I often write about what it’s like to raise kids in Japan, since this subject may offer some insight into the country that would hard to find elsewhere. As a general rule, Japan seem more focused on education than the U.S., at least compared with my own experiences with public schools in Maryland, Virginia and California. Both my kids attend juku, or evening schools which help the kids keep up in their studies, and the general culture of attending these extra lessons helps keep them more focused on learning than they would be otherwise. (These schools are often translated as “cram schools” in English, although that word is better applied to yobiko or “preparation schools” which are specifically for getting students into universities, slightly different in this case.) It also seems to me that there is a lot more contact between schools and parents here, in part due to the custom of impressing parents into volunteering to be special helpers for school events, which everyone hates, although it does bring parents and kids closer together. The other day my wife attended a parent-teacher-student meeting to discuss my daughter’s future direction. The teacher hadn’t figured out that our daughter was haafu (half-Japanese and half-American) and was going on and on about how good her English was. We got a good laugh out of that one, and made sure not to correct her misunderstanding.
Asuka is one of the most famous haafu characters in anime.
