The overwhelming majority of middle and high school students in Japan are required to wear uniforms, and so it’s no surprise that Japanese schools tend to have lots of other rules governing students’ personal appearance. One that’s been attracting controversy in recent years, though, is a requirement at some schools that all students must have black hair.

The ostensible reason for the rule is that almost all Japanese people have naturally black hair, and so they’ll only have non-black hair if they’ve chosen to dye it a different color. Such willful, discretionary standing out from the norm is seen as a distraction and/or lack of earnestness according to orthodox Japanese values, and thus counterproductive to the collective student body’s academic development.

However, an incident in 2017 sparked debate when it highlighted that requiring students to have black hair and forbidding them to dye it aren’t always one and the same, and in fact can sometimes be complete opposites. You’ll notice in the last paragraph that we sad almost all Japanese people have naturally black hair, and that’s because some of them don’t. While it’s relatively rare, some Japanese people are born with hair that has a natural brown tint to it, and one such girl who was attending high school in Osaka was forced to dye her naturally brown hair black, resulting in damage to her scalp and prompting a 2.2 million-yen lawsuit against the school.

While the lawsuit is still ongoing, opponents of school policies requiring students to dye their natural hair in order to look more like it isn’t dyed to unaccustomed eyes can celebrate one victory. On July 30, Hiroki Komazaki, head of children and family advocacy NPO Florence, presented a petition to the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education. The petition, which had collected 19,065 signatures since May, asked that schools be prohibited from instructing naturally non-black-haired students to dye their hair, and the board gave its word that the request will be met, with High School Educational Guidance Section head Seiichi Sato saying:

However, the board stopped short of complying with the petition’s request that municipal high schools be required to mention on their official websites that students with non-black hair will not be required to dye it, saying that the primary purpose of the websites is for each institution to communicate what makes its school unique and special.