Yep. This is pretty much it. However, I remember a couple of specific incidents. One time the home room teacher noticed that a student's lunch box was not very good. It had all sorts of pre-packaged stuff and was mostly filled with sweets. So he ordered the mother in to the school. Amazingly she came and he spent an hour lecturing her on how she was ruining her son's life by giving him crap to eat. After she had cried an acceptable amount[0], he ordered her to come in once a week where he arranged cooking classes for her. She dutifully came in and the home room teacher along with the home ec teacher gave her explicit lessons on how to do the shopping and make nutritious and cheap lunch boxes. It was awesome and terrifying all at the same time!

Another time a student was caught smoking behind a convenience store. Smoking is a very serious offence in public high schools[1] and often results in expulsion. The teacher ordered the parents in to the school. He asked, "Which one of you smokes?" The father admitted that he smoked. The teacher lectured him on how he was setting a bad example for his son and ruining his future (you can probably see the pattern here...). So then the teacher brought in the student and they worked on a compromise that would allow the student to stay in school. The student would have a 2 week suspension and would agree never to smoke until after he turned 20. Then the teacher got the father to agree never to smoke in sight of his children again. Failure to comply would result in the immediate expulsion of the student.

The level of WTF from my Canadian cultural background in these instances was overwhelming. On the one hand I couldn't believe that the parents would allow the teacher to have so much authority over them. On the other hand, I couldn't believe that this stuff actually worked. For things like this, it's a different world over here...

[0] I discovered that students are trained very early on that teachers will lecture them until they cry. If you are not stubborn and you can learn how to cry, you can get away with almost anything. Even as adults it's the way society works. When you do something very, very bad (like line your pockets with public money as a politician) it is expected that you will go on TV, apologise and then cry. Then it seems like it's OK. It's very strange....

[1] There is a public school system and a private school system (not to be confused with "public schools" in the UK -- "public schools" in Japan are mostly government funded, while "private schools" are funded by tuition rates). Students choose to either go to public or private schools. There are many elite schools in both systems. However, if you get expelled from the public system, you can only be educated in the private system. For that reason, there are many private schools that cater to troubled students. Their rules are much, much, much more lax. Students who are about to get expelled and do not have money to go to a private school, must get a job. The school where the student goes takes responsibility for the student and arranges a job for them. In those cases the student is not expelled, but rather "decides that school is not for them and quits to take on a job". Many of those students then enroll in "night school", which is for students that dropped out and want to continue studying. This is also publicly funded (to the best of my knowledge -- although even public high schools have a tuition fee). Essentially the system is set up to filter students into institutions that (ostensibly) are better suited to deal with their specific issues. Sometimes this is abused by crap teachers who have a vendetta against certain students. Life can be cruel.