Japanese teacher beats up student for making fun of his body by calling him anime character name

Board of Education hands down punishments to teachers fighting, dating their teenage students.

With anime being more popular than ever, you can probably walk through just about any junior high school in Japan and overhear students saying an animated character’s name as they talk about their favorite series. The circumstances were a little different, however, on a day in January at Kawachinagano Municipal Middle School in the town of Kawachinagano, Osaka Prefecture.

During a break between classes, a third-year student (who would have been either 14 or 15 years old) called a 38-year-old male teacher by the name of an anime character because of similarities in their physique. The exact name the teen called the teacher hasn’t been publicly stated, but it wasn’t intended as a compliment, according to the Osaka Prefectural Board of Education, implying that the teacher is likely either obese, gaunt, or short.

When the student called the teacher by the anime character’s name a second time, the educator became enraged, grabbing the teen by the front of his shirt and shoving him to the ground, then punching him in the side of the torso and head, near the temple.

This wasn’t the first time things had gotten physical between the two. In May of 2023, an incident occurred in which the teacher put the same student he’d later punch into a “lightly tight” headlock. Since starting work at the school in the spring of 2022, the teacher had been repeatedly made fun of by male students because of his physique, something other school employees were reportedly aware of but did not see as a problem.

Seeing a teacher raining blows on one of their classmates, other students informed other teachers at the school of what happened. The teen suffered light bruises and did not require hospitalization, and the teacher has since apologized to both him and his parents, saying “I was unable to control my anger, and did something inexcusable to a student.” On February 26, the Board of Education announced that the teacher will be docked 10 percent of his pay for three months.

▼ Somewhat ironically, smart-mouthed students and short-tempered teachers brawling in the classroom is one of those things that’s a lot more palatable in anime than it is in real life.

During the same round of disciplinary notices, the board handed down an identical punishment to a 36-year-old teacher at the all-girls Neyagawa Municipal Junior High School in the town of Neyagawa. This was in regard to an incident that took place in December of 2022 in which the teacher took a third-year student for a two-hour drive in his car, during which he held her hand and had her pat his head while they were waiting at signal lights. When asked what possessed him to do such things, the teacher said “I wanted to reward her for reaching her target score in her end-of-term tests, and for her to study hard around New Year’s for her high school entrance exams.”

▼ If that’s really all he wanted to do, seems like a simple “Great job kid, keep it up!” would have sufficed.

It all goes to show that it’s important for schools to hire teachers who can maintain a proper, professional relationship with their students, in a nice, healthy medium where they like them enough to resist any urges to beat them up, but without liking them so much that they want to date them.

Source: Sankei Shimbun via Yahoo! Japan News, Mainichi Shimbun
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert images: Pakutaso (1, 2)
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