Why Japanese Kids Can Walk to School Alone
It’s a common sight on Japanese mass transit: Children troop through train cars, singly or in small groups, looking for seats.
They wear knee socks, polished patent-leather shoes, and plaid jumpers, with wide-brimmed hats fastened under the chin and train passes pinned to their backpacks. The kids are as young as 6 or 7, on their way to and from school, and there is nary a guardian in sight.
A popular television show called Hajimete no Otsukai, or My First Errand, features children as young as two or three being sent out to do a task for their family. As they tentatively make their way to the greengrocer or bakery, their progress is secretly filmed by a camera crew. The show has been running for more than 25 years.
Kaito, a 12-year-old in Tokyo, has been riding the train by himself between the homes of his parents, who share his custody, since he was 9. “At first I was a little worried,” he admits, “whether I could ride the train alone. But only a little worried.”
Now, he says, it’s easy. His parents were apprehensive at first, too, but they went ahead because they felt he was old enough, and lots of other kids were doing it safely.
“Honestly, what I remember thinking at the time is, the trains are safe and on time and easy to navigate, and he’s a smart kid,” Kaito’s stepmother says. (His parents asked not to publish his last name and their names for the sake of privacy.)
“I took the trains on my own when I was younger than him in Tokyo,” his stepmother recalls. “We didn’t have cellphones back in my day, but I still managed to go from point A to point B on the train. If he gets lost, he can call us.”
Taking responsibility for shared spaces means that children have pride of ownership and understand in a concrete way the consequences of making a mess, since they’ll have to clean it up themselves. This ethic extends to public space more broadly (one reason Japanese streets are generally so clean). A child out in public knows he can rely on the group to help in an emergency.
What accounts for this unusual degree of independence? Not self-sufficiency, in fact, but “group reliance,” according to Dwayne Dixon, a cultural anthropologist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Japanese youth. “[Japanese] kids learn early on that, ideally, any member of the community can be called on to serve or help others,” he says.
This assumption is reinforced at school, where children take turns cleaning and serving lunch instead of relying on staff to perform such duties. This “distributes labor across various shoulders and rotates expectations, while also teaching everyone what it takes to clean a toilet, for instance,” Dixon says.
this is the same reason it's not odd to see an upstanding, not homeless person drunk, slumped on a busy Tokyo street. no one will rob them...they'll pretty much be watched over thanks to their "group reliance"
i.e.
It’s a common sight on Japanese mass transit: Children troop through train cars, singly or in small groups, looking for seats.
They wear knee socks, polished patent-leather shoes, and plaid jumpers, with wide-brimmed hats fastened under the chin and train passes pinned to their backpacks. The kids are as young as 6 or 7, on their way to and from school, and there is nary a guardian in sight.
A popular television show called Hajimete no Otsukai, or My First Errand, features children as young as two or three being sent out to do a task for their family. As they tentatively make their way to the greengrocer or bakery, their progress is secretly filmed by a camera crew. The show has been running for more than 25 years.
Kaito, a 12-year-old in Tokyo, has been riding the train by himself between the homes of his parents, who share his custody, since he was 9. “At first I was a little worried,” he admits, “whether I could ride the train alone. But only a little worried.”
Now, he says, it’s easy. His parents were apprehensive at first, too, but they went ahead because they felt he was old enough, and lots of other kids were doing it safely.
“Honestly, what I remember thinking at the time is, the trains are safe and on time and easy to navigate, and he’s a smart kid,” Kaito’s stepmother says. (His parents asked not to publish his last name and their names for the sake of privacy.)
“I took the trains on my own when I was younger than him in Tokyo,” his stepmother recalls. “We didn’t have cellphones back in my day, but I still managed to go from point A to point B on the train. If he gets lost, he can call us.”
Taking responsibility for shared spaces means that children have pride of ownership and understand in a concrete way the consequences of making a mess, since they’ll have to clean it up themselves. This ethic extends to public space more broadly (one reason Japanese streets are generally so clean). A child out in public knows he can rely on the group to help in an emergency.
What accounts for this unusual degree of independence? Not self-sufficiency, in fact, but “group reliance,” according to Dwayne Dixon, a cultural anthropologist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Japanese youth. “[Japanese] kids learn early on that, ideally, any member of the community can be called on to serve or help others,” he says.
This assumption is reinforced at school, where children take turns cleaning and serving lunch instead of relying on staff to perform such duties. This “distributes labor across various shoulders and rotates expectations, while also teaching everyone what it takes to clean a toilet, for instance,” Dixon says.
this is the same reason it's not odd to see an upstanding, not homeless person drunk, slumped on a busy Tokyo street. no one will rob them...they'll pretty much be watched over thanks to their "group reliance"
i.e.
Last edited:
i guess its just that much safer out here. You dont really hear about kids getting snatched up like that. Just nerd fukks killing off a random or their own family with a knife.
