My Family and Other Globalizers | World's safest country to bring up kids?

Children as young as six routinely travel to school on their own in Japan - a feat that is unthinkable in most other places on earth. (Representational image by PNW Production via Pexels)

Note to readers: My Family and Other Globalizers is a weekly parenting column on bringing up global citizens

Do you ever feel exhausted having to watch your kids like a hawk all day? Does the daily school run deplete your energy? Does ferrying them back and forth from birthday parties, playdates and extracurricular classes feel like it has replaced your own social life? If the answer to any of these questions is in the affirmative, I have a solution for you, dear reader: consider moving to Japan.

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I lived in Tokyo for four years between 2016 and 2020. My boys were five and eight years old when we moved there. I remember my first few days as a haze of unpacking boxes and accompanying the children back and forth from school. Initially, I had fulminated about the lack of a school bus. On inquiring why our expensive, international school didn’t provide a bus service, I’d received a reply stating, “Most of our pupils walk, bicycle or take public transport.”

On only my second day in Tokyo I’d seen a little kid of about six, heaving a school bag that was almost bigger than he, wandering down a busy Tokyo road all alone. Naturally, I’d run after him to offer help, imagining that the boy had somehow lost his parents. But before I could catch up, he’d pulled out a metro pass from his pocket and disappeared with practiced efficiency into the bowels of one of the capital’s busiest subway stations.

Still, it took me months to become inured to the sight - unthinkable in every other big city that I’d lived in (New Delhi, London, Los Angeles, Beijing and Jakarta) - of elementary school-aged children, hopping onto buses, changing trains in subway stations and walking along thoroughfares on their way to, or from, school. In Japan, this was as unremarkable as well, clean public toilets.

I posted a picture on Facebook of a cherubic schoolgirl, barely waist-high, waiting for a metro by herself. Within hours I was inundated by messages from Indian friends who were both amazed and envious. “In Delhi, even my 13-year-old is walked to the bus stop about seven minutes away,” someone commented. “We don’t let our six-year-old go out to the park without a guard,” another friend wrote.

I discovered that Japanese children begin travelling to school by themselves from grade one of primary school when they are about six years old. Those who attend public schools in the neighbourhood that they live in, walk to school. Those enrolled in private schools – often located in distant parts of the city – take the metro, bus or a combination of the two.

The training for this journey begins when children are in kindergarten. They are encouraged to observe their older siblings going about on their own. Parents show them how to safely cross roads and point out places where they can ask for help if ever in trouble.  The “safe spot” of choice is the convenience store.

More than 55,000 Seven Elevens, Family Marts and other convenience stores punctuate Japanese cities, and any lost or distressed child can ask to use the phone at one of these stores. They can then wait there until a parent arrives to collect them.

Japan is regularly on top of lists of the world’s safest countries. Despite having a substantial population of about 127 million, only 853 murders were reported in 2022. In addition, public infrastructure is excellent. Trains are regular and preternaturally on time, with railway companies publicly flagellating themselves for, wait for this, their trains departing a few seconds early. (In November 2017, the media was filled with stories about an express line between Tokyo and the city of Tsukuba that departed 20 seconds early, at 9:44:20 AM instead of 9:44:40 AM. The line’s management issued a “sincere” apology “confessing” that the crew had not “sufficiently checked the departure time and performed the departure operation.”)

But perhaps the most crucial ingredient in the recipe that allows Japanese children such independence, is an accepted reliance on community that is more reminiscent of a village than of big-city culture.

Schools distribute a special yellow patch that first graders wear on their uniforms identifying them as newbies to the art of navigating in the city. Adults keep a special eye out for these patch-wearers. Retirees sometimes volunteer to usher children across roads safely as they walk to school. Households can also volunteer to display signs outside their homes indicating their willingness, convenience store-like, to provide refuge to any child in need.

After a few weeks of witnessing the practiced flâneurie of kids younger than he was, my older son began clamouring to be allowed to travel to school alone. I was reluctant; he didn’t speak any Japanese at the time. Two years into our stay, however, I caved in.

By the time Ishaan turned ten, I not only allowed him to travel back home unaccompanied on public transport I also had him chaperone his younger, seven-year-old brother. If this scenario had been described to me when I still lived in Indonesia, I’d have thought it likelier for my children to sprout wings and fly home rather than travel alone in a city of 30 million people. Life in Japan was often like that: stranger than fiction.