Children's Voice Ignored

(Archive)

A girl is a girl with no home, even though she lives with her family… Suppose her name is Kanako. This is not her real name.

There is a high school girl who feels that she doesn’t belong anywhere. It is not about the welfare system that the politicians are discussing. There are too many children who are suffering in Japan at this moment.

The children want to kill themselves, end their lives. I am writing about a girl in a high school, not as news but as a story. However, sadly, this is based on a true story, and I hope people think about what society is for the children in Japan.

Why do children have to end their lives?

There was a high school girl who had a scholarship. Her father is a university associate professor, and her mother is a woman with a decent part-time job. Her father’s income is nearly 100,000 dollars, which is well enough for him to pay for Kanako and her brother to go to a decent university in Japan. Being an associate professor of a university secures social status as a university faculty. He seems like a very decent person in façade. However, he has a different face.

Due to repetitive abuse since childhood and negligence of mental care, Kanako is in serious depression. Even when I see her, I can tell that she has depression clearly.

I asked her, “What is going on with your family?”

Kanako has a younger brother, and her father is willing to ask for financing from the bank or her wife’s parents to pay for special education only for her son, not for Kanako. Kanako started to say, “My younger brother gets everything he wants. My father gets everything for himself, but not for me. Even education and my high school life.”