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Pop Culture

American mom living in Japan shows her son's adorable required school supplies

Okay, these are so freakin' cute.

Photo credit: Canva

We all need those adorable hats and loafers.

July is almost over, which means that a return to school is just around the corner. That also means that back-to-school shopping has begun.

But what might that look like in other parts of the world? Thanks to the internet, we need not wonder.

Moriah is an American mom who began living in Okinawa, Japan, in January 2024 after her husband got stationed there. She regularly posts videos showing just how different daily life is in her new home, not least of which being her son’s school.

In a now viral TikTok clip, Moriah shared her son’s latest school supply haul. And let’s just say…it looks a little different than what we normally see in the U.S.

Moriah began her clip by saying that everything cost 65,000 yen, which roughly amounts to $420. That’s a pretty hefty price for just one kid, but wait til you hear what was purchased.

For the first item, prepare to be overwhelmed by cute kid fashion. Moriah showed off an adorable black and white “summer hat,” to match his summer uniform. In winter, he’ll have a different uniform, and a different matching hat. Plus an outside hat…Japan has their hat game down pat.

But wait, there’s more! Moriah’s son also gets a name tag that looks like it was plucked right out of a wholesome anime, which will be pinned onto his uniform each day, in addition to two gym shirts with his name in Japanese sewed onto the front, three pairs of gym shorts, two sets of the blue short overalls, two of the button-up shirts, an art smock and last but not least…a bow tie.

“They wear this during formal events,” Moriah explained.

Of course, the boy needs matching shoes for all these outfits, which are also part of the supply haul. Then his school outfit will be complete with an “itty-bitty” backpack.

And now, we get to the actual supplies.


@momentswithmoriah Japanese school supplies 🤩 #okinawa #okinawajapan #japanese #japaneseculture #shoppinghaul ♬ sonido original - SONIDOS LARGOS


First up: a pianika, which is a small, portable breath-powered keyboard that’s standard for most Japanese elementary schools.

“All of the kids get these and learn how to play them and then they'll have a school event where we get to watch and see what they've learned,” Moriah explains before playing a couple of notes.

Then there’s the drawing pad, a jump rope, art supplies like scissors, glue pastels, markers and clay, all of which fit into a nifty supply box that’s top also acts as a mold for the clay that they use. There’s even a pouch that holds onto all “communications for the parents.”

Because organization is clearly a priority, Moriah says that she has to label each and all of these supplies. But she luckily has her kid’s name in Japanese on a stamp to make that task a little easier.

And that’s it! At least, for brand-specific school supplies. Moriah said her family would later go out to stores to get things like her son’s lunch mat and water bottle, which could allow for a little more personal flair.

The mom then shared that when she first attempted this three months ago, it felt really “daunting.” But now with a bit more experience under her belt, she’s “actually excited to get everything organized and ready for the start of the school year in September.”

Though Moriah and her family might only be in Japan for 3-6 years (according to her follow-up video), she’ll certainly have racked up quite a few memories while there, in addition to fun videos for us! It’s always cool to see how different cultures navigate life. Granted, even within Japan, different schools are bound to operate differently, but still, this is a prime example of how the internet is a great way to celebrate and explore differences.

To follow along on more of Moriah’s Japan journey, follow her on TikTok and Instagram.

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Joy

The restaurant in Japan where getting your order wrong is totally expected and accepted

It's a beautiful example of social inclusion for people with dementia.

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

At The Restaurant for Mistaken Orders, orders come as placed only 67% of the time.

Imagine you order salmon and green beans at a restaurant and the server brings you steak and potatoes. You'd say something, right? Tell them they got your order wrong? Expect them to fix the mix-up?

Not if you were dining at The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders in Tokyo, Japan, where part of the dining experience is not knowing whether you're going to get what you order. You have about a 1 in 3 chance that you won't, but those odds are in place for the best reason.

The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders employes people with dementia as servers, fully knowing that sometimes they're going to get customers' orders wrong. Customers who eat there know this fact as well. It's all just part of the adventure of dining at a restaurant designed to increase kindness and reduce isolation for people with cognitive impairments.

The pop-up restaurant is a collaboration between creator Shiro Oguni and a group home for people with dementia.

“Like everybody else, my awareness of dementia at first tended towards negative images of people who were ‘radically forgetful’ and ‘aimlessly wandering about,'" Oguni shared with Japan's government website. "But actually, they can cook, clean, do laundry, go shopping and do other ‘normal’ things for themselves."

Oguni was worried at first that people might criticize the concept of the restaurant, as if people with dementia were being treated as a carnival show or being made a laughingstock. But he says that when people see the smiles on the faces of the servers and how much joy and confidence they gain from having a purpose and being viewed as still capable, they are moved.

“The restaurant is not about whether orders are executed incorrectly or not,” noted Oguni. “The important thing is the interaction with people who have dementia.” It's a win-win. The people with dementia aren't as isolated, and 99% of the people who visit The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders leaves feeling happy.

"Dementia is not what a person is, but just part of who they are," said Oguni. "People are people. The change will not come from them, it must come from society. By cultivating tolerance, almost anything can be solved."

People love the idea of creating a space where people with dementia can work have other people to interact with.

"Kindness, inclusion, and compassion are the hallmarks of making someone feel like a human being despite adversity in their circumstances," shared one commenter on Instagram. "These people are sweet human beings who deserve not to be given up on by society."

"Instead of sticking them in a home and avoiding them, they are including them and giving them the ability to live, a sense of purpose, a reason to smile. I think it's a beautiful concept," wrote another.

"The beauty of a community choosing to meet people where they are instead of forcing them into a mold they no longer fit. Change the mold, change the result. Love this idea," shared another.

Many people pointed to the collectivist mindset in Japan, where societal well-being is more important than individual ambition, as something to aspire to. But even in Japan, The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders is a novel experiment that has proven to be a success.

"The image of ‘Cool Japan’ is recently gathering much enthusiasm, but I think ‘Warm Japan’ is just as important," said Oguni. "I want to promote a Japan that cultivates a warm, comfortable environment, so people will return home with smiles and a glow in their hearts.”

A beautiful goal for any nation to have. Learn more about The Restaurant for Mistaken Orders here.

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Education

Teacher in Japan shares mind-blowing differences between her school and schools in the U.S.

Is there any reason American schools couldn't implement some of these things?

@hito.bito/TikTok

Japanese and American schools differ in a few significant ways

When you live in the same country your whole life, it's easy to think of things as "normal" simply because it's the way they're always done. One of the best ways to divest yourself of that notion is to go live in another country for a while, because very quickly, you start to see things you thought of as a given—or never thought about at all because it never dawned on you that they could be different—are actually cultural norms that don't exist everywhere.

An American teacher who lives in Japan offers a perfect example of how the norms of different countries can contrast sharply.

On her TikTok channel, @hito.bito, the teacher shared a video called "Things about my Japanese school that could send Americans into a coma," and the differences she described are mind-blowing.

She begins with, "We all have to change from outdoor to indoor shoes as soon as we enter the school. And no, I’ve never seen any love notes or confessions in the shoe cubbies.” She shows herself changing into comfy slippers after entering the school. Definitely a good way to keep the floors cleaner.

Not that cleanliness is an issue for schools in Japan, since the students—not janitors, the students—clean the whole school daily.

"You don’t know clean until you’ve been to a Japanese school because these kids clean the school from top to bottom every single day,” she shared.

People familiar with the Montessori approach to education are familiar with the idea, but it's not at all the standard practice of most public schools in the U.S. Perhaps it should be?

Another difference she pointed out was the lunch kids are served—or rather that they serve themselves. Usually, it's some kind of rice, vegetables and protein, and it all looks delicious.

Of course, not every difference is a positive.

"Now, what sends me into an absolute spiral almost daily is that they leave the windows open and there’s no heating or cooling in the hall so I have to walk around in a coat," she shared, showing herself wearing a parka indoors. This practice probably has more to do with Covid and air circulation than a cultural norm (I lived in Japan 20 years ago and don't recall this being a regular practice), but even taking proactive steps to keep the air clean is a far cry from schools here, even in the Covid era.

She also shared some hair, makeup and piercing rules that are far stricter than most schools in the U.S. (She stated in a later video that the reason for the low ponytail rule is that kids are required by law to wear helmets when biking and most Japanese kids bike to school, so the hairstyle rule allows for safe helmet use.)

Watch:

People in the comments loved certain parts of Japanese school protocol, but others not so much. The consensus is that the cleaning habits are awesome—pretty much everyone felt that American kids should be cleaning their schools as well. The shoe change was a popular idea, too. Several Canadian commenters said they do that up north as well.

The hair, make-up and piercings, however, people were not so fond of. Americans do treasure our individuality and freedom to express ourselves. That's a norm that's pretty unshakable here.

We all have things that we can learn from one another, and when we share our customs and norms, sometimes we can find ways to improve or enrich our own culture. Now it's just a matter of figuring out how to make the kids-cleaning-the-school thing happen in the US…

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Community

The reason Japanese fans clean up after World Cup matches boils down to one word—'atarimae'

Imagine if the whole world adopted this concept.

Photo by Jaleel Akbash on Unsplash

Japanese soccer fans explain why they clean the stadium after a match.

Japanese fans at the World Cup tournament have been receiving praise for their admirable habit of cleaning up the stadium after their team's matches. It's commonplace to see Japanese fans, blue garbage sacks in hand, hanging back after the game to pick up the trash everyone has left behind in the stadium.

It's not the first time Japanese cleanliness has made headlines. Some schools in Japan don't even hire janitorial staff, as the students clean their schools themselves. Other than in specific educational programs such as Montessori (where practical skills and habits like cleaning and organizing the environment are incorporated into the pedagogy), that idea is practically unheard of in the U.S. But watching the Japanese fans picking up after a game, the automatic assumption that someone else is going to clean up after us feels like a mistake.

So what is it that compels Japanese fans to clean the stadium at the World Cup, despite the fact that there are people hired to do it already?

It generally comes down to one word: "atarimae."

Atarimae isn't easy to directly translate into English, but it basically means "natural" or "obvious" or "the norm." Japanese fans may be getting a lot of attention for their cleaning habits, but they're not trying to make some grand statement or gesture—for them, it's simply a matter of course that one would clean up mess wherever they are.

Al Jazeera's Sandra Gathmann interviewed several Japanese fans after their team's 2-1 victory over Germany to ask them about their stadium clean-ups. It was explained that the idea of cleaning and tidying up is ingrained as a part of Japanese culture from a young age and that it's atarimae—obvious, natural, the norm—to leave a place cleaner than they found it.

Watch:

@aljazeeraontiktok

Why do Japanese football fans clean up after a match? @Sandra Gathmann asks the fans #QatarWorldCup2022 #FIFA #WorldCup #Qatar #Football #Qatar2022 #WorldCup2022 #Japan #cleaning #fans

Imagine if everyone thought of cleaning up as atarimae. Wouldn't that be something?

Having lived in Japan myself, I can attest to how clean Japanese cities there are—despite being densely packed with people—due to this concept. The contrast between an average Japanese city and an average American city in terms of cleanliness is quite remarkable.

But being an American raising kids in the U.S., I can also attest to the fact that it's much easier to ingrain those automatic cleaning habits into kids when the entire society is living this concept. Parents in the U.S. are in an uphill battle trying to train kids to take responsibility for cleaning up in a someone-else-will-do-it society, and it would take a major cultural shift to make automatic cleaning a matter of course for Americans. I would certainly love to see it, though.

In Qatar, the Japanese are showing what's possible when a habit is culturally embraced and are setting a wonderful example the whole world can follow. Perhaps before the World Cup is finished we'll see people from all nations taking trash bags into the stadium and running with the idea that cleaning up after an event without being asked is simply … atarimae.

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