More updates on Amazon Japan’s child porn and abuse images

Posted on March 20, 2015 by MThomas

I previously posted in October about the child abuse images and pornographic materials being openly sold on Amazon (also on Rakuten and Tsutaya). An online protest was started shortly thereafter, and Amazon Japan responded by (partly) removing the most offensive items. But they didn’t go far enough, didn’t explain anything or apologize to the public for posting the items and breaking the law, and in essence tried to ignore the situation or pretend it never happened. To no avail. In January, the police raided Amazon offices in Tokyo, and revealed that they had in fact already been looking into the situation for several months (perhaps, we like to think, partly encouraged or jump-started by the fuss we raised through various online media sources).

Now it appears that they have begun “investigating” two suspects in connection with the case. Continue reading →

Posted in child abuse, child safety, international hub, Japan, Japanese, Japanese law, Japanese society | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

“International” kindergarten open day

Posted on March 7, 2015 by MThomas

Today we went to “open day” at a nearby “international kindergarten,” where our oldest daughter has gone for two years to Saturday classes. The previous week, our youngest daughter joined the four-hour class for the first time, but we were not allowed to watch. There were about a dozen kids ranging in age from 3 to 6, but they all seemed to enjoy singing in English, playing English card games, and responding to simple questions like “What’s your name?” and “How old are you?”

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When talking about this kind of program, I always put “international” in quotation marks, because the term is still sort of a marketing catch-phrase in Japan. Continue reading →

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The Joy of Reading

Posted on February 25, 2015 by MThomas

books1I’ve blogged a little (very little) on the fact that my daughters are growing up bilingual and bicultural — this is usually the reason they are often called “haafu” in Japan (I despise this term, but I’ve already written about it and there’s much more discussion in the upcoming book).

But I haven’t really said much about what we do to help our kids maintain both languages.

It goes without saying, naturally, that our kids speak Japanese fluently. We live in Japan. My wife is Japanese. Our relatives here are all Japanese. The kids go to a Japanese nursery school. And yet, for some reason every time we meet people…at the library, at the supermarket, in a restaurant or shopping mall…the first question they say to my oldest daughter is, “Can you speak Japanese?” As if having a non-Japanese father automatically disqualifies them from having any Japanese language ability.

Ahem. Getting ahead of myself. Continue reading →

Posted in education, Japan, Japanese, reading | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment