Dress code check has people in Japan upset.

A number of Japanese school rules have been under increasing criticism over the last year for being outdated or illogical, and the one getting the most attention these days involves students’ underwear. As part of their dress codes, a number of schools have regulations in place that say students must wear white underwear.

However, school uniforms are, obviously, already designed so as not to show students’ underwear. Unfortunately, rather than take it on faith that the unseen underwear conforms with the rule, some schools exercise their authority in performing spot tests. One method is to have a teacher can check the color of bra straps pulled up through a student’s collar, but one school in Fukuoka Prefecture has used an even more shocking method.

According to a student who was interviewed by the Fukuoka Bar Association as part of a study of school rules in the prefecture, girls at the school were told to line up in a school hallway, standing side-to-side. They were then told to unbutton and open their shirts while a teacher came by and inspected their bras to make sure they were solid white.

Though you couldn’t really call the situation better if the students’ panties were checked as well, the fact that the underwear check apparently only involved their bras strongly implies that it was only girls who were checked to see if they were in compliance with the dress code. The semi-logical reason would be that boys’ uniforms, by nature of having pants, mean that their underwear would never be seen anyway, but then the same should at least be true for girls’ bras, which are always covered by their uniforms’ blouses.

▼ Honestly, that seems like something professional educators should be able to understand.

As for the check taking place in a hallway, Japanese schools generally don’t have locker rooms for general P.E. classes (which is partially why individual club rooms are so often seen in high school sports anime and TV dramas). However, classrooms themselves are often used as changing room before/after P.E. class, and if the school was dead-set on performing a bra color check, doing it in a classroom would have at least afforded greater privacy than the hallway.

Other troubling revelations from the bar association’s study included a female student saying that her school’s underwear check was performed by a male teacher and at least one case of a students whose underwear didn’t conform to the dress code being told to remove it (it’s unclear if she was given dress code-compliant underwear to change into or had to spend the rest of the day with no bra at all).

Online reactions to the report have been a mixture of frustration and anger:

“Disgusting.”
“I feel so sorry for those students.”
“These schools are run by perverts.”
“They should put an immediate stop to underwear checks.”

While an immediate abolition is probably too much to hope for, it does indeed look like school underwear checks’ days are numbered, and Fukuoka’s neighbor, Saga Prefecture, has already said it will have no more checks as of this spring.

Source: FNN Prime Online via Livedoor News via Itai News, YouTube/FNNプライムオンライン
Top image: Pakutaso
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