a history of me

Awesome moment of the day: a little girl with multiple handicaps came to school this morning looking rather down. The vice-principal greeted her and she barely acknowledged him. I walked up and said "Good morning" and she suddenly started beaming and looked up at me from her wheelchair with a huge grin. She may not have the faculties to learn much English in class, but it's obvious that I have had a significant impact on her life.

Hang on, did I just say a little girl came to school this morning during summer vacation? The short answer is yes, students still come to school over vacation. There are no classes, of course, but lots of children meet up in the playground, amuse themselves in the gym, or spend an hour or so in the pool. Every Japanese public school has a pool, apparently, which makes me crazy jealous. My elementary had a pool, in theory, but it was very small, fairly dirty, and it was never open anyway. If I had free access to a pool this nice every summer when I was a kid, I might actually know how to swim today.

It must also be said that in Japan, elementary schools are purposely integrated into the community to ensure that no one is more a few kilometers away because there are no school buses. All of these children walk to and from school every day, including the first graders. I grew up in a small town with about 7000 people, and we had only one elementary school. This town is a little bigger (closer to 10,000 people) and a little more spread out, but they have six elementary schools. If we applied Japanese thinking to my hometown, I'm sure we would have had at least two more elementary schools and I wouldn't have thought twice about hanging out there in my free time.

Here's where things really start to surprise me. Beyond the local elementary school, most neighborhoods have a jidōkan (児童館, "children's hall") which serves as an even localler (new word!) place for the kids to gather. I actually teach an after-school English class periodically at one of these buildings. They are quite small (at least around these parts) and run by the board of education. The one I visit has a tiny playground, a computer lab (no Internet access), a miniature kitchen and loads of books, arts & crafts projects, and other miscellaneous crap that some child twenty years ago simply forgot to take home. Kids come to these halls after school, on weekends and even over summer vacation.

What purpose do these jidōkan serve? Why don't these kids just go home? I haven't figured that out yet. When I first heard about them, I assumed they were created to solve the problem of latch-key kids who would otherwise be home alone because Mom and Dad both have jobs, but that doesn't make sense in a place like this. First off, these buildings are obviously older than the two-income household. Furthermore, this is a rural community where most people are farmers or work similarly-local neighborhood jobs. I doubt any of these kids come home to an empty house in the afternoon.

I suspect this is all tied into the importance of groups in Japanese society. As I said, all these kids walk to and from school. If they're from the same neighborhood, that means they probably walk together everyday. That means that beyond the usual sibling or grade-level pairings, these children have their own han (班, "block" I suppose). They presumably all meet in the morning around the same time before going to school. Once they arrive, they split up according to their grade and classroom. When they are dismissed (and this I've actually seen) they assemble in the schoolyard not by grade, but by han. Then they all walk home together, except when they want hang out or study together, in which case they go to their jidōkan.

Again, I can't help but apply these ideas to my own childhood and wonder how things would have been different. I did know a couple kids in my neighborhood, yes, but most of our interaction was limited to bus-stop conversations. We would hang out sometimes after school, but the older we got the less we would see of each other (despite living within shouting distance of one another). Nearly everyone whom I think of as a "friend" today I met for the first time at school, and most of them lived in a totally different part of town than I did. The school bus or a ride from Mom was the only way we got to see each other. Had there been a Truesdale han or Benedict jidōkan, I would have spent most of my time with those local kids, probably right up though high school. Considering how much my relationship with my friends has shaped my life, I can't begin to imagine how different a person I would be today if all that happened. I sure as hell wouldn't be in Japan right now!

Is one way "better" than another? Using the Japanese way, I probably would have had a lot more friends, or at least more daily activity with kids from my neighborhood. I also would have spent more time with my sister, and perhaps we would have found a way to spend less time fighting with each other thanks to all that extra interaction. On the other hand, the American way meant I was able to seek out other children who I had certain commonalities with. When I look at my friends now, we are very different people, but we all share a core of certain interests, ideals and values. That's what brought us together in the first place. By replacing that with mere coincidence (i.e. you kids live near each other, so you will spend all your time together), I can't believe I'd have the same kind of long-lasting friendships I do now.

I know I'm oversimplifying here, but living in Japan and working with children all the time has, understandably, given me a lot of time to wonder about raising my own (potential, as yet non-existent) children. But since my childhood is the only real "map" I've got to child-rearing, and since my childhood is so radically different from that of Japanese children, I'm constantly comparing and contrasting the two schools of thought in my head.