October 10 is a holiday in Japan. Not Columbus Day, but Athletes' Day, to commemorate the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. That seemed to me like a funny reason for a holiday, but for Japan hosting the Olympics less than 20 years after the end of its defeat in WWII was a real sign that the war was over and its imperial aggression forgiven, and its arrival back into the world of nations as a global power.
The point is that I didn't really see any school children until today. I headed out on the train early to get to a popular mountain hiking park outside of Tokyo in rush hour traffic. And rush hour wasn't just workers heading into the city (though there were thousands of those). There were also school children, even some elementary children, riding the subway alone on their way to school.
They were easily identifiable by their uniforms, but I tell you that Japanese school's don't have the "four inches above the knee" rule for girls and skirts. Their skirts are short.
Because Japan uses characters for its written language instead of a phonetic alphabet, learning to read takes a lot longer here. I spent a lot of time over the weekend with a seven-year-old Japanese boy, who seems very smart and confident, and who read a map of the prefectures of Japan. (That's kind of like a state or province.) He did well on identifying them by reading their characters. I found out that students typically learn 140 characters a year in school, and that there are nearly 3,000 characters in the commonly written language.
It makes me glad I'm hooked on phonics.
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