“The dark side of …" suicide, violence and drug use in Japanese schools

Adolescent suicide, school violence and substance abuse are major social problems that affect all industrialized nations to some degree . Over the past several decades, researchers have sought to uncover the causes and correlates of adolescent social pathology, often focusing on the impact that schools have in promoting health or augmenting problems . In their introduction to The Manufactured Crisis, Berliner and Biddle (1995) dramatically portray the problems faced by a large, capitalist democracy which, they assert, readers will assume is the United States, as Americans are so ready to believe that adolescent problems are an American phenomena. The country they portray, however, is Japan, and by exposing the “dark side�? of Japan, they and other authors (e.g. Young, 1993; Bracey, 1996) have claimed to demonstrate that concern over the condition of American adolescents in middle, junior and senior high schools is a “manufactured�? concern.