@Aurorastar My high school life mostly sucked and there was some nasty stuff. And for a long time after I always figured that school was this eternal thing and bullying was the same no matter where or when, maybe a bit tougher in tough neighbourhoods, with a bit more gloss of poshness in posh neighbourhoods, but basically the same. But it isn't.
On the fiction front, I've noticed that the Korean school setting is consistently depicted as nastier than the Japanese; Japanese school settings sometimes have bullying and negative stuff, but Korean school settings almost always have that stuff and it's always depicted as sort of universal and pervasive, where in Japanese settings it's often (though not always) just a few bullies without that much broader support.
On the real life front, I was astonished to find out that my daughter's schools were almost entirely bullying-free and social cliquism was much milder than my experience, largely because of conscious efforts from kindergarten on up to foster empathy and rejection of bullying-type interactions before anything serious even started. Rather than a harsh but ineffective zero-tolerance approach where the authorities smack the more egregious bullies down hard by . . . acting like bullies themselves . . . schools in my immediate area used a sort of nurturing approach where they brought the kids up to be nice to each other in the first place, and I was boggled that it actually seems to work. And I mean, my daughter's a misfit, half nerd, half rebel (generally awesome), someone who didn't fit tidily in anywhere. In my high school she'd have been a victim, but where she was she was pretty well accepted and she wasn't aware of anyone who really got harassed.