A blog about adventures, academia, adoption and other things starting with the letter 'A'. I'm a geek, a metal head, a shiba inu wrangler and a vegetarian, and I write about all of the above. You have been warned!
During a cult meeting, a young mother expressed concern that
her two year old son was behaving violently towards his big brother, and asked
for advice. A more experienced mother spoke up to share the story of her
youngest. He was always getting into fights, wrestling other children to the
ground and hitting them. By the tender age of four he had earned the nick-name “The
Grappler” and was known as such by the entire neighbourhood. His mother spent
many hours worrying about his behaviour. Then he started school. Many Japanese
elementary schools keep some sort of small animals like rabbits or chickens. A
school in my area has a very sad looking dog. In previous years monkeys were
popular but they (thankfully) seem to have fallen out of favour these days. The
school The Grappler attended was a rural school, and instead of fluffy bunnies
they had a belligerent billy goat all the first graders were terrified of. On
the first day of school The Grappler walked right up to the goat, grabbed his
horns and wrestled him to the ground, winning fame and popularity for the entirety
of his elementary school years. And so, his mother concluded, even violent
traits can be positive in the right context.
Reason #2 for the long time between photos is that my older sister came to visit so we have been busy hanging out with monkeys, ninja and playing in the snow.
Love Japan's sunny winters
We were chased by this ninja, but Tiger defeated him
I am happy to
report that no children were injured this year, although there was "an
incident" last year no one wants to talk about. One firework did shoot
downwards instead of up, but it missed the kids.
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means if you click then buy the item I get a small commission. It
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to the subject of a post. If you want to know why I have begun including
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I haven't obscured her face because it was so long ago that I can't imagine her being recognisable today
I have no idea who this child is. I was having dinner with
some friends circa 2005, and her parents just walked over, put her in my lap
and took a photo. I’m not sure who was more freaked out about the situation,
her or me.
I was walking with the man-person recently when a little girl,
about five years old, yelled out 外人だ (foreigners!) and broke away from
her mother, running over and throwing her arms around my waist. Beaming up at
me she pleaded 遊ぼう (play with me)??
It’s been the case for a long time that foreigners,
specifically English-speaking foreigners, have been prominently employed in the
education field. A lot of kids have happy experiences playing with a fun,
cheerful foreigner at an “international pre-school”, English conversation
class, baby “let’s sing and play in English” class and of course at elementary
school. It’s not surprising that kids see us and assume that we are there to
entertain and play with them. What is slightly less understandable is the way
adults push children to interact for them.
“Ask her where she’s from” the mother on the bus will ask her child in
Japanese. The child turns to me and says “where are you from?” in Japanese. I
answer in Japanese. “What is she saying?” The mother asks the child, and the
child repeats exactly what I said back to the mother. “Wow, foreign languages
really are easier for children!” The mother marvels. The child and I roll our
eyes in synchronisation.
While I don’t mind at all (I love kids and do actually find
them easier to communicate with), I wonder how safe it is for the children
involved. I guess paranoia about stranger-danger is a very un-Japanese thing, and I usually like that about Japan.
No idea where they were heading after we decided to go home... or what they were doing in the red light district in the first place for that matter. A lot of the working girls bring their children to 'work' with them, but this lady wasn't dressed like the usual employees in the area.
Once when an Australian friend was visiting we were out in the red light district
late on a Friday night, on our way back from some all-you-can-drink karaoke. A
woman with a six year old boy wanted to practice her English and engaged some
of our group in conversation while the visiting friend and I played a wild game
of tag/dragon ball through the nearby park and side streets. His mother never
even turned around to see where he was. While I think it is wonderful that
children are given more freedom and that society as a whole looks out for all
children in a communal way in Japan, I was pretty shocked by that particular
incident. A group of drunk strangers, chasing a very little boy through the
bushes in the red light district in the wee hours of the morning surely
warrants at lest the occasional look-see. Being foreign doesn’t automatically
mean someone is safe to leave your child unattended with, any more than being
foreign makes them automatically more dangerous.
Excuse the poor quality photos, I only had my phone camera handy
A couple of times a year I get to teach at kindergartens.
It’s chaotic, scary and absolutely amazing in every way. Kindergarten is an
invaluable gateway between the comfortable, pampered world of home, which is
the only life most children have ever experienced, and the structured,
self-reliant atmosphere of elementary school. Children learn to be separated
from their mothers, to work in groups and to deal with conflicts with other
children. The emphasis is on physical development and social behaviour, with
very little attention to academics in the public kindergartens I have
experienced.
Stilts, hula-hoops, balance walk and mattress to jump onto. What more could a five year old want?
One principal told me that she tries to teach the hiragana
syllabry to the children before they go to school, but every other principal I
have talked to seemed to think that this was inappropriate. Large picture books
are always available and pre-literacy skills are taught, but any specific of
reading and writing seem uncommon, as is numeral recognition. Instead the day
consists of free play, structured play, crafts, singing and dancing, story
time, music lessons and lunch. When it comes time for lunch, the kids are
expected to set up tables and chairs. The tables are often the kind with legs
that fold down flat. They are too heavy for five year olds to set up alone and
the metal clips for the legs are too rigid for their little hands to release.
They have to work together as a group in order to erect the table (preferably
without catching their fingers in the workings). This is done largely
unsupervised because the adults prepare tea or additional snacks during the set
up time. The kids have to organise themselves and cooperate, and they do.
The teachers have buried objects in the sand box for the little archaeologists to excavate
Bare-foot play is not a problem
Whenever possible the kids are encouraged to play outside.
This inner city kindergarten has various
activity stations the children move between at will.
Restaurant corner. The knives have rounded tips but are serrated and cut nicely.
A kindergarten on the
fringes of a remote suburb interrupted free play to put the kids through a sort
of obstacle course challenge designed to improve strength and coordination and
including monkey bars and pogo-sticks. That kindergarten also had free-range
chickens. Every morning the kids would run around looking for eggs and if they
found any they got a mid-morning snack. A rural kindergarten I visited once
included a stroll in the forest to collect pine cones and acorns to use in
craft activities. Many kindergartens have rabbits or hamsters so that children
can experience taking care of animals and learn to be gentle. I like pretty much everything about the kindergartens I have worked at (the exception being the expectation that the kids wear t-shirts and shorts all year round).
This is harder to balance on than it looks...
I saw a segment on "super preschools"* on TV the other day. Each of the featured pre-schools had a special focus, whether English lessons, kanji or athletics. Skip to around 3:00 in this video to see the very small children tackling an impressive hill.
My personal favourite was the "playing in the dirt" pre-school http://www.doronko.biz/index.html (have a look, there are some gorgeous photos).
The children are encouraged to test their physical limits playing freely outside: climbing tall trees, splashing in mud, and caring for goats and chickens. Between energetic play the children are taught 座禅、seated zen meditation. The idea is that they learn to self-regulate their emotional arousal, a vital skill for elementary school. Being excited during exciting activities is important, but so is the ability to quickly change focus to an activity that requires calm concentration. The panellists on the TV show talked at length about the tree climbing. Many parents are afraid of their child getting hurt these days, they said, so children aren't being allowed to fully explore their physical capacities. An Olympic medallist observed that children can't come to properly control their bodies if parents and teachers are always controlling it for them, imposing restrictions from the outside (I think that's what he was saying, my Japanese isn't great). They then showed statistics about a massive increase over the past thirty years in elementary school kids injuring themselves and others. I think they were saying that childhood has been getting less physical, and as a result children don't understand natural consequences or their own limits. I find this fascinating.
I love the way children in my area are free to engage in unsupervised "dangerous play". They learn to assess risks, understand their own boundaries through experience, and if they do hurt themselves adults expect them to take responsibility for whatever stupid thing they did that they should have known better than to try. Yet, while I like it in theory, I know with absolute certainty that I couldn't control my own fear enough to sit back and watch my five year old climb an 8 foot tree. After decades of removing anything that could cause a boo-boo from playgrounds in Australia and the US, it seems that the pendulum is swinging back and the advantages of letting children take risks are being promoted again:
After observing children on playgrounds in Norway, England and Australia, Dr. Sandseter identified six categories of risky play:
exploring heights, experiencing high speed, handling dangerous tools,
being near dangerous elements (like water or fire), rough-and-tumble
play (like wrestling), and wandering alone away from adult supervision.
The most common is climbing heights.
“Climbing equipment needs to be high enough, or else it will be too
boring in the long run,” Dr. Sandseter said. “Children approach thrills
and risks in a progressive manner, and very few children would try to
climb to the highest point for the first time they climb. The best thing
is to let children encounter these challenges from an early age, and
they will then progressively learn to master them through their play
over the years.”
Sometimes, of course, their mastery fails, and falls are the common form
of playground injury. But these rarely cause permanent damage, either
physically or emotionally. While some psychologists
— and many parents — have worried that a child who suffered a bad fall
would develop a fear of heights, studies have shown the opposite
pattern: A child who’s hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely
as a teenager to have a fear of heights. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/science/19tierney.html
In Japan this is just common sense; but in Japan, too, there seems to be a tenancy for contemporary parents to be more risk-averse in their parenting style than previous generations were.
When we asked Director Kumagai if she thought that families and children have changed in the past twenty years, she responded: 'Yes. Everyone is running scared. Parents overprotect children and themselves. They fear the world. They fear forming relationships with others, fear that a relationship they might get into will become strained, so they don't form relationships, and as a result are isolated. They fear germs, so they keep their children away from others. They fear dirt, so they keep their kids away from dirt, sand, and nature. They are afraid of encountering problems in life. But if there were no problems, that would be the real problem. Life is full of problems. Our job as early educators isn't to protect children from problems, but instead to put them in situations where they can experience problems and struggle to find solutions.' Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited: China, Japan, and the United States, Joseph Tobin, Yeh Hsueh, and Mayumi Karasawa, 2011.
*There is a distinction between day-care/preschools and kindergartens, but the lines is very hazy, with many pre-schools offering a kindergarten year for the older kids and some kindergartens offering day-care services for younger kids. Consequently I'm not bothering to make a distinction, although I am aware it will annoy some people.
This post contains an Amazon affiliate link. That means if you click it
then buy the book I get a small commission. It does not mean that I am
being paid to promote a particular product or opinion. I will only
include affiliate links that are directly related to the subject of a
post. If you want to know why I have begun including affiliate links you can read about it here.
Today is Setsubun, one of my favourite seasonal festivals. Unfortunately I am stuck under the kotatsu blowing my nose and can't enjoy it much this year though [/selfpity]. I was going to write a nice educational post all about what Setsubun is and how to celebrate it, but there are so many good posts on the topic that you should really read those instead. Like Fran-Japani's. Or Gaijin Wife's.
In summery, dried soybeans are thrown while saying “ogres out, fortune in”. This is
meant to both ensure a safe and fortunate year and also to bring spring
on. I say “ogre” here for the Japanese “oni”. Some people translate oni
as devil. I think that’s because they are often red and have horns.
Otherwise it’s a silly translation. The oni live in mountains, carry
clubs and dress in tiger pelts. They carry off and eat children. My
perspective is skewed because I first encountered oni in the picture
book “The Red Ogre Who Cried”. It’s a beautiful book about a gentle oni.
Anyway, it’s traditional for someone to dress as an oni so that really
little kids can throw beans AT THEM, making the whole thing more
exciting. This isn't some kind of morality tale where kids get to triumph over the oni though. It's all about the age-honoured Japanese tradition of scaring the crap out of tiny children. In all seriousness, I think it's great. This video is from a kindergarten. As you can see, the Oni don't hold much back. Notice that the boy who repeatedly tries to stand up to the Oni and throw his beans at them gets particularly targeted, eventually getting "abducted". This is a common "Oni" tactic. Can't have the kids being too brave!
In years past my delightful partner got to play the role of oni at the preschool where he worked. The staff
prepared a hit-list of children for the oni (including the girl who had
told everyone she “wasn’t afraid of ogres”). The kids
(some of whom are as young as two) were gathered in a room and sang a
song to cheer themselves up. The Mr and his fellow oni came stomping down
the hall, banging on the walls; at first in time with the song but
gradually increasing the tempo until the song could not drown out the
sound. They burst into the room and began terrifying the children,
throwing the targeted kids over their shoulders and dragging them away
to a store room. One kid remembered his beans and valiantly flung them
with all his might, trying to rally his friends into defensive
formation, but it so happened that he too was on the hit-list and he was
promptly dragged away. The reduction of tiny children to terrified
sobbing messes is a much beloved part of the pre-school experience here.
I’m sure they’ll laugh about it one day… The terror didn’t stop there, however. The staff kept it up for weeks. A
group of kids went to the toilet and some came back before another; the Mr was furious with them for “abandoning” their friend “when you know there are
ogres around”. They were tearfully bracing themselves to go back out
into the newly terrifying corridors to secure their friend when he
returned in one piece. The sound of road works nearby was
designated as “ogres beating their clubs”. Any staff member who hadn’t
been seen for a while was presumed eaten. Hilarious fun for all the adults and probably only mildly scaring for the kids. In all seriousness though, I think the mixture of terror but suspicion that it's probably actually completely safe makes for a good experience for the kids. They get the exhilaration of the adrenaline but they can "check in" with their caregivers and see that they aren't genuinely panicking at the same time. It's like a safe way to experience a real fright. Much better than roller-coasters. Setsubun isn't the only occasion that kids get terrified by the way, just the only time they are given ammunition to fight back with. This "kidnapping" was during an Obon dance.
One of the tiny elementary schools (a total of ten students at the time I taught there) I taught at held a summer "camp" at the school (it's between a river and a forested mountain) where the kids were challenged to climb the mountain in the dark with flash-lights. The teachers and enthusiastic local sadists hid in the forest and stalked them (rustling the bushes and making weird noises) or even jumping out at them. Not a single kids made it all the way up the mountain without freaking out and running for his or her life back down to the school!
I came to work yesterday to the news that another student
was hit by a car while coming to school. This happens with unacceptable
frequency, and although this student only had some cuts and bruises, not all of
my students have been so fortunate. I was interested to read this article about
a successful “bicycle license” system for kids. One of my elementary schools
has a similar system for fourth graders. They aren’t supposed to ride bicycles
before then. There isn’t a license exactly, but we set up a road simulation and
have them practice doing head checks before taking off, stopping at stop signs
and that sort of thing.
Bicycle Training at School
While the kids do ride like maniacs, the adults driving the
cars are the ones that are really scary. Japan’s car licensing system does not
require much driving on an actual road; almost all the practice and all of the
testing is carried out in closed systems without other
cars/cyclists/pedestrians around. I highly doubt that a first world country
exists with a worse average level of driving ability than Japan’s. I saw a car
mow down a cyclist just outside my house recently, and the driver didn’t even
notice that an accident was happening until the bicycle was so mangled in the
car wheel that the car stopped.
A few months ago, in the chill of Winter, a different school
told me that there was a two hour police presentation on bicycle safety going
on in the gym and could I was expected to attend. The gym was freezing and I
was less than enthused, but the presentation was much more exciting than I had
expected. It looked like this
Which is reason #54,000 why Japanese elementary schools are simply awesome.
.
, Joseph Tobin
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