Japanese lawyers have asked an elite boys’ high school in Osaka to reconsider its practice of trimming the hair of students to conform to rules, after some students demanded a rule change while claiming human rights violations, Japanese media reported.
The Osaka Bar Association said last Thursday that it had written a “non-legally binding” advisory to the Seifu Gakuen Senior High School in the western Japanese prefecture.
While it acknowledged that private schools have the right to set instructions on a hairstyle code, the legal group asked the school board to consider more flexible approaches in enforcing their rules, especially during monthly hair inspections.
The checks had drawn the ire of some students who said the rules were not fairly enforced and approached the Osaka bar for legal advice in April 2022.
Senior high schools in Japan are typically attended by students aged between 15 and 18.
A bar association committee conducted interviews with students and school employees, and found that some students were singled out for discipline despite having similar hairstyles as others who passed the inspection. Complaints about teachers forcibly cutting the hair of non-compliant students were also confirmed.
The lawyers said the school’s actions “exceeded the scope of socially acceptable guidance and infringed on the students’ freedom of hairstyle”.
The bar association’s vice-chairman Tsuyoshi Adachi said at a press conference: “It’s not in keeping with the current times to unilaterally decide school rules without listening to students’ opinions. We hope that the school will be willing to discuss the issue (with them).”
Seifu Gakuen said: “We will take the advisory seriously and would like to consider how to respond sincerely.”
In a student handbook given to its 1,780 students, the prestigious private school declares that “hair at the nape (back of the neck) and around the ears must be trimmed” and that “bangs must be kept to a length that does not touch the eyebrows when naturally pulled forward”.
The school used to mandate buzz cuts in the 1970s so that students can “see what should be seen and hear what should be heard”, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.
A barber at Oita Hair Salon said many Seifu Gakuen students would patronise his outlet before a hair check.
“There are times when nearly 100 people come in a month,” he told Japan news site MBS. “I hear from alumni saying, ‘I’m very grateful because I can learn about unity through this hairstyle, and how to have a clean hairstyle when I go out into the world’.”
Seifu Gakuen’s hairstyle code is the latest incident over controversial school rules in a country where conformity is a cultural norm.
In 2022, Japanese media reported that nearly two-thirds of schools in Chiba prefecture had rules mandating students wear white-coloured underwear. Separately, a former teacher in Shizuoka prefecture said girls were barred from wearing their hair in ponytails in some schools he taught to avoid “exciting” male students.
