So it’s been nice this time around to be here as a family, putting the kids in school, filling in the forms and reading the notices and doing all the mundane everyday stuff, and finally discovering that not everything works properly, that the Japanese make mistakes too, that despite the history and culture and food and everything they haven’t actually got life totally worked out after all. Yes! They’re just like us, trying to do the best they can in this crazy mixed-up world in which we live in [Paul McCartney].

But just when I was starting to believe that the Japanese are mere mortals, it turns out that there is still one area where they’re super-human, and that’s sleep. The kids here somehow manage to get by on less sleep than seems right. Felix’s normal bed-time of 8 pm, for instance, is absolutely laughable; none of his friends would be in bed before 9, many of them later still. And yet every person I speak to—teachers especially, but parents too—will decry the trend towards later bedtimes. The other day we were given an official government pamphlet that urges children to get more sleep. Apparently 57% of Year 6 kids go to bed after 10 pm on weeknights, while a mere 6% get to bed before 9 pm. Somehow I think that pamphlet’s been wasted on us.

I remember grappling with this very issue back in Italy, where they also put their kids to bed late, but at least the Italians have a valid excuse: the afternoon siesta. Whereas here in Japan, the kids are trained to stay up late and survive on less sleep as part of the legendary toughening up process. Or is it that we misguided Westerners have trained our kids to be too sleep dependent, putting them to bed ridiculously early for years on end until their pathetic soft bodies start to think that they actually need that much rest? Perhaps it’s a bit of both. In any case, it’s clear that we’ll need to work on our two if they are to survive the next couple of years without collapsing in a heap at some point.

Anyway here’s some photos from Felix’s matches on the weekend.

Lining up after the match to bow to the opposing team:

Hanging around between matches:

As you can see, the pitch is just a massive sandy area. Many sporting pitches in Japan are like this, as are all school grounds. Perhaps Australia could take a leaf out of Japan’s book and do away with water-hungry grass pitches altogether; it would certainly be cheaper.

Meanwhile only a handful of Ruby’s compatriots at Mihara UFC stayed on after the graduation ceremony in March, because junior high school is much more demanding and most don’t have the time to fit in soccer practice as well. As a result, there is no Wednesday night training session as such; instead they take part in a full-on scratch match involving all the local soccer fanatics. The teams are a mixed bag of players, including some of the coaches (in their 40s and 50s but still really agile); a few young men in their 20s or early 30s who look like they might have been professionals at one stage; and the youth players. They all just turn up, half of them put on bibs and away they go. It’s a fast and frenetic pace and the foot skills from some of them are quite incredible to watch. Ruby was naturally apprehensive at first, but during her first hit-out last week she held her own admirably down the left flank and even got a few handy crosses into the box. She was reasonably pleased with her effort afterward, and I think the scratch matches will be a fantastic experience, because there’s no room for being timid and pathetic when you’re playing against adults.

Meanwhile, Ruby is also in another all-girl team that’s affiliated with the J-League team Hiroshima Sanfrecce. This is a more serious outfit (certainly in terms of the uniform costs) though tragically the training ground is located an hour away and requires a train and bus ride, so we can’t make all the training sessions. Sanfrecce organise regular weekend matches where all the girls pile onto the special Sanfrecce purple bus and are whisked off to the game then delivered back in the afternoon.

Like Felix’s team, the players don’t have set positions as such, mainly because the coaches never know who’s going to turn up on the day. It’s quite a different approach to what we’re used to in Australia; however it seems to work. Perhaps the team structure will begin to form as the year wears on.

Here’s what Ruby’s team looks like:

They’re all a bit wet and bedraggled because it was raining that day.

Stay tuned for match reports will full details, including video footage if I can manage it.

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):

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

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

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:

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:

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.

But we all decided that the formality wasn’t such a bad thing. Certainly it provided a stark contrast to the graduation ceremony in Australia, where the highlights included the video projector stubbornly refusing to work and Ruby’s certificate being mislaid altogether so that she would have missed out entirely had her pernickety father not had a stern word to some of the teachers.

And I am pleased to report that the graduation outfit so painstakingly assembled over the previous weeks was deemed acceptable on the day and did not cause any embarrassment. What’s more, as the newest member of the class and therefore the last on the roll, Ruby ended up being the last one out the door with the responsibility of uttering the final words of the ceremony (“Thangyou and goodniiiiiight!” or words to that effect) and delivering the very last bow of the day:

Note the angle, the straight head, the hands by the side. The kids may not have done too much study in the last few weeks but they sure know how to bow properly.

I should also mention that Felix for his part did an excellent job of keeping still for 90 minutes, possibly the longest time he’s ever stayed in the same place since birth.

After the ceremony we all went back to the Grade Six classroom where the students lined up to present Miss Wada with a parting gift of a flower. Thankfully it was a much more informal atmosphere (only 0.2 bpm approx. as measured on the Bow-o-Meter).

The next day saw yet another ceremony, this time to farewell all the teachers who are leaving the primary school. The Education Department has a policy of rotating teaching staff at regular intervals whether they like it or not. And judging by the farewell ceremony, many of them do not like it one little bit. Both Ruby’s grade six teacher Miss Wada and the wonderful skool principal Mrs. Haruta had been given their marching orders along with six other teachers and support staff, and the ceremony soon turned into a vast outpouring of emotion. All eight teachers gave speeches, many of them dissolving into floods of tears along the way. Several of the students who had to formally thank the teachers suffered a similar fate. A number of the younger children in the audience became inconsolable and could be heard emitting muffled howls throughout the ceremony. The kids were crying; the teachers were crying; even Eleni was moved to tears and we’ve only been here two months. Surely this can’t be right. I think I might have to have a quiet word with the Education Department.

More skool photos are here.

Hang on, I hear you say, surely you don’t graduate from a soccer club?

Well if you’re in Japan, where they love nothing more than a good ceremony, then yes you do. The end of primary school graduation is a truly major event (hear what Ruby has to say about rehearsals for her upcoming graduation here) and the soccer club likes to follow suit. And because few of the kids will be sticking with soccer, given all the club activities they are expected to undertake at high school, the soccer graduation really does represent the end of an era.

Thus it was that Saturday’s normal training session was followed by a little ceremony in which the director and president gave speeches, each of the coaches gave speeches, the graduating kids gave speeches… there were lots of speeches. And then there were presentations. They even made each kid give their parent a flower to say “thanks for taking me to training week in week out for the past six years.”  I do believe that’s the first time I’ve ever been given a flower by anyone, let alone my daughter. (Not that she thought of it herself; and as we all know it’s the thought that counts.)

I should at this point give some background about the club. It’s called Mihara UFC and it’s a small club with probably not more than 100 kids, as befits a town of about 100,000. They train on Wednesdays and Saturdays, with additional futsal training/matches on Monday and Thursday nights for the super-keen. (We’re not quite at that stage yet.) There isn’t a defined season with matches every week and league ladders and an eventual champion; instead, they train all year round and once or twice per month they organise all-day round-robin competitions with nearby teams, usually called the Something-or-other Cup. Ruby’s first match is coming up on 20-21 March (a two-day affair, although if you get knocked out on the Saturday you don’t both turning up on Sunday), and Felix has his first one on April 24.

Like any local soccer club, Mihara UFC is basically run by volunteers, including all the coaches. It’s obviously a more informal environment than the primary school, and this has provided Ruby and Felix with a vastly different challenge in terms of settling in: given that there was no formal introduction by the school principal, the other kids pretty much ignored them at first simply because they didn’t know what to do with them (or if they could speak Japanese). But this impasse didn’t last too long. Felix, as you might expect, zoomed right in without a care, but Ruby, as you might also expect, took a while to come to grips with the idea of playing in a team of boys. Then she warmed to the idea. Then we discovered that there was in fact another girl who must have been away. Then Ruby decided that she wanted to be the ONLY girl in the team, before finally deciding that she might be able to accommodate another girl after all. (Such a princess.)

In any case, it all changes again when the new school year kicks off in April. With so few of the Grade Sixes expected to return, those that do stay on are nominally lumped in together in what’s called the Youth team. So Ruby will be playing alongside boys from Year 7 (her compatriots) as well as years 8 (including the Other Girl, who is called Momo and is actually very nice), Year 9 and possibly Year 10. She’ll have to really run hard and learn to push them out of the way if she wants the ball.

In other exciting news, the Mihara UFC director has entered Ruby in an all-girl team that’s associated with Hiroshima Sanfrecce, the local J-League team. In other words it’s like playing for the U13 Girls division of Melbourne Victory. As you can imagine I’m very excited about this. Training is on Friday nights and involves a train ride to a nearby town. Momo is also in this team so the two of them can catch the train together and become firm friends and all that soppy parent stuff.

Stay tuned for a full report on this weekend’s Whatever-it-is Cup…

With the end of the school year approaching I’ve been reflecting on the Japanese school experience lately.  The eight-hour day and the two hours of walking seemed ridiculously long at first,  but I’ve started to come around to the idea. In a nutshell: it’s better to be busy than bored.

For instance, Felix used to play Mario Kart an awful lot back in Melbourne; now he barely gets near it. Is this a good thing (less fixation with video games) or a bad thing (less free time for playing)? After all, he still finds time to play with friends once or twice per week, either at the park or here at home, or at someone’s house. In fact, he seems to get together with friends here more than he did in Melbourne. It’s much easier to organise after-school plays since they all walk home together. Sometimes I get a call from his friend’s house: he’s dropped in for a play and won’t be home until later. Whereas in Melbourne it was often hard to fit in play dates around after-school activities: swimming, soccer, football, karate etc.

Which brings me to my other point: with the school day being so long, there’s less time for shunting kids around after school to millions of different activities. Does this make Japanese children less well-rounded? I don’t think so. And do we actually need all these activities anyway? It could be argued that we do it partly just to keep the kids engaged during the pre-dinner window, so they don’t end up playing video games all afternoon. In this sense, Japanese school does the job for you by keeping the kids occupied for a few more hours. Once they do get home there’s time for homework, dinner, bath and not much else. I used to think that this was a terrible restriction on their free time, but now I quite like the idea. (Although another half hour in the evenings wouldn’t go astray.)

And it turns out that despite the lack of time, we quite often manage to squeeze in a family game or two after dinner, something that happened only occasionally in Melbourne. (Monopoly Deal is the game of choice at the moment — thanks to the K Family!). Our days are busy, exhausting and highly organised — but never boring.

Another benefit of the Japanese schooling system is that it makes the kids more independent (as detailed here). We shove them out the door in the morning and welcome them home nine or ten hours later. They walk to and from school in their designated walking groups, unaccompanied (and unencumbered) by adults. In the process they make friends and learn both how to be independent and how to be part of a group . And this can only be a good thing in terms of self-confidence and independence (particularly in light of my propensity to be just a teeny bit over-protective).

There is a downside of course:  I miss taking the kids to school and picking them up. I miss chatting with other parents in the school yard. I miss school life in general, what with all the concerts, presentations and sporting events that used to go on at Ripponlea. They do have special days where all the parents are allowed to observe a couple of designated classes, but it’s not quite the same. A couple of weeks ago Eleni and I organised with the principal to come in and watch Ruby and Felix in action, which was fun, but you can’t keep doing that all the time.

I guess I’ll just have to learn to be a bit more independent myself.

At this point I should backtrack a little: Felix received his first love letter last Monday! It was from a girl whose name escapes me for the moment, but it was very cute. We have vowed to keep it in a safe place and bring it out at his 21st (with subtitles). Meanwhile,  two more of his admirers came around  after the school the next day and helped him to frame a response (polite and thankful without sounding too keen). I haven’t heard if there’s been any further developments or whether they are fighting amongst one another for his affections, but it’s certainly nice to see him playing with the opposite gender on equal terms.

Ruby had her induction into the local high school today (see official here ) and got measured up for her very own sailor suit. Eleni and I went along too, because we’ve got nothing better to do than hang around and embarrass our daughter. It was all rather austere and formal, but I think (I hope) that was due to the nature of the occasion; in any case, I met a few of the students afterward and they certainly seemed very happy and content and not at all austere. Actually one of them lives right near the park where we play soccer and I’ve chatted to her before, so she will be able to show Ruby the ropes from April onwards. The high school has the requisite massive gymnasium and pool (despite having just 81 students in years 7-9) and is also located further up the hill with rather lovely views of the sea. Not that Ruby will have any time for gazing out the window by the sound of it.

• First of all, the official website is here (Japanese only obviously, but a nice picture of the cherry blossoms in bloom).

• The school day starts at 8:10 and finishes at 4:00, except on Wednesdays, when they finish at the outrageously early time of 3:30.

• Currently there are 131 students altogether in Years 1 through 6. Class sizes are 20-25, which is small by Japanese standards. There is also a kindergarten on the site with 20 tinies.

• The school has a huge yard covered in packed sand (Lilydale topping?) like on the Tan around the Botanical Gardens. (Grassed areas are rare at schools and in public parks in Japan.)

• There is an impressive indoor gymnasium with a stage down one end, and even an outdoor pool that will open up in about June.

• Every day after lunch the kids all have to help clean the school. Each class has allotted duties; I don’t know what Felix’s class does but Ruby’s class has to clean out the toilets!

• They get cooked school lunches every day.

• There is no such thing as playlunch, so in the morning we must feed them up properly so that they can last until the cooked lunch arrives at 12:40.

• There are six periods in the day, and between each period the kids get to run outside for ten minutes to stretch their legs.

• They don’t have to wear school uniform.

• During winter (ie now), they don’t turn on the heaters in the classrooms unless the outside temperature is below 10° C. Most of the kids wear massive fluffy coats with furry collars while studying at their desks.

• The kids have to take off their shoes at the entrance and put on special school slippers called uwabaki. At lunchtime and for outdoor sports, they put their outdoor shoes back on again.

• Felix was rapt to discover that there are enough boys of his age who like soccer to form two teams at lunchtime. There are even goals in the playground.

And it’s fair to say that the kids are thoroughly fed up with hearing some or all of the following from our friends and family:

• You’re so lucky!

• You’re going to have so much fun

• It’ll be such a good experience/It’ll be so good for your education

• You’ll be so fluent at Japanese

• You’ll thank your parents when you’re older

To which they are no doubt thinking:

• What about all my friends/my toys/my things?

• I don’t like Japanese food

• Do we have to?

and quite possibly:

• Are we there yet?

And I can see their point. Ruby in particular has built up a close circle of friends during her last year at primary school and she’s not too happy to be leaving them all. And it will be pretty tough at first, getting up to speed with the language. And it is a wrench, that’s for sure. Even I’m scared, and I’ve lived there for five years.

But think of all the positives: endless supplies of sushi; cute mobile phones with Kitty dolls hanging off them; vastly superior stationery materials (better even than Smiggle); new friends; guarantees of extra MSN and Facebook time to make up for the loss of old friends; and last but not least, more time together as a family (!!).

For that they’ll surely thank us when they’re older.