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Kids and public transport 2021/2/11 16:58
Hi all,

Just for pure curiosity.

At what age are japanese kids usually alone do a first time trip due the elementary school, which is as complicated as for example Umeda-Namba (no matter which part of specific train or subway station inside those huge buildings)? How do you teach all the specific optimal routes inside the station not to get lost or not get to the wrong train? Or does big cities have enough elementary schools so those who for example live near the Umeda do not have to go to a school near Namba or Tennoji.

For comparison, in Estonia my elementary school was about 2 km where i lived and i had only took a local (but very crowded) bus to get near the school. Currently the distance between my home and daughter's school is about 10 km, but she has the option to use specific school bus which stops in front of our apartment building.

I would be pretty scared should the route for my daughter be something like: random train station -> transfer on some station on Yamanote or Osaka loop line -> another transfer on Yamanote or Osaka loop line -> final train station.

So how do you manage your kids or how easy or difficult was it for you, when you were young?

BR,
Lauri
by Lauriandres (guest)  

Re: Kids and public transport 2021/2/11 20:35
If you are talking about transportation for commuting to school on a daily basis, kids learn to do that from grade 1, which is 6 years old. But parents would study the safest and easiest route, and commute with the child for a while until the child learns how to do it. Typically, students are encouraged to commute in groups. But students commute from various parts of the city, so finally they would be alone by the time they come home.

But not all 6-year-olds commute on buses and trains. Most elementary school students, as well as junior high school students (up to age 15), walk to/from a designated public school in their school district which usually is a peaceful residential area in the city. Typically, this would be within a 20 minute walk unless it's in a very rural area.

It is only those who chose to attend far-away private elementary/junior high schools who commute by buses and trains. In other words, upon choosing which private school to attend, many parents would prefer to choose a school which is easy/safe to commute to. Or the family might move to a new home if they truly insist on attending a specific school that was originally difficult to commute to.

Meanwhile, those who walk to their district schools are educated to travel within a city as a group of maybe five, on a field trip at the end of their first year in junior high school (age 13). A teacher told me that the aim is to practice traveling on your own so that they could travel to take a senior high school entrance exam 2 years later. Senior high school is not compulsory education in Japan, so typically, kids would need to go take an entrance exam by age 15.

By the way, schools in Japan hardly offer school buses, even if it's a private school. I've noticed that in rural villages, the local bus driver remembers all elementary school kids who rides his bus, and would kind of look after them by chatting a little bit as they get on and off.
by Uco rate this post as useful

Re: Kids and public transport 2021/2/11 23:08
Uco, thank you for the information.

Am i correct that in general there is no shortage of elementary shool space in your neighbourhood in big cities unless there is a BIG baby boom in specific years? I.e if you officially live somewhere, then local city officials must plan with local school authorities to have classroom availability for your kid(s) and therefore the transportation from home to school should be pretty easy?

BR,
Lauri
by Lauriandres (guest) rate this post as useful

Re: Kids and public transport 2021/2/12 08:43
In cities, there are more public schools than you think.
I grew up in a suburban area in Kanagawa prefecture with a population of 9 million right next to Tokyo.
My public elementary school was 10 minutes away from my home on foot and it was only 15 minutes to another elementary school. No one would not need to walk more than 20 minutes to school there.

I heard there were a lot more students in one class in my parents' generation which was nearly in the baby-booming. It was 50 children per teacher or so. Now it's 30-34.
But I've never heard of a problem with "space" in schools.
by Tai (guest) rate this post as useful

Re: Kids and public transport 2021/2/12 10:57
Lauri,

As suggested, Japan is currently suffering a great decrease of birth rate. So, not only do we have more elementary schools than we need, a lot of them are closing down due to the decrease of their students.

Ironically, that necessarily doesn't mean that education is getting better. In fact, due to the decrease of teachers, many of them are now too busy with their desk work that they can't take enough care of their students.

But unlike what the media prefers to feature, the children of most of the people I know, including that of myself, have been blessed with good public education.
by Uco rate this post as useful

Re: Kids and public transport 2021/2/12 14:17
uAm i correct that in general there is no shortage of elementary school space in your neighbourhood in big citiesv
Yes, that's correct. Japanese cities don't have school shortages that require elementary school age children to commute long (i.e. non-easily walkable) distances. There are some elementary school-age kids who commute by train, but it's not the norm, and the ones who do commute by train are generally doing it because there's a specific school their parents want them to attend, not because all the closer schools are full.

Japan does have a shortage of pre-school/day care centers, in some urban/suburban communities, but kids young enough to be attending them aren't commuting on their own, so even if they have to take public transportation, they're generally with their parents.
by . . . . (guest) rate this post as useful

Re: Kids and public transport 2021/2/12 16:33
Again, thanks to everybody; it is always interesting to read stuff about real life, which is not sometimes mentioned in travel guides etc.

In my country we had baby boom around '88-90 (due the Perestroika and Glasnost phenomen), then the numbers decreased massively (due the poverty after getting independence) until 2006-2010 with another boom due the 1,5 year maternity salary for either mother or father. Therefore there has been a lot of closing and reopening of schools and kindergartens.

On my trips i have always wondered-admired that "navigating through the stations for a grown up person is difficult, how do the kids manage and how can the parents stay sane :-) specially before the mobile phone period".

Is Japan free of the phenomen, that for example all the citizens who live in Osaka want that their kids go to public school at Nara, because the public local schools are not considered good enough therefore those desired schools are crowded and those near home are not and worst case closed?
In my country it is quite common that the distance between home and public school might be even 20 km, even if the local school is quite near the home.

When the kids are already at age 12 and older i.e teenagers, is it possible for parents to monitor/track or regulate the use of IC cards (SUICA, ICOCA etc) so that the kids can not "empty" them while riding trains for fun or going to places where they are not supposed to be?

BR,
Lauri
by Lauriandres (guest) rate this post as useful

Re: Kids and public transport 2021/2/13 00:25
Is Japan free of the phenomen, that for example all the citizens who live in Osaka want that their kids go to public school at Nara, because the public local schools are not considered good enough therefore those desired schools are crowded and those near home are not and worst case closed?

I'm afraid I didn't understand the question. But, at least in Japan, people don't judge commuting distance by kilometers but rather by time. If you can travel from your home to your classroom within an hour using a bus and/or train, that's considered decent. For example, a lot of train connections have improved over the years, and that has allowed more choices to certain commuters.

Also, it's not that parents/kids always choose to commute to far-away schools for the reason that their district schools are not good enough. I'm sure some people in Estonia might pay for extra singing lessons if they're into singing, while many who aren't interested won't take lessons. Private schools here are something like that. It's something extra that some people choose to pay for while others don't.

When the kids are already at age 12 and older i.e teenagers, is it possible for parents to monitor/track or regulate the use of IC cards (SUICA, ICOCA etc) so that the kids can not "empty" them while riding trains for fun or going to places where they are not supposed to be?

Monitoring is possible at any age by using IC cards or mobile phones, and indeed the system is often used for elementary school students commuting by buses/trains. But I believe teenagers around the world dislike being "spied on", so that's a whole different story.

Meanwhile, in city centers, teachers and the police keep an eye on the youth. Also, a lot of municipals have by-laws, and places like game arcades strictly obey them. For example, here in Yokohama, those 16 years old and younger must leave game arcades at 4pm. The staff would come around checking your ID. Not to say that teenage crime doesn't exist.
by Uco rate this post as useful

Re: Kids and public transport 2021/2/13 03:28
The impression I've gotten is that a lot of the closing schools in Japan are in more rural areas rather than it being as much in cities. While there might be a baby bust everywhere, it's not felt the same everywhere. A lot of rural areas are older and grayer, as people with children move where they are better job opportunities. So kids in rural areas will end up with longer commutes because there just are fewer schools. and of course with more schools closing and longer commutes to a school, it makes rural areas less attractive to young families.

I'm not in Japan, but for example, the USA as a whole is not having a baby boom, but my city has been and my daughter's elementary is overcrowded. They have 3 mobile classrooms parked in the school yard because there is not enough room in the building for the kids. They just opened a new High School in the last few years for all these kids, and it has not even graduated its first class yet. We're in a huge city public school district, but our individual school is considered one of the best in the state. If school was not virtual, her commute would be 1 km. I sort of feel like if neighborhood elementary schools are within a 1 to 2km radius of most students in my US city, I can't believe Japan's more densely populated cities are not similar.

I also can't imagine living in Osaka and the nearest school you like is in Nara. The commute isn't even that bad depending on where in Osaka you are, but it just seems bizarre to me that someone in Osaka wouldn't be able to find a school they like that is closer because Osaka is just so big and has so many people.
by rkold rate this post as useful

Re: Kids and public transport 2021/2/16 01:48
Uco,

What i meant: for example, in Tallinn, Estonia we have to following schools:
https://gag.ee/english/
https://real.edu.ee/en/about/history/

Which while public, are extremely prestigious, so parents all over the Tallinn and its suburbs want to put their kids to that school. However, it means that on some years it might be difficult to get a seat for your kid who lives near the school, because those schools also might have some "grey-areaish" preschool exams-questions to get the best students.

BR,
Lauri
by Lauriandres (guest) rate this post as useful

Re: Kids and public transport 2021/2/16 11:27
uIs Japan free of the phenomen, that for example all the citizens who live in Osaka want that their kids go to public school at Nara, because the public local schools are not considered good enough therefore those desired schools are crowded and those near home are not and worst case closed?v

Since you're using Osaka and Nara as examples, you're asking about the situation in large cities, right? In that case, yes, Japan is free of such a phenomenon. There aren't any large cities that have a reputation of having low-quality or overcrowded schools, so there would never be a situation where a parent would say "Well, all the good schools in Osaka are full, so I have to send my kids to school in Nara."

In general, in Japan major cities tend to be more economically prosperous than other areas, so in communities where there are a lot of people, there are a lot of resources (tax revenue) to build schools. The situation that sometimes happens in other countries, where an urban area has a large, low-income population with many children but not enough economic resources to keep schools open and not crowded, doesn't really happen in Japan.

When schools close in Japan, it's usually schools in rural areas, and the reason why is usually a shrinking population in that community. Because of that, children in rural towns may end up commuting long distances. But in cities, if a community has enough children that the local schools are getting crowded, either a new schools gets built or the existing schools get expanded.
by . . . . (guest) rate this post as useful

Re: Kids and public transport 2021/2/16 11:40
uis it possible for parents to monitor/track or regulate the use of IC cards (SUICA, ICOCA etc) so that the kids can not "empty" them while riding trains for fun or going to places where they are not supposed to be?v

Such safeguards are partially built in into how IC card rail passes are designed in Japan. Students who take the train to school don't just have a prepaid IC card, but a commuter rail pass IC card.

When you buy a commuter pass, you don't specify an amount of money to charge to it. Instead, you specify the starting and ending stations, and you're are allowed to ride between them as often as you like during the period the pass is active. So if the closest station to a child's house is Station A, and the closest one to their school is Station C, those are the station their parents will specify when buying the rail pass. Since the rail company isn't deducting money from a charged total each time the student takes the train, there's no fear of the student "emptying" the card and not having enough money left on it to get to/from school and home.

It is possible to get off at stations between the specified stations, though. For example, if the student lives near Station A and their school is near Station C, but there's a Station B in between those stations, they can also get off at Station B using their commuter pass. However, as Uco said, there are monitoring systems parents can use which give them notices via text message or email showing when and where their child's pass was used. It's also common for station gates to have lights that light up when the person passing through them is using a child's pass. Ostensibly, this makes station staff notice them, and if there's something suspicious (like a child who looks lost, is being dragged against their will by an adult, is in a part of town where kids wouldn't normally be by themselves at that time of day), they'll step in and see if the kid is OK.

Commuter pass ID cards can also be charged with money, which can be used to purchase things at stores and vending machines, or to buy tickets to go to stations outside the designated commuting route. However, the cards have to be charged before they can be used for those purposes, so at that point it's no different than giving a kid cash, so it's something the parents will do only if they trust their child to use the money responsibly.
by . . . . (guest) rate this post as useful

Re: Kids and public transport 2021/2/16 19:15
Lauri,

Okay, I think I know what you mean.

In Japan, any child age 6-15 is automatically allowed to go to his/her district municipal school, no matter how poor or how academically failed. At the same time, any child is free to take an entrance exam to enroll in a more prestigious school, which may be public-run or private-run. But the prestigious public schools are usually run by the country (government-run) instead of the municipal, and while they may be more affordable than the private ones, they are scarce.

Now, some parents feel that their district municipal school is very bad. For example, they may feel that there is more bullying than other schools, or that the teachers are more lazy, or that the majority of parents are unconcerned to begin with. School districts with that tendency do exist.

But it's not like the whole city of Osaka would be like that. It would be like municipal school A is bad, but if you walk an extra kilometer to municipal school B, it would be good enough. So, a whole city wouldn't be abandoned just because of school quality.

The thing is, however, you are basically not allowed to attend a municipal school of a different district unless you have a good reason. So, parents who aren't pleased about their district school, but cannot afford to pay for prestigious schools, tend to move to a home in a better part of the area rather than to have the child commute longer distances. To begin with, a bad school can mean bad neighborhood.

On a related note, the population of children can be lower not only in rural areas but also in the middle of a city where the area is more suitable for offices and restaurants than homes for younger families. For example, a lot of schools in Chiyoda-ku, which is in the middle of Tokyo, are known for their small number of students.
by Uco rate this post as useful

Re: Kids and public transport 2021/2/16 22:36
Uco and .... and all the other members - thank you for the information.
Always nice to have a background info how the society works in one of your favourite travel destination. Even my wife some days ago when we discussed about our theoretical vacation plans echoed something like that while knitting "my dear, we are visiting Japan again should we have the opportunity, right?", although it would be a 4th time for her since 2017 i.e she has not throwing out alternatives.

BR,
Lauri
by Lauriandres (guest) rate this post as useful

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