exam, and a male high school student were also stabbed in the back and fell to the ground.

The police officers who received the report immediately rushed to the scene. Boy A did not show any particular gesture of resistance and was meekly arrested.

Afterwards, he told the police his reason for the incident as follows.

I cut up three people. I don’t know them. I was studying to become a doctor at the University of Tokyo, but my grades started to suffer a year ago, and I lost confidence. He thought that if he couldn’t become a doctor, he would kill someone and commit seppuku to carry his guilt.

It is reported that Boy A attended a nationally renowned preparatory school in the Tokai region. It was a prestigious school that had a particularly high acceptance rate for medical school, and sent many students to medical schools, including the University of Tokyo.

The reason for the spate of indiscriminate killings

When this incident was reported, many people must have thought, “Oh no, not again.

In recent years, indiscriminate killings and injuries have been occurring frequently, as if they were terrorist attacks. 10 ～10 ~ 20 20 In recent years, indiscriminate killings like terrorist attacks have become more frequent. 18 of 18 years 22 A 22-year-old man killed and injured a man on board a Tokaido Shinkansen train in 2006. 20 years In 2008 A 15-year-old boy stabbed a woman to death in a commercial facility in Fukuoka. The stabbing death of a woman in a commercial facility in Fukuoka by a 15-year-old boy in 2008. In 2009 In 2009 24 The stabbing of a woman in a commercial facility in Fukuoka by a 15-year-old boy, and the stabbing of a 24-year-old man on the Keio Line in 2009 are two examples.

The year 19 The year is 19. Although there were no indiscriminate There have been no indiscriminate incidents involving boys in their 20s or younger, but there have been incidents involving boys in their 40s or younger. 40s 40s and There have been no indiscriminate incidents involving juveniles in their twenties or younger. There have been no indiscriminate incidents involving juveniles in their 20s or younger. In addition, there have been a number of incidents involving children in their 40s and 50s, including the Kyoani arson case and the Noborito street crime case in Kawasaki City.

In addition to the pathology of the perpetrator, there is a complex intertwining of family and social problems that snowball into a myriad of difficulties. I can see it.

The following two points are characteristic of the incident at Todai.

The perpetrator was an active high school student at a prestigious high school.

The assailant was an active high school student at a top-notch high school, and he blamed his grades for his crime.

The details of the case will be left to future investigations, but there are many cases where parents’ distorted education is the trigger. The perpetrator of the Akihabara street robbery case was one of those whose mind was destroyed by his parents’ excessive education. Whether in juvenile training schools or free schools, there are a certain number of children who have become victims of such spartan education.

This case reminded me of the arson murder of a Nara high school student in the home of a doctor.

I would like to look back at the outline of this case.

The incident took place in It was in 2006. It was in 2006. The perpetrator was Boy B, who attended one of the most advanced schools in the prefecture and, like Boy A in the Todai incident, was aiming to enter medical school.

Boy B’s father was a doctor. His father had been teaching his son to study since before he started elementary school in order to make him a doctor like himself. His father had always had a high sense of elitism and was the type of man who oppressed those around him. Due to his personality, his one-on-one tutoring gradually escalated into a Spartan education with violence against Boy B. Later, Boy B was taught by his father that he was a child of the elite.

Later, Boy B confessed that he spent his days in fear of violence by his father. He said that he was shouted at, things were thrown at him, tea was poured on him, he was hit, and he was kicked on a daily basis. For the boy, it must have been abuse, not education.

Forbidden contact with the mother

Eventually, the mother separated and divorced, taking Boy B’s sister with her. Boy B was left with his father, and it is not hard to imagine that this must have inflamed his feelings that his mother had abandoned him.

After the divorce, the father forbade Boy B to have any contact with his mother or sister, and intensified his Spartan education. At the same time, his father remarried a woman who was also a doctor. In an environment where his father and stepmother were both doctors, the pressure on Boy B to go to medical school became even greater.

Boy B was torn between the need to live up to his father’s expectations and the desire to give up. Even so, the fact that he was able to go on to a famous school in Kansai, which was considered a top-notch school, was a testament to his efforts.

This environment, however, began to take a toll on Boy B’s spirit.

His father only told him to “study hard and become a doctor,” and did not take his feelings into account at all. If he spoke his mind, he was abused. He wouldn’t even allow me to have my own dreams. No matter how much effort I put in, I was never praised, and I shuddered at the thought of being mistreated because of my low grades. A growing sense of inferiority to his superior classmates. …… This is the first time I’ve ever seen such a thing.

If he had been able to pass the entrance exam for the University of Tokyo’s medical school, he might have been able to have some peace of mind. However, just like athletic skills, the ability to study is to some extent an inborn ability (although the trend in the educational world to not recognize this and to attribute everything to effort is wrong). And it’s hard to grow up when you’re forced to do things.

What was unfortunate for Boy B was that there was no one around him who understood this. Rather, he tended to feel that because he was in a famous advanced school, he was not able to study as much as he should.

It was in his first year of high school that his spirit reached its limit. His English score on the midterm test was far below the average. This was not necessarily a bad thing for a school that produces dozens of students who are accepted to Tokyo University every year. Besides, as a freshman in high school, he would have plenty of chances to make up for it.

Forcing the idea of “getting into a top university

However, when his father found out about this, it turned against him. This was a score that his father would never accept. Boy B’s fear grew from the abuse he had suffered. He began to think about killing his father to escape his control.

He began to plan the murder, but he was probably not in the right state of mind. June 20 In the early morning of June 20th, he set fire to the house even though his father, who controlled him, was not home for work.

The house was quickly engulfed in flames, and three people, including her sleeping stepmother and her stepbrother and sister, were burned to death.

What I would like to think about through this incident is how much the imposition of “getting into a top university” can hurt a child’s mind.

Over the decades, various incidents have been caused by parents’ spartan education. Each time an incident has occurred, criticism has been directed at the way parents treat their children as their “property” and the way the social atmosphere overlooks this. Recently, some have begun to regard excessive education as “educational abuse. Nevertheless, these problems are not being corrected, and similar incidents are still occurring.

Why? The reason lies in the warped structure of education.

In Japan, as the gap between the rich and the poor widens, the structure of a few powerful people dominating the rest and controlling their wealth has become clear. In the pyramid of education, with the business world and universities at the top, the content of instruction was increased and imposed one after another as if developing materials under the name of “human resource development” when in fact it was to “nurture humanity.

It is obvious that there is an educational gap among such children, and it is also clear that there is an inborn ability gap, including learning disabilities. Nevertheless, the children are almost all placed in a horizontal line, and those who win are considered “those who tried” and those who did not are considered “those who did not try.

In such a situation, it is inevitable that some parents would want to somehow make their children excel through Spartan education. Even though there are many problems with parents, there is an atmosphere in society that overlooks them.

In the Nara case, the father, a doctor, made many mistakes. But the people around him must have had problems too. I wonder if there was an atmosphere that would have stopped the father, a doctor, from trying to get his child to become a doctor as well. How many people at the school understood the suffering of Boy B? Why didn’t the doctor’s stepmother, who had witnessed the abuse up close, stop it in the first place?

Education is meant to help a child develop his or her natural wings in a way that suits him or her, and let him or her fly in any direction he or she wants to go in the sky.

It is not for society or parents to create wings that are convenient for them and make them fly in a certain direction. This is something that drones should do. In what world would a parent bird attach a propeller of its own development to a chick that has just hatched from an egg and try to control it?

The day after the incident at the University of Tokyo, the National College Entrance Examination was held as scheduled at the same venue and other venues across the country. A few years from now, most of the children will be flying on their own wings in the direction they want to go. But what kind of sky will the children with wings imposed by society and their parents fly?