Japan Update

I'm leaving for Kyoto in a few hours, to visit my in-laws for a few days, and won't have Internet access.

But I hear you all asking, "Why should that make a difference? You never post on this blog anymore, anyway!"

Sorry. It's been a tough trip. Work got better after a rough first couple of weeks, but it was still a struggle to set up interviews. There was also some......interpersonal stuff, which wasn't stressful in itself, but prevented me from doing all I wanted to do everyday. I kind of had to back off, to avoid creating problems, and stick to my own tasks instead.

While I was here, I worked at a borrowed desk in the office of the.....oh, I better not say it, because I don't want it to show up in Google searches for it, but it's a flagship Cow Bones publication. I will call it the Crawl Street Infernal. All of the Crawl Street Infernal folks were really helpful and nice to me, which was greatly appreciated.

Juggling the kids between Hub's squalid one-room apartment and my friend's lovely home was time-consuming and exhausting, but the most draining parts of the entire trip from me were conversations with Hub about Daughter's education.

We agree upon two things:

1) Little Son will go to the local elementary Japanese school.

We have a choice of two nearby -- Minato-ku has school choice. One of the schools is kind of ugly, next to a huge elevated freeway (yuck), but it's much closer to where we live, and also a much shorter, safer walk to the public afterschool daycare/recreation center.

The school Big Son and Daughter attended is farther away, but is much nicer. It's set back from the road, surround by trees -- but it's a long walk to the rec center, across a terrifyingly busy street.

It will be up to Hub to determine if other kids from the neighborhood will be going to the nicer school, in which case Little Son wouldn't have to walk by himself, and I would be okay with it. But the thought of my little guy walking all that way alone......I'd rather send him to the ugly school next to the freeway.

He will get the same standard Japanese education at either school -- that much is certain. So our choice will depend on the other factors.

2) Big Son will take the entrance exam for Keio Academy, a boarding school in New York. If he doesn't pass, he will attend our neighborhood middle school in Tokyo, and we'll send him to juku (supplementary afterschool education) to prepare for high school entrance exams.

So we have a plan, and a backup plan. Big Son has told us he himself wants to go to a Japanese university, so that's the direction in which we can help him go -- and if he changes his mind, we can take it from there.

But Daughter............

Daughter is begging us to let her stay in English-language school. International schools in Tokyo are all expensive -- some are cheaper than others, but they're still more than a Japanese government worker and a journalist can afford.

(Note: Keio Academy, the boarding school we're considering for Big Son, is also incredibly expensive, but then he could get into Keio University, which is a lot cheaper than a U.S. university, so it would be like front-loading some of his college costs.)

So Hub said, sho ga nai, it can't be helped, Daughter has to go back into the Japanese system.

And this breaks my heart.

We can always send her to the public middle school with Big Son, and send her to juku, too, but Daughter doesn't like to study as much as Big Son does, and she generally doesn't do as well on tests. Whereas we're pretty confident that Big Son will be able to get into a decent high school no matter what, we are less sure about Daughter -- especially in light of the way her grades dropped in the second half of fifth grade. This is a kid who really needs the right kind of academic support.

Hub found an affordable, private Japanese middle school and high school that accepts a lot of kikokushijo, and even has an entrance exam for them entirely in English. It's some kind of Protestant Christian school.

Whether Daughter can pass the exam is another question, but it's worth a try. We visited the school with her, and found it full of happy-looking girls, and Daughter liked it.

I thought it was okay, except.......there weren't any white people there. Yeah, that bothered me. I even asked the woman giving the tour if there were any foreign kids, and she replied that yes, there were, but they were all from other Asian countries, and that there were also some mixed-race kids like my daughter.

The other thing that bothered me was the selection of English books in the library. There were a few shelves of them, and my impression was.....not good. It was heavy on the airport reading -- lots and lots of Tom Clancy.

And I was amazed to see "The Thorn Birds" there, too. It's not something I would have expected to find in the school library of a Christian girl's school -- I mean, the main character falls for a priest, and has his love child.

Clearly, English is not a priority at this school.

So I went on my own to visit Sacred Heart, a school Hub and I had already ruled out because it costs too much, and....I loved it, and I think Daughter would be very happy there.

Hub is upset I even went to see it. He says we absolutely can't afford it, and that I should just forget it, before I get Daughter's hopes up.

I'm about to leave for a few days at my in-laws' house in Kyoto, where Hub and I will discuss this further, and probably reach no conclusion.

Stay tuned.....