In one sense, Kokuhaku presents a situation so dark that it is nearly implausible, with one reviewer calling it “too grimly cynical to convince fully” (Huddleston 2011). Yet in another sense, Kokuhaku presents all the nightmarish fears that plague parents and the Japanese Ministry of Education alike: violent students, uncontrolled bullying, and ineffective teachers. The movie’s themes resonate with the phrase gakkyuu houkai, or “collapsing classrooms,” which became a household term in the early twenty-first century in Japan (Arai 2003: 370). As Andrea Arai describes, the media was filed with criticisms of youth’s diminishing “academic ability, physical strength and social skills” along with their increasing “excesses of desire for commodities and death” (Arai 2003: 370). As a general consensus, the Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995 and the Kobe child murders in 1997, both carried out by fairly youthful bodies, are seen to have instigated the moral panic in Japan, one that Japan’s educational system was responsible for fixing (Arai 2003: 370).
As a result of Japan’s moral crisis, the Ministry of Education released a series of educational reforms, stating the following in their 1998 Educational Reform Programme:

While life [for children] has become affluent and education has quantitatively expanded, the educational influence of the home and local community has declined, excessive examination competition has emerged as educational aspirations have risen, and the problems of bullying, school refusal, and juvenile crime have become extremely serious. It cannot be denied that to date in Japan, education has tended to fall into the trap of cramming knowledge into children, while the ability to learn and think for oneself has been neglected. (Cave 2001: 175)

The educational reform that followed included five-day school weeks (as opposed to having class on Saturday mornings), more flexible course choices for high school students, and increased numbers of six-year secondary schools, which would take away the necessity for high school entrance examinations for several students (Cave 2001: 179-181). While the changes would take several years to implement, the idea was to alleviate the academic stress placed on Japanese students, which was seen as much of the cause for the moral deterioration of the nation’s youth.