On the night of Feb 25, some 95 people attended a pre-graduation
“sayonara” party for university seniors at a pub in Kyoto City. At
some point in the evening, a co-ed, aged 19 at the time, fell into
a semiconscious stupor from overindulgence in alcohol, was escorted
into an adjacent room and sexually assaulted by six members of
Kyoto University of Education’s American football and soccer
teams.
On June 1—more than three months after the incident—university
president Mitsuyo Terada appeared at a press conference to announce
that the institution would slap them with an open-ended suspension
for having committed “obscene acts.”
“A university is not an investigating body,” Terada stated
somewhat lamely. “The measures we took were intended as corrective
in nature.”
A police source informs Nikkan Gendai (June 3) that it was not
until March 27 that the woman, described as “unable to hold her
liquor,” consulted the police regarding her assault.
“The six men were arrested on June 1,” the source relates. “Four
admitted to going all the way; two insisted they only ‘touched’ the
victim but did not rape her.
Kyoto University of Education is a public institution with roots
going back to 1876, when it was founded as a pedagogical school.
Its adjusted standard deviation score (class curve) of 53 would
place it in the mid-tier in terms of academic standing. According
to its English website
http://www.kyokyo-u.ac.jp/ehp/english/index.html, 52 foreign
students are enrolled.
“The university is well regarded as an institution that
graduates teachers,” remarks Yutaka Doi, a Kyoto-based author.
“This city, with a population of 1.47 million, is home to 37
universities, of which seven are public. Kyoto University of
Education rates in the top segment. But I think this incident ruins
whatever image they had as a ‘clean’ school.”
Four years earlier, Nikkan Gendai recalls, members of the
American football club at the elite Kyoto University, a
world-famous institution, had been involved in a gang rape.
With 138,509 university and junior college
students—approximately one-tenth of the city’s total
population—Kyoto is a said have long enjoyed the status as a
“student-friendly” town. But for Kyoto University of Education not
to expel the six for committing rape is taking indulgence too
far.
“The problem is that the perpetrators were students in the
Faculty of Education,” opines the abovementioned author Doi. “In
Kyoto, these students still engage in chug-a-lug contests at
parties. Under the pretext of preserving tradition, they think
they’re entitled to special privileges, and that they can get away
with anything.
“They’re more overbearing and insolent than students in Tokyo,”
Doi adds. “I think it was this kind of smug attitude that led to
the rape incident at Kyoto University (in 2005) and this recent
one.”
It would seem, the reporter concludes, that the downside of
Kyoto’s convivial climate for students is that it fosters a sense
of entitlement that all too often leads to their running amok.