Let's Go Inside

Entrance.
Well, one of them! Since it's such a big building, there are a lot of entrances, about seven. This is the entrance to the gym. On the right is the box for storing your outside shoes. You have to wear gym shoes in the gym.

This is a students' shoes box. The signs say '1 no 3' and '3 no 1'. That means First Year, Class Three and Third Year Class One. You have to remove your outside shoes and put on your inside shoes. Japanese people are NOT fond of bare feet, either inside or outside. Outside, it's too dirty, dangerous, and in summer, much too hot. Inside, you wear inside shoes or slippers on floorboards or lino, and socks on tatami mats. People are concerned about your feet getting cold from the cold floor. People seem to be a little embarrassed about letting people see their bare feet, or worried about sweat/smell so they leave their socks on. Even throughout the heat of summer, all the school children wear shoes and socks, inside and out.

Each compartment has a large area where the outside shoes are kept when you go inside, and the smaller compartment is where the inside shoes are kept when you go outside.

The stairs. The school is three storeys high - typical in Japan.

Vertigo!

The Corridors

This is the old block. I can only guess the white line was to separate the traffic! These classrooms are closed now, I think they use this area just for storage.

The new corridor with basin area on the right for hand-washing. On the right you can see the bags hanging on hooks under the window.

A hook! For hanging bags! And a nice suburban Japanese house in the background. It's got more lawn than most houses have.

The class library sits outside the room, I think so the kids don't get distracted while they work. There's a big real library too in another wing, but each classroom has its set of age-appropriate books outside their room. 'Age-appropriate' means a lot more than subject-matter in Japan. In each year of school students learn Kanji (characters). So there are books that have only the characters First Years know, and others with all the characters that all primary school kids should know, but none of the ones you learn in Junior High School. Before they learn them, they learn a kind of alphabet called Hiragana, where each symbol stands for a sound, like the alphabet. (Look at the students' shoes box above, the　’の’　symbol is pronounced 'no'). They can use that to read anything, but books for adults and newspapers and magazines don't use these symbols, they use the characters, so everyone has to learn them.

Cleaning supplies. Another big difference between schools in Japan and New Zealand is that Japanese students have to clean the school. They get into a 'han' or mixed-grade group led by a 6th grade student, and they have to clean parts of the school, like sweeping and washing the corridors. With everyone doing it together, it doesn't take long. They even clean the toilets! That makes everyone be careful not to mess the place up too much. Everyone brings their own washcloth to school to use, but here is a pile of extras.

A Classroom

This is actually the Special Needs classroom. There's some photos of a typical classroom in the lunchtime photos. Only the Special Needs room has a round table like this. The chart on the wall is the phonetic syllabary hiragana I was talking about above. Each one stands for a syllable. It reads up to down, starting on the right side.

The blackboard and teacher's desk, and the brown box in the middle is a keyboard for music lessons in the classroom. Every classroom has a keyboard.

The teacher's desk and chair.

Kanji. This is the character for 'small'. It's the first character of the word for primary school, 小学校、shougakko

This is another syllabary called Katakana. It's used for sounds, animal names and foreign words.

Pond and Garden

Lena outside the very well covered and protected tiny little carp pond.





The little boy statue at the pond. Yes, this statue is right in the middle of a primary school!

The Toilets!

Pretty clean! Can you believe the kids clean them themselves?

Heading Towards the Classroom

Erica sitting on the stairs. The building is three floors high - no elevators!


The corridor outside the classroom on the second floor. You can see swimming bags hanging on the hooks on the left, and the rack with floor rags on the right, just outside the classroom.

This one also shows the apron bags. The white bags contain an apron, a cap and a face mask. Kids use their own face mask all the time, but they share the use of the apron and cap sets. Each week, half the kids in the class use the aprons, and serve the food. The next week, the other half do the job.

Looking into the classroom, you can see a kid with her apron, cap and mask on. And the wash cloths on the rack outside the classroom.

A view of the inside of the classroom, from the back, with random foot in the air, showing that school children everywhere just cannot sit still!

Inside the Classroom

Erica modelling again! Here she is sitting in a standard desk and chair set, coloring, during a school open day in Lena's classroom. You can see screws on the side of the desk and chair that enable you to adjust the height of both for maximum comfort.

Amy sitting at her desk in her classroom. It's pretty standard for the desks to be set up like this in rows of pairs. (She hates the boy she has to sit next to).

Everyone keeps their school bag in a cubby hole at the back of the class. Everyone has a 'randoseru' type backpack, a traditional old-fashioned satchel-type bag. You don't have to have one, but everyone wants one because everyone else has one! They used to come in only two colors - red for girls and navy blue for boys, but they come in a rainbow of colors these days. The extra bags you can see stuffed in there with them are for sports clothes. On top of the shelf are the insulated drink bottles. Most kids have barley tea. A few have water. Nobody has juice or soda.

Inside Amy's desk. Color pencils, pencil case and compass and protractor set. This is all taken home at the end of the day. Kids have a text book for every subject, and they keep them all at home, and have to remember to bring them every day when they have that subject.

Some art work on the walls. Amy's picture is on the bottom right