Also, check a link down below on your description, and also to just some weirdish art. Beeline Laia, Oscar T.S.E.T.E.E.E. Eric and Pissorca, Eric and Darryline, and Darryline on your own list, I have a full shake on Ronalda, a good option course to see you local for a good chat. To record Eric and Pissorca, about 40 years in the August 9th, not even the idea that obviously you call Ronalda, Eric and Pissorca are obviously clean, confirm yourself all every day on a whole squad.
Corolla's Eric, a good, a good, a good, a good, a good, a good, a good, a good, a good, a good, a good, a good, a good, time sneakers. And first episode of 2.5 year old named Heroki is entered pickup curry and flowers in fish cakes and a market that's a kilometer away. He's someone down the street by himself. He passes lots of people even a cop, but they pay him no mind.
And then he makes it to the store where a client helps him find some percentage. So I look at my area myself. I'm sure I'm not going to go. Then as Heroki is leading the shop, the dramatic climax of the episode.
He realizes that he has forgotten the curry and he has to go back. But he eventually finds the curry, completes his quest and makes the long-track home to his grandparents, dragging the flowers along the ground with the boogers swinging down his face. When old enough to do it on Netflix, it was a hit. That's late reporter Henry Gabor.
And he's gone enough of these very cute kids and their very grown up tasks. But there was another element drawing people to show a sense of disbelief. Who in their right mind was it a two-year-old kid out into the world like this? What's the stuff they're from getting kidnapped?
Right back hard. One Netflix viewer tweeted, do this in the US and the child will never be seen again. You can get some young memories in my kids in bubbles. I protected that and I put up some guardrails.
But I would not do this. My first errand is a gimmicky show with hokey music and a laugh track. But it's also rooted in the truth about Japanese society. Most Japanese children are remarkably independent from a very young age.
Way more independent than kids in the US. In Japanese cities, fifth graders make 85% of their week trips without a parent. And this remarkable probability is made possible by everything from the neighbors next door to the width of the streets. It's important to note that my first errand is reality TV.
Like all reality TV, it's not real. At least not completely. The kids on a show are actually alone. There are producers following them every step away.
Hiding high trash cans or pretending to be cat drivers. And on the show, the kids are attempting their first errands at a much younger age than they would be in real life. Like they wouldn't necessarily be going out as a two-year-old. If there wasn't a camera crew around it, that's kind of, for the TV show, we kind of make it a little bit more extreme.
But the whole idea of kids going out when they're five or six and getting whatever's in that for their little brother, that's not a dramatized. And that's not true in Japan. There's no zone that says you can only have residential ability to. So the strictest zoning you can have, you can have apartments, and you can have some small businesses and things like this.
You can have a small office in a residential zone. And that type of development means that there are destinations within walking distance. You are much more likely to find a shop or grocery store that's just a short walk from the kid's house. Most important destination for children is, of course, school.
Early on in his research, Owen went to an elementary school. And he was a little bit older than a school. And he was a little bit older than a school. Early on in his research, Owen went to an elementary school.
He was a little bit older than a school. And he was a little bit older than a school. So this is a short walk from the kid's house. Most important destination for children is, of course, school.
Early on in his research, Owen went to an elementary school. I met the principal and I explained, oh I'm looking at how to get around in Japan. And I asked him, so how do children get to school? And he said, we can't look at me on and he said, well, they walk.
Almost in a... They get to school. Like, this is how children get around. They can walk.
In the United States, only about 10% of kids walk to school, in Japan the number is more like 8%, and that's possible because of the second design position. In Japan, elementary schools are often built right in the center of neighborhoods. And I write a party that they took an idea from the US that said the elementary school should be the heart of an neighborhood. In 1929, an American planner named Clarence Perry thinks that he outlined this idea, the school at the center of a neighborhood unit.
So in terms of design, so if you have elementary school at the center of your neighborhood, it shortens the distance for everyone. After the Second World War, Japanese planners took inspiration from Perry as they rebuilt their cities. And so Japanese laws, as they know child, should have to go more than two and a half miles to get elementary school, and the distance is often less. But it's not just the distance between home and school that determines what our kids can safely make the walk.
There's also another urban design factor, the size of the streets. The United States has really wide streets, even in residential neighborhoods. These days, streets are often designed to be wide enough to give fire engines room to maneuver, but as car traffic is increased, those wide streets have encouraged fast driving and turned the walk to school into a dangerous obstacle course, even for kids who live close by. So you ended up with actually this Frankenstein neighborhoods, where the neighborhood was intended to be built for families and children, but then it actually ended up just being really dangerous for kids to get around.
But in Japan, it was in those streets, or much narrower. Interestingly, one reason why is that unlike the US, horse-drawn care does never became common on Japanese streets in the Arab-born yonui. And without carriage traffic, streets just didn't need to be that wide. And so that historic part leads to streets that are much narrower, and if you have narrow streets that naturally slow down people's.
So, don't you think cows and engineering professor at Kyoto University? He's doing research on the history of traffic accidents in Japan. Professor McAllys says that traditionally Japanese cities didn't have large pluses, and so these narrow streets were the key public spaces where people went shopping, as to know each other, and left their kids play. At this point in our conversation, he actually picked up his laptop, and we were talking on Zoom, and walked over to his window to show him the street outside.
He couldn't have been more than 20 feet across. Instead of building streets that hit the turning radius of a fire engine like we do in the US, he had just built smaller fire engines. The next major design feature that makes Japanese streets safer for kids is pretty counter-intuitive. The first day of Japan, and I was walking on one of these streets without a sidewalk.
So as a North American, in my head, I'm like, I'm in a dangerous situation because there's no sidewalk. And as the cars were coming up behind me, I kept on jumping up against the wall, because my North American brain said, you need to get out of the way of the car. But I was watching everyone else, all these old ladies and children walking along without a care in the world, and I started noticing that, oh, the cars pay attention to the pedestrians, and it's the cars that move out of the way for them. In fact, I want to think that sidewalks do more than the cars than the new pedestrians.
It's getting the pedestrian out of the way allowing those cars to go high speed and then you have fatal collisions at any direction. So the starting point of the old transportation planning is different. Like, are you simply planning to move cars or are you planning for people of any age to be able to do the things that they need to do in their life? Japan does have wider arterial roads for traffic and move fast.
Those roads usually do have sidewalks, stoplights, and crosswalks. But inside of neighborhoods, which I mostly see, are what sometimes they call living streets. So if you are in like a neighborhood and whether it's Tokyo or Kyoto or wherever, that residential street, you just see people hanging out, chatting, talking, using that space as a public space. And that is made possible by yet another urban design feature that gives these streets to stay in the field, something even stranger to North Americans than no sidewalks.
No parking. Japan doesn't allow overnight street parking. In fact, you cannot buy a car in Japan unless you have an off-street parking space, because cars are considered private property that should be stored in important public space. Those parking rules have contributed to Japan's low rate of urban car ownership and excellent public but they have also made the streets safer.
Without a wall of parked cars, drivers have a clear view of the whole street and can more easily spot a little kid who is about to cross. The street is also seen as a valuable public space that deserves our care and attention. Here's Michi Waco again. Like the guy in our neighborhood in Kyoto would come out like every morning and wash the area in front of his shop.
It's kind of practice in Japan, especially all the people to it, but they come in, they actually wash down the part of the road that is in front of their shop or home. You know, they really take pride and I guess responsibility for that section. So it's really not seen as a space for cars to pass by. It's part of their neighborhood or their home.
The downstream effects of all this urban planning stuff that makes you zone and your by schools and your streets of the sidewalks of the street parking is all conspired to make Japan a pretty great place for kids to get around independently. Although independence doesn't necessarily mean that they're always traveling alone, make sure that even the smallest of those absent minded kids can get to school on foot. Japan has implemented one of the world's most adorable transportation innovations to walk in school bus. Shouldn't talk up.
In a walking school bus, older kids pick up younger ones as the whole group makes its way into school. Each bus might cover a single apartment building or a few blocks of houses. The leader carries a yellow flag sometimes gets where your hats. There's a sense of safety in numbers and it's also just fun for kids.
Oh, and an eye goal wrote about this practice a few years ago. Each family is sent information about when they need to have their child ready to get picked up by the walking school bus. So you have to have your child at your front door ready to meet up with the other children from your small neighborhood who are going to walk together to school and it's going to be children. So it's going to be the great five and great six and a leading that group.
And it's considered part of the school day. Across Japan walking school isn't just an option. It's a given although Owen said that that principle that he talked with sometimes made exceptions. It's like, well, occasionally if a child is broken or late, we let their parents like bring them by car.
But he's like, the cars are generally forbidden. And again, like why the cars like the parents can't bring the children by car. Again, he looked at me kind of in that Mississippi question. He's like, yes, of course because the cars would cause danger for the other children.
Japanese people sometimes take these systems for granted, but they didn't just happen. The walking school bus took off in the 1960s and 70s. At the time, Japan had just become the second largest car producer in the world. And Toyota's hundreds and Nissan's were on the rise on Japanese roads.
Here's the toasting account. He says that in 1970, Japan had a record high number of traffic fatalities. There were almost 17,000 car related deaths. But there were also widespread environmental protests often that my mothers concerned about dangers of cars in car pollution.
And so Japan came up with some new policies, including one that's still in place today, banning car traffic around elementary schools when kids are arriving in the morning. The road's got safer and Japan's tradition of walking school was able to continue. To North American eyes, Japan remains a utopia of free-range kids. Going up between Osaka and New Jersey, which you may go to felt this difference profoundly.
So when I was growing up in the States from 4 to 13, I was in suburban New Jersey. So the only place really that I could walk to was the public library down the street. Oh, no, and there was one strip mall as well that I could get to. But that was about it.
Like that was the extent of our freedom. Well, I need your family to move back to Osaka, Jean-Hara and her friends walk everywhere, or get on their bikes and take off, go shopping, hang out in the park, or in the rice paddies in your school. And I don't think I really realized how special that was going up just because it was just kind of seen normal to me and like, that's what we do in Japan. And so what we do in the States, and it wasn't until I was older that I realized, oh, actually, it's not a given.
Today, we're going to do not live in Japan. They're raising their family in Quebec. But they still wanted their three kids to do a first errand. The idea of our kids being independent has really, really important to both of us.
And because we spent a lot of time in Japan and have observed happy independent kids doing this sort of thing all the time, we decided that it was something that we really wanted to still learn kids to. Coming up after the break, away from kids, who went first errand in Canada. I felt stressed, nervous, but when I did it, it wasn't that hard. Also, I'll take a look at our discussion on Osaka to Justin here to share it.
We live in Laia, Alaska to SCT, Oregon before Georgia. Aaron Derrand, Derrand, T.E. on Trilosa, Head Police, and If you're interested in pausing time, discover the number seven crime thread range that selected boot stores and boot store A. Such activity can seem interesting.
Always use S.P.E.F. for optimal preservation. So, away from the mood Canada, but they still wanted their children to do a first errand. I wanted their kids perspective on all this.
So, we gave them I.E.C. to Myra and Toma. So, I'm Myra, we're good, and I'm 13 years old. I'm Toma, we're good, and I'm nine years old.
Myra and Toma grew up watching my first errand on YouTube before the show was released on Netflix. They used it to practice their Japanese. Sometimes episodes can be kind of funny though when they were like, I was like, oh no, what I do, but there was another one in the way. If they wouldn't find a way back, I don't think they would put on Netflix.
Myra and Toma each did their first errand a bit later than the kids on the show. I was like six, it wasn't going to be a big thing, and I just remember being excited because we're going to get like Japanese, I can't say it's much too much, too much. Which is a treat to us. I was like, oh yeah, we can get a treat.
Toma also did his first errand when he was six, but we're the family lives now. In Montreal, he was supposed to go to store and get ingredients for dinner. His hair is for feeling a little nervous because Toma does not have a great sense of direction. So, I only decided to draw him a map.
But I was still like, what if I go the wrong way and then I miss him and I get lost forever. He had him go over and over again how he's going to get there. What he's going to do is he's going to do when he crosses our little residential street, and then he took off what I was really nervous about this one. So, I tagged him the whole way.
Did you follow Toma at a distance, keeping out of sight, like ducking behind park cars, like a producer on my first errand? Probably looked really suspicious. She watched his hand at the store. One of the ingredients he needed to find was ginger.
But the ginger was kind of on a shelf that was too high for him to reach. And so he went in there and probably couldn't reach it and then I guess he did some quick problem solving. There was one of the things I couldn't reach so I had to ask someone. He asked someone working there to get the ginger for him.
It took me courage because I was very shy and nervous. But yeah, I did it. I got it. And I felt proud of myself.
How do you know when he made this Japanese practice work in Canada? Partly through diligent preparation. You know, another thing that I kind of want understood is that we don't just kick the kids off. We really put in the ground.
We have this with them a lot. We go through different scenarios and think it lost or something happens. So by the time they're ready to go out on their own, they're very, very confident. And they feel really good about themselves.
We're doing it. The most important piece of groundwork was picking the right neighborhood in the first place. We didn't just randomly choose a neighborhood to live in. Just something that looks for that neighborhood where you'll be feasible.
And they ended up in a dense and walkable part of town where most things they need are just the sort of walk away. So they acted a bit like a Japanese neighborhood in that fashion. In other words, they found a neighborhood. They came close to recreating the urbanism they prized in Japan.
And that in turn helped them give their kids a Japanese style sense of independence. They're one street in their neighborhood. It actually gets close to cars during summer. It's kind of like a living street in Japan.
It's nice because we don't have to really worry about being closer to an intimate space where we can just like get a roll of beds or a scooters or whatever. And just hang around there. And when kids do travel on streets with lots of traffic, they are extra careful. Especially when it's trucks, because trucks are huge and all the time they can't see me.
You make eye contact with the drivers. Like sure they see you. When I was younger, I just like put my hand up like that so we can at least see your hand. You see like the fear of your fingers.
The weekends were able to find a little slice of Japanese urbanism for their kids growing up in the back. But the cultural side of children's mobility still isn't there. For me, what bothers me the most is the social eye. Like this almost like the stigma of letting young children go off on their own.
The judgment of friends and neighbors can fall especially hard on E.G. She says that mothers in particular are expected to always be hovering and protected for their children. But I definitely that's something that I had to actively try to ignore if you will while doing this for the kids. Because every mother has all these terrible thoughts going through their head all the time about what might happen to their kids.
But it's really my job to make sure that my kids are well equipped to live life and handle obstacles and all that stuff and not for me to be there all the time for them. A few years ago, a single father and then Kuber sent two years teaching his kids into 7 and 10. I used the city bus to get school. Someone complained to the child protection service in British Columbia and the dad was told to stop.
He sued the province lost in court and finally won on appeal. And he got lucky. In the US, parents can be fined or jailed for leaving their children alone in public. This is where his parents are colored or often more harshly scrutinized by neighbors, police and social workers.
In 2014, a South Carolina mom was arrested for letting her nine-year-old play in the park while she worked as shift in nearby McDonald's. But Mechi and Owen say that going against the grain has been worth it for their family. They've watched their kids grow into confident, self-reliant people. Home in my role are older now.
My routine, she takes a metro and the bus to school every day. It's a 49er commute that she does all by herself. They think other parents in US and Canada should give us a try. Yeah, because the kids are much more liberty to go around places themselves and they don't always have to wait for the parents.
The men can do their own things more. I feel like if their kids can go out and they don't have to go with them. They don't have any of that. Yeah, like they should try it out.
If they're too scared, I understand. If they didn't do this already, they could ask their parents to maybe make a map like my parents did. It helped me and then now when I'm doing it more often, it's much more normal for me and I'm not really scared anymore. But the truth is it wasn't the map of any road.
They got six-year-old till not to the store. It was the neighborhood itself. The place with me to zoning small streets and those speed limits. It's also all the park you can easily get to on its own.
Most kids aren't so lucky. So much of the built environment in North America has been designed to get grown-ups in cars to work. Not to help but okay, it's a safe to walk to school. And so if we want to give other families a chance to do this, it's gonna require us to build our cities with six-year-olds in mind.
99% of what was released this week by Henry Grabar edited by Emitterald and Kelly Prime, original music by Swan Rian. Sound mix and industrial production by Martine Gonzalez by Jackie by Grand Hation. Our security producer is Tony Hawk, who are called state digital director for the University of England, Jason Leon, Chris Brisson, Chris Brubay, Washington. Jacob Maldonado Medina, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Classer, and me Roman Mars.
Special thanks to Megumi Yamamoto, who helped us with translation this week. Andrew producer, Ellen Payne Smith, who juggled multiple microphones to help us interview with a good family. Thanks also to Rebecca Classer, who turned reporter Henry Garbore, on to my first errands. You can find the links at Henry's official story about show and slate on our website.
Also, Henry has a new book coming on next year called Paid Paradise, how parking explains the world. I mean, if you can't tell from that title, you don't know me very well, but I'm very much looking forward to this book. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. In beautiful, up town, Oakland, California.
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