This paper examines the difficulty of the claims-making of "ijime" by victims. The word "ijime", that is applied to the experience of "victims", is prone to make them ashamed because they feel that the problem lies within themselves. So they are unwilling to make claims. Focusing upon the interrelation between the interaction order and the public discouse, I analyze the difficulty of the claims-making in the micro-politics of the trouble. In the face-to-face interaction, the smooth projection of the definition of the situation is maintained at the cost of covering the stigma that marks inferior traits. In the public discouse, although the idea that victims of "ijime" bear inferior traits is ruled out, it is assumed that the harmonizing the definitions of the situation must come before everything else to benefit victims. Upon that, because of the feature of the `ijime"-relevant category, the effort to dismiss contradictions about the definitions of the situation restores the word "ijime" as the sanction to the weak character of a participant in the micro-politics of the trouble process. Therefore, the claiming of "ijime" becomes difficult. But the dominant educational discourse heavily problematizes "ijime", so adults adopt the remedy that they must discover "the signs" of children being bullied. This remedy in which one implicitly detects the other's state of mind involves an assumption that the taken-for-granted definition of the situation is maintained smoothly by implicit tact, so it eliminates the conflict of the definitions of the situation through conversation. And it reinforces the difficulty of the claims-making about "ijime".
