Most recently, they watched the 2005 Japanese drama 女王の教室 (Jyoou no Kyoushitsu/The Queen’s Classroom), an eleven episode series talking about a sixth-grade teacher who is generally referred to as the teacher from hell. While watching only a very little bit of the series, mainly the introduction, a bit of the middle, the ending, and some of the specials which talk about the teacher’s past, one thing really struck me, especially from the specials: children these days are really sheltered from the world around them.

(Spoilers follow, but if you want to watch the series, you can go here and start off your torrents. I would recommend watching the eleven episodes first before the two specials)

In the specials, we see the teacher’s first attempt at teaching at school, where there was a really spoiled child who basically taught her the things she mentions in her introduction to the class:

• Those who work hard or have influence get all the privileges (ie. the social elite)
• Only six in one hundred people can expect to be happy
• Being a member of the social elite gives you numerous advantages over the common man

Now these interactions were no where friendly to say the least. The boy, born into an influential Japanese family, had an older brother who died in a traffic accident and as a result, he was living under his brother’s shadow. As a result, the boy developed a superiority complex over his classmates, which he used to single out students he believed were inferior.

After the boy’s main bullying target attempted to commit suicide (which, in my opinion may or may not be true as we see the boy get intercepted at the school gates), an attempt to get some form of answer as to why he continued to harass students turned ugly as a fight broke out between the two inside the gym equipment room. The teacher was forced to go to a reform school for teachers, generally considered to be the place where teachers gave up their teaching careers while the boy lost his influence over the class and was generally ignored.

The bully victim ran into the teacher outside a tutoring center, letting her know what happened to the boy and how the former bully was going to transfer out because of his situation.

As I said earlier, he is a spoiled child. As he is the only remaining son, his mother is overly protective of him and puts what she thinks is best for the child onto him, thus being overly-protective. In the end, after some words from the teacher to the former bully, as well as his former victim coming out to show he cared, he made his own decision to go face his problems.

I’ve been through lots in these twenty-something odd years. As painful as some of the memories are, the message that they try to convey in this series is very true. While it may be hard to face the facts at times, we really need to open our eyes and see that the world isn’t fair and that we need to face our problems instead of running away from them.