Photos of Japanese elementary school documents, including contact books, have been posted on Chinese social media with the real names of teachers and pupils still visible, according to a parent who searched the platforms after interpreting in a school dispute.
The parent, writing in Bunshun Online, said the search followed work interpreting for a Chinese family in a dispute with a local public elementary school. Looking for similar cases, the parent searched Xiaohongshu — a Chinese social media platform similar to Instagram — and short-video sites for posts by Chinese parents about Japanese schools, and found many.
Most of what turned up was ordinary. Chinese parents in Japan wrote about kind nursery teachers, warm entrance ceremonies and making their first mother friends. Posts touching on political or historical friction between Japan and China were almost nonexistent, the parent wrote, and complaints tended to be about everyday matters such as cumbersome paperwork at government offices.
Faces left uncovered
One difference stood out: Chinese parents appeared less likely to put stickers or mosaic blurring over their children's faces. Japanese schools themselves have only become sensitive about publishing pupils' faces in graduation albums in the past decade or so, the parent noted, and attitudes to children's personal information vary widely between countries.
What the parent found harder to dismiss as a cultural difference was the volume of posts reproducing school paperwork and screenshots of messages exchanged with Japanese parents. These were uploaded to Chinese social media as they were, the parent wrote.
The Bunshun Online article describes the posts as showing a "chilling innocence" on the part of the parents who made them. It does not say how many such posts exist, which schools are involved, or whether any of the families or schools pictured have been told.