Today, though I got an extra reminder of it. I got very very bored of sitting in my room and decided to walk to the big second-hand DVD/CD/bookstore in Saijo (which takes about 50 minutes). By the time I came to walk back, my foot, which is still injured from a previous outing, felt like it was on fire, so I waited for a bus. Except I missed one, and ended up sitting at the stop for about half an hour.
While I was waiting, the elementary school (shougakkou, ages 6-12) behind the bus stop ended its day, and a steady stream of about two hundred small children suddenly appeared. As they got to the double crossing, half of them went across straight, and half of them turned right. As I watched them get further away I realised that there was not one adult with them. It was so different to the end of my day at junior school (for you Americans, that's ages 7-11).
When our lessons ended, we used to go out into the playground, where mummy or daddy or both would be waiting to take us home, whether it be walking or cycling or driving. Only the oldest kids with the closest homes used to walk by themselves.
I began to wonder about the reasons for this. Perhaps it's partly because Saijo is such a small country town that all the children live within twenty minutes' walk of their school. Perhaps the schools arrange it so that the children who live near each other walk home together. Or perhaps it's because Japan is such a safe country that the parents don't feel like their children will be unsafe walking the streets alone.
I'd be interested to hear from anyone living in a different area of Japan - do young schoolchildren walk home alone in Tokyo, for example?
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