Today I was walking through Roppongi around lunchtime, and I saw a couple teenage boys, maybe 15 or 16 years old, standing at the street corner waiting for the cross signal to change. When it changed, the boys started screaming, threw their hands in the air, flailed around, and ran across the street. When they reached to other side, they both stopped, laughed hysterically, and then just went about their business. It sort of struck me as cute and funny, kids being kids, just a little bit of youthful rebellion. Then I tried to imagine an American boy of 15 or 16 doing such a thing, and it occurred to me that if he were to do it, at least one of his friends would kick his ass. And that made me think about what youthful indiscretions have come to mean in the United States. And it made me appreciate Japan a little bit more.
As much as I miss my home, my family, everything about America, there’s still a sense of innocense in the things kids do in Japan that makes me happy to be living in such a safe country. In the US, I locked the doors every night, checked twice, kept the car doors locked when I drove, never left my purse more than a foot or two from my body, if I set it down at all. Never would I have left a pram sitting on the sidewalk outside of a restaurant (something I see daily) or would I have felt safe letting one of my children run ahead of me through a crowd. Here, I don’t think of these things, and if I think of these things – like when I wrote this post – I appreciate that I don’t feel that I have to worry about my safety.
This is just one more of the things I love about Japan.
Filed under: Children, Daily life, Family, Random Tagged: | expat life, Japan, Japanese culture, Teens, Tokyo
