If the system is ineffective for those who can keep up with it, it is downright useless for those who have fallen through the cracks. In his latest non-fiction book "Junanasai No Satsujinsha" (Seventeen-year-old Murderers), crime writer Seiji Fuji reveals the institutionalized problems that turned a troubled adolescent into a murderer. Last year, a busjacking by a seventeen-year-old boy that ended in the murder of an elderly female passenger, received national media attention. A long history of psychiatric problems, cause in part by incessent bullying at school, plauged the youth who, at one points, endured a two month hospital stay for injuries incurred when his classmates forced him to jump a five meter ledge. Though his mother had appealed to his teachers for help, the school remained unresponsive and he eventually dropped out of school, becoming a statistic among the growing number of students who engage in hikkikomori (withdrawal from school and or society). When the boy began to exhibit violent behavior, the mother appealed to the police and psychiatric hospitals for help. The police were reluctant to assist, and the hospital released the boy three days before the busjacking.

Fuji, however, does not only believe that increasing violent tendencies are limited to Japanese youth. Adults are becoming more violent as well. "People really need to throw out the misconception that Japan is a safe country, or that 'it won't happen to me,' state of mind," Fuji warns in a recent Davinci magazine interview.

At least the mother of the busjacker tried to find help. Many parents and teachers, under the latent pressure of societal conventions, sweep possibly dangerous psychiatric problems surreptitiously under the carpet. While in America mental illness abounds as a fashionable social accessory, mental illness in Japan is still very much a taboo.

In a 1997 case that sent collective shivers down the nation's spine, a fourteen-year-old decapitated a younger mentally challenged male neighbor and placed the severed head at the front steps of the local school. The boy had also bludgeoned two girls while riding past them on a bicycle. One of the girls later died at a nearby hospital. A police investigation unearthed a pattern of chilling brutality in the teen who often cruelly bullied his male victim and habitually eviscerated stray cats around his neighborhood. The court ordered mandatory rehabilitation. But Takaaki Mori, a counselor who worked with the young murderer, seriously questions whether the reformatory has even come close to changing his violent proclivities.

"The school is only concerned with keeping the boy in line and has no intention of believing in these boys," Mori stated in a recent article on japantoday.com. "It's doubtful whether the school can rehabilitate these kids."

Mori, who was supposed to spend ten sessions counseling wayward youth on the sanctity of life, was sacked from the center after only two sessions for allowing the boys to speak too freely. Hiroshi Yahata, a clinical psychologist in Japan, speculated on the reasons for Mori's dismissal for japantoday.com.

"Battle Royale," for all of its violence, will garner a few mediocre to bad reviews, while in the long run Japan's education system must answer for so much more.

And, here in America, the new administration pursues an aggressive agenda of student testing as the core of its education program despite opposition from teachers' organizations and PTAs across the nation.

Fukasaku, who met socially with Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara last week, made some pointed jabs at the government's stance, quipping that he'd like to film a "Battle Royale II" at Tokyo's City Hall. "But there are too many regulations here," he joked.