When a Japanese school forced a student to dye her naturally brown hair to black, she filed suit against the district in a case that began Friday.
An unidentified 18-year-old high school student from Osaka, Japan is suing the prefecture for “mental anguish” after school officials allegedly forced her to dye her brown hair to black. Her suit amounts to 2.2 million yen (roughly $20,000 USD), The Mainichi reported. The prefecture has called for the case to be dismissed.
Since junior high, the girl was allegedly forced to dye her hair black and her mother asked the high school “to take care not to let the same thing happen in high school.” However, the high school soon ignored her mother’s request and began forcing the student to dye her hair. The girl calls the incident “bullying in the name of guidance.”
The girl claimed that teachers inflicted psychological damage on the student, accusing her of having brown hair since she is from a “single-mother household.” She was also forbidden from attending certain activities, due to her natural hair color.
“Even if we had a blond foreign exchange student, we would force them to dye their hair black,” a school representative allegedly told the girl’s attorney.
Many schools in the Osaka Prefecture have a “brown hair registry” — an annotated list of every student in the district that was born with brown hair. As long as the shade of brown-hair students does not change they are supposedly safe from disciplinary action. The mother of the student claims that the school in dispute does not have a registry.
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