Second blog essay

After reading this post on Willy's Visual Blog I decided to write my second visual anthropology blog essay on this post. When I first read that he spent the whole day with a Japanese child, who from the picture appears to be quite young, maybe around 11 or 12 years old, I was kinda shocked. I mean, who would let their child be gone that long without knowing where they were. But admittedly this reaction was quite awhile go, since I read this about three or four weeks ago when I had not explored much of outside Hirakata-shi.


When I am travailing around Japan I often see little children (this weekend I saw like five year olds staking the train by themselves, but my Japanese friend Yuki explained that it was quite common when the child was smart at a small age and had to travel far away to school. So even thought I see little children travailing alone in Japan I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

As to his reference to when he was a child his parents taught him not to talk to strangers this was for safety reasons. If a stranger wants to talk to you in the U.S. he or she most likely wants to do something bad to you. However, in my Struggle for Justice class, which is about the law systems in Asia we have talked about how Japan has a low crime rate. So most likely if a stranger stops to ask a child something most likely they don't want to kidnap him or anything like that. So in that little boys mind he probably didn't once think that these foreigner might hurt him. After all, whenever I see little Japanese children usually I think "Oh no, they shouldn't be out alone, what if someone kidnaps them?"

As to the reference that he often see Japanese children doing things that his parents would never allow him to do, I have had this same thought many times while in Japan. But I suppose it is the same in America. My parent would never allow me when I was a small child to do some of those things that I see Japanese children do, but as you grow your parents usually become more lenient and you get away with some of those things that you wouldn't have been able to before. However the opposite is true in Japan. In Japan, until pre-school children are allowed seemly free range, but once they hit pre-school/elementary school age they stat being hammered into good Japanese citizens.