Covert

Hello all,

Here's a story in yesterday's Mainichi, a national daily paper in Japan,
about spying in a Japanese schoolroom.

Could this kind of thing actually be happening, in this day and age, in
Japan -- a country long considered the educational envy of the world? You
bet it's happening.

And they say 1984 is a year in our distant past....

Regards,

Brian Covert
(KnoK NEWS)
Osaka, Japan

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Mainichi Daily News - 18 October 2000

http://www.mainichi.co.jp/english/news/archive/200010/18/news02.html


SCHOOL APOLOGIZES FOR HIDDEN CAMERA


Mainichi Shimbun

KAGOSHIMA -- A public junior high school here apologized to students late
last month after they found that a homeroom teacher had been filming the
students with a hidden camera, it was learned Monday.

The 45-year-old male teacher who set up the video camera admitted his
action and offered an apology to the students on Sept. 27, saying, "All I
wanted was to protect a bullying victim, but I took the wrong action."

The teacher hid a camera inside the speaker of a television set in his
classroom during the summer holidays to find out who was carrying out a
hate campaign against a female student, Kagoshima Municipal Board of
Education members said. It remains unclear who organized the hate
campaign against the girl.

Identities of the people involved and the school are being withheld for
reasons of privacy.

Officials at the Ministry of Education expressed their regret over the
incident.

"Trust between students and teachers is fundamental to education.
However, the fact that the teacher had installed a hidden camera shows
that the trust had already been lost," a ministry official said. "The
filming was over the top. There must have been some other method."

The students discovered the camera on Sept. 27 after one of them turned
on the television in a room adjoining theirs and realized that the images
came from their classroom.

The school organized a meeting of the students on the same day to
apologize over the matter.


Copyright 2000 The Mainichi Newspapers Co.