Japanese kids are tough
And by that I don’t mean that they’re aggressive or nasty, just that they’re made of tough stuff.
Consider this: kids as young as Grade 1 walk an hour to school and back every day with our two. They do this every day, rain hail or shine, in the depths of winter and through the typhoon season.
At school there is no heating except for oil heaters that sit in the middle of the classroom and are fired up only when the weather forecast is 10 degrees or below. In the refrigerator-like gymnasium, the students do PE classes in nothing more than shirts and shorts.
Needless to say there is no air-conditioning during the oppressive humidity of summer either.
And it seems to me that Japanese kids are also much more independent. Friends come over after school and when it’s time to go home, they just disappear off into the cold twilight. Sometimes they’ll get picked up by a parent, generally not. Likewise at soccer practice on Wednesday nights, most of the kids turn up on their bikes with not a parent in sight, and hang around until eight o’clock or later before heading home in the dark. Kids are used to getting around on their own. It’s not just a country thing; in Tokyo you see tiny little kids of six or seven lining up alongside commuters on the subway of a morning.
All of which means that our Western cotton-wool style of parenting (oh you poor things it’s raining, we’ll drive you to school today) just has to go. I dare say we’ve used up our quota of drop-offs already; Wednesday nights after soccer practice the kids don’t get to bed until about 9:30 pm, so on Thursday mornings we let them sleep in and drive them to school. Quite pathetic by Japanese standards, but clearly it’s going to take us a while to develop the necessary toughness.
This blog is about the adventures of a family of Australian barbarians spending two years in the islands of southern Japan. Stay tuned for regular updates on the food, the culture, the earthquakes, the wacky festivals, the school system and more. 
Comments
March 13th, 2010 at 3:41 pm
I think Japanese kids have it tough rather than are tough. Whether this is good thing or not is a matter of opinion. However, one clear problem for many Japanese children is the lack of relationship they have with their parents.
I think they develop independence simply because their parents are not around. I don’t think it is cultivated with good intentions (life skills etc) by parents. Socially and emotionally I have found Japanese kids very challenged. In my ten years of living in Japan I met very few kids who where talkative, outgoing and confident.
March 15th, 2010 at 3:28 pm
You could be onto something there SJ. Quite a few of the kids around here don’t seem to get much time with their parents, and we all know the classic tales of the overworked father who only gets to see his kids on the weekends. Surely that can’t be a good thing. On the other hand, most of the kids strike me as outgoing and confident. It’s an interesting issue, framed as it is within our own cultural expectations, and one which I want to explore more in the future.