My wife is having a challenging time right now. Our daughter starts the sixth grade in April, and by unwritten tradition parents are expected to join the school’s PTA leadership for a year and do various things for the school and the community at large. These include organizing the kids walking to school into groups (called han) and choosing a group leader (called hancho, where we get the word Head Honcho from) who will be responsible for the group, especially the new crop of first graders who will walk to school with the bigger kids. The PTA also signs up neighborhood parents into “flag waving brigades,” who position themselves at street corners along the routes the kids walk to school and make sure the children get to school safely each morning. My wife is in charge of creating materials to be distributed to all parents of elementary school kids in our part of the city, which involves compiling Excel documents with the names of new teachers so parents can have information on the changes for the new school year. She has several assistants, but they’re not much help: as a rule, many Japanese are often happy with lower levels of technical skill than you’d generally find in the U.S., and none of the housewives in the group has a computer or knows what Excel is, making a lot of extra work for her.
