All Posts from the Parenting Category

  • Skool holidays 2

    April 09, 2010  |  3

    All too soon, the skool holidays are over. Today we attended Ruby’s junior high school induction ceremony, another bow-fest that reached its nadir for me personally at the point where the principal finished greeting the new students, bowed four times (Japanese flag/distinguished guests/teaching staff/assembled audience), left the stage and resumed his seat only to get right back up again, bow four more times and ascend the stage to deliver his State of the Union address.  That’s eight in a row without a single word!

    Of course, I shouldn’t be so flippant. Graduating from primary school and starting out at junior high is a big deal, for the teachers and parents if not the students themselves. A decent ceremony is called for, and nobody does it better than the Japanese. Luckily this is as formal as it gets, according to my sources, until such time as either Felix or Ruby graduates again, neither of which is going to happen if we stick to our original plan of returning home after two years.

    Here’s Ruby in her new sailor-suit uniform (yes, they really call it that):

    skool uniform

    And here’s the Class ‘o’ 2010 getting ready for their skool foto.
    Can you spot the odd one out?

    skool foto 2

    Afterward we all repaired to the classroom to collect the two-foot-high stack of textbooks.

    in class

    More skool fotos are here.

    But back to the holidays. The highlight for me was not so much the hectic schedule of activities (some photos are here) as the opportunity for our kids to experience some new-found independence, country Japan style.

    On Friday Ruby headed off to the local shopping centre with her new best friends from school for a session on the Sticker Club machines. Known here as Puri-kura (short for Print Club), these are basically glorified photo booths where you all sit inside and take 7,000,000,000 pictures in different poses and then spend 15 hours decorating them with tiny little hearts flowers stars glitter spangles tinsel ribbons wigs hats bows etc etc, then print out the results and stick them in a book, like this:

    Puri-kura

    The girls stayed out the entire afternoon and all caught the bus back at 6 pm, which for us as parents was a major milestone in the Letting Go process, which I hear becomes increasingly important in the teenage years.

    Felix, meanwhile, discovered the joy of roaming the streets with the local kids. There was a group of about five or six who seemed to be at a loose end during the holidays and just hung around together. One day they all played at the park until dark; another day everyone came around here and mucked around in the garden; and a few times they raced around the streets for hours playing a local-area version of hide and seek that extended to people’s gardens. (Once Felix hid in our car and nobody could find him. Eventually they got bored searching and wandered off to do something else, leaving Felix alone and rather cheesed off.) In fact, it was very much like the idyllic notion, cherished so fondly by people of my generation, of the good old days when life was rosy and everyone played on the streets every day until dark. And I have to say, it worked a treat: son happily engaged, parents off the hook, he got to be rugged and independent, it didn’t cost us a cent. He even managed to amass an impressive collection of childhood scars, including the traditional elbow scabs plus a huge scrape on his bottom where he fell over in a ditch.

    Not to be outdone, Eleni spent the holidays cultivating her network of local connections, which resulted in one of her new best friends inviting her to a hanami party on Friday. Hanami technically means “cherry blossom viewing” but it’s really  just an excuse for a picnic. The idea is that you sit under the sakura trees admiring the view, but on Friday it so cold and windy that they shut themselves inside the local community centre instead. Another friend came around the other day to pass on some cooking tips and help Eleni plant some lettuces. And through her burgeoning network Eleni has also managed to join a women-only wadaiko (Japanese drumming) club; started ikebana lessons; and she’s even tracked down a piano teacher for the kids who lives just a few streets away. Now all we need is a piano.

    Speaking of flower arranging, here’s one Eleni prepared earlier:

    Ikebana 1
    Rather fetching for a first effort wouldn’t you say? (Not that I’d have any idea. For all I know it could have been assembled by a 70-year-old Ikebana grand master. All I know is I was captivated the juxtaposition of the fronds, the subtle variations in length, the contrast of shapes, the colour and movement, the aperture and focus and depth of field etc etc etc.)

    Oh, and we endured yet another ceremony during the holidays, this time an induction ceremony for Ruby’s new soccer club. Luckily the bpm rate was much lower at this one, although there were quite a few speeches, including an introduction from every player in the room.

    So I really think that’s quite enough ceremonies for me in this life, until such time as I finally walk Ruby down the aisle.

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  • Japanese kids are tough

    March 06, 2010  |  2

    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.

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