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SPEAKER_07: This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Back in March, Netflix picked up a long running Japanese TV program based on a children's book from the 1970s. On Netflix, the show is called Old Enough, but the name of the original Japanese program translates to My First Errand. Because in each episode, a child runs an errand for the very first time. Episodes are only 10 to 20 minutes long, but in that short time, a toddler treats the audience to a bite sized hero's journey while wearing adorable tiny sneakers. In the first episode, a two and a half year old named Hiroki is sent to pick up curry and flowers and fish cakes at a market that's a kilometer away. He stumbles 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 kind clerk helps him find some chrysanthemums.
SPEAKER_07: Then Hiroki is leaving the shop. The dramatic climax of the episode. He realizes that he has forgotten the curry and he has to go back.
SPEAKER_07: But he eventually finds the curry, completes his quest and makes the long trek home to his proud parents, dragging the flowers along the ground with boogers streaming down his face.
SPEAKER_05: When Old Enough debuted on Netflix, it was a hit. That Slate reporter, Henry Gebar. American audiences couldn't get enough of these very cute kids and their very grown up tasks. But there was another element drawing people to the show, a sense of disbelief. Who in their right mind would send a two year old kid out into the world like this? What's to stop them from getting kidnapped or hit by a car?
SPEAKER_07: One Netflix viewer tweeted, do this in the US and the child will never be seen again. You guys know me. I mean, I raised my kids in bubbles, protected them and I put up some guardrails, but I would not do this.
SPEAKER_05: My first errand is a gimmicky show with hokey music and a laugh track. But it's also rooted in a 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 percent of their weekday trips without a parent.
SPEAKER_07: And this remarkable child mobility is made possible by everything from the neighbors next door to the width of the streets.
SPEAKER_05: 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 the show aren't actually alone. There are producers following them every step of the way, hiding behind trash cans or pretending to be cab drivers.
SPEAKER_07: And on the show, the kids are attempting their first errand at a much younger age than they would be in real life.
SPEAKER_01: Like they wouldn't necessarily be, I mean, going out as a two year old, you know, if there wasn't a camera crew around. That's kind of for the TV show. They kind of, you know, make it a little bit more extreme. But the whole idea of kids going out when they're five or six and, you know, getting whatever, some diapers for their little brother, that's not dramatized. Michi Weigood was born in Japan, lived in New Jersey as a kid and then moved back to Osaka at 13.
SPEAKER_05: She totally gets why the show has become such a hit both in Japan and in the US. I mean, the kids are really, really cute. That's one. But also the whole overcoming adversity, like some of the most popular shows are the ones where the kid has some sort of mishap.
SPEAKER_01: Like the one where the girl for hours is trying to get a cabbage out of the ground.
SPEAKER_05: That's Michi's husband Owen Weigood describing an episode set in the country where a young girl struggles to harvest a cabbage from the family vegetable patch. And like that kind of view into the child's life as she's like walking away going, oh, mom's gonna be like, what took you so long?
SPEAKER_06: Why are you coming home when it's getting dark?
SPEAKER_05: Both Michi and Owen have unique perspectives on My First Errand. Michi because she grew up between Japan and the US and Owen because he basically studies exactly what the show is all about. So my PhD topic was basically examining why children in Japan are able to get around by themselves.
SPEAKER_05: Owen is a professor at Polytechnique Montreal, but he did his doctoral thesis at Kyoto University.
SPEAKER_06: Just living there, you notice things that are different. And one of the differences was that you saw kids getting around. You saw kids playing together in the park. You saw them on the subway. And so Owen started researching children's mobility and he collaborated with Ayako Taniguchi, a professor of engineering at the University of Tsukuba.
SPEAKER_07: She remembers the first time she let her son go out solo.
SPEAKER_05: Professor Taniguchi says she didn't let her son travel alone until he was in first grade because he was absentminded, a bit of a space cadet. And when he did walk to school for the first time, she followed at a distance. And sure enough, he got sidetracked. She saw him picking up bugs and chasing butterflies.
SPEAKER_07: Professor Taniguchi thinks there are a few different cultural factors that make the tradition of first errand possible.
SPEAKER_05: First, she says, is an environment where everyone in the neighborhood feels responsible for the local children.
SPEAKER_07: They may not have TV producers following them, but when a child is walking by themselves to a corner store in Japan, they're not really alone either.
SPEAKER_05: She says that in Japan, there's a culture of communities raising children collectively. And that communal culture is maintained in part through neighborhood associations. Everyone within a given area will pay monthly dues of around two to five dollars. Then the association will organize festivals and activities and help people get to know each other. Japan's low crime rates bolster parents' confidence, but local PTAs also map safe routes through neighborhoods and ask retirees to keep an eye out when kids are going to and from school.
SPEAKER_07: This tight-knit sense of community isn't just present in small towns in the countryside. In his research, Owen found that contrary to Western stereotypes, neighborhoods in Japanese cities are even more communal than small towns. And that actually the more urban a kid was, the more likely they were to know people in their neighborhood.
SPEAKER_06: And there have been international studies that show that parents in Japan are the most likely to say that they know people that will help their children if need be. And it increases as you go more urban.
SPEAKER_05: But culture is only part of the story. The biggest reason why children in Japan are able to move around more freely is the way the country has designed its streets and neighborhoods.
SPEAKER_06: There is an expectation in Japan that children can get around by themselves. And so if you have a cultural expectation that you can, that children can go places by themselves, you're going to build a built environment that facilitates that.
SPEAKER_07: And there are actually really specific aspects of that built environment that help children get around independently in Japan, starting with zoning.
SPEAKER_05: In the U.S. and Canada, cities are usually divided up into distinct zones. You have a residential zone and a commercial zone. And if you want to go shopping or go to work, you have to travel between them, which often requires a car. But that's not true in Japan.
SPEAKER_06: There's no zone that says you can only have residential buildings here. So the strictest zoning you can have, you can have some 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.
SPEAKER_07: You are much more likely to find a shop or a grocery store that's just a short walk from a kid's house.
SPEAKER_05: The 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 children get around in Japan and I asked him, so how do children get to school?
SPEAKER_06: And he said, he kind of looked at me and he said, well, they walk almost in the how else would they get to school? Like this is how children get around. They can walk.
SPEAKER_07: In the United States, only about 10 percent of kids walk to school. In Japan, the number is more like 80 percent, and that's possible because of a second design decision. In Japan, elementary schools are often built right in the center of neighborhoods. An ironic part is that they took an idea from the U.S. that said the elementary school should be the heart of a neighborhood.
SPEAKER_06: In 1929, an American planner named Clarence Perry famously outlined this idea, the school at the center of a neighborhood unit.
SPEAKER_05: So in terms of design, so if you have the elementary school at the center of your neighborhood, it shortens the distance for everyone.
SPEAKER_06: After the Second World War, Japanese planners took inspiration from Perry as they rebuilt their cities.
SPEAKER_05: And so Japanese law says that no child should have to go more than two and a half miles to get to elementary school, and the distance is often much less.
SPEAKER_07: But it's not just the distance between home and school that determines whether 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.
SPEAKER_05: These days, streets are often designed to be wide enough to give fire engines room to maneuver. But as car traffic has 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, almost like a Frankenstein, like 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.
SPEAKER_07: But in Japan, residential streets are much narrower. Interestingly, one reason why is that, unlike the US, horse-drawn carriages never became common on Japanese streets in the era before the automobile. And without carriage traffic, streets just didn't need to be that wide. And so, like that historic part leads to streets that are much narrower, and if you have narrow streets, that naturally slows down vehicles.
SPEAKER_05: Satoshi Nakao is an engineering professor at Kyoto University. He's doing research on the history of traffic accidents in Japan. Professor Nakao says that traditionally, Japanese cities didn't have large plazas.
SPEAKER_05: And so these narrow streets were the key public spaces where people went shopping, got to know each other, and let their kids play. At this point in our conversation, he actually picked up his laptop, we were talking on Zoom, and walked over to his window to show me the street outside. It couldn't have been more than 20 feet across. Instead of building streets to fit the turning radius of a fire engine like we do in the US, Japan just built smaller fire engines.
SPEAKER_07: The next major design feature that makes Japanese streets safer for kids is pretty counterintuitive.
SPEAKER_06: The first day I was in 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 kind of 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 kind of started noticing that, oh, the cars pay attention to the pedestrians, and it's the cars that move out of the way for them.
SPEAKER_05: In fact, no one thinks that sidewalks do more to benefit cars than they do pedestrians.
SPEAKER_06: It's getting the pedestrian out of the way, allowing those cars to go high speed, and then you have fatal collisions at intersections. So the starting point of the whole 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 where traffic can move fast. Those roads usually do have sidewalks, stoplights, and crosswalks.
SPEAKER_05: But inside of neighborhoods, what you'll mostly see are what sometimes get called living streets.
SPEAKER_06: So if you are in a neighborhood, whether it's Tokyo or Kyoto or wherever, that residential street, you'll just see people kind of hanging out, chatting, talking, using that space as a public space.
SPEAKER_07: And that is made possible by yet another urban design feature that gives these streets their distinctive feel, something even stranger to North Americans than no sidewalks. No parking.
SPEAKER_05: 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 shouldn't be stored in an important public space.
SPEAKER_07: Those parking rules have contributed to Japan's low rate of urban car ownership and excellent public transit, 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's about to cross. The street is also seen as a valuable public space that deserves our care and attention. Here's Michi Weigood again. Like the guy in our neighborhood in Kyoto who would come out like every morning and wash the area in front of his shop.
SPEAKER_01: It's common practice in Japan, especially elderly people do it, but they come and 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, part of their home.
SPEAKER_07: The downstream effect of all this urban planning stuff, the mixed use zoning, the nearby schools, the narrow streets, the lack of sidewalks, the off street parking, it 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. To make sure that even the smallest, most absent minded kids can get to school on foot, Japan has implemented one of the world's most adorable transportation innovations.
SPEAKER_05: The walking school bus, Shudentoko. 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.
SPEAKER_07: The leader carries a yellow flag. Sometimes kids wear yellow hats. There's a sense of safety in numbers. And it's also just fun for the kids.
SPEAKER_05: Owen and Ayako 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.
SPEAKER_06: And it's going to be children. So it's going to be the grade fives and grade six. They're leading that group. And it's considered part of the school day.
SPEAKER_07: Across Japan, walking to school isn't just an option. It's a given. Although Owen said that that principal that he talked with sometimes made exceptions.
SPEAKER_06: He's like, oh, well, occasionally if a child has broken their leg, we let their parents like bring them by a car. But he's like, but the cars are generally forbidden. And again, it's like, okay, what? Like why the cars, like the parents can't bring the children by car? And again, he looked at me kind of in that this is a stupid question. He's like, yes, of course, because the cars would cause danger for the other children.
SPEAKER_05: Japanese people sometimes take these systems for granted, but they didn't just happen.
SPEAKER_07: 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 Toyotas, Hondas and Nissans were on the rise on Japanese roads. Here's Satoshi Nakao again. He says that in 1970, Japan had a record high number of traffic fatalities. There were almost 17,000 car-related deaths.
SPEAKER_05: But there were also widespread environmental protests, often led by mothers concerned about the dangers of cars and car pollution.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_05: The roads got safer and Japan's tradition of walking to school was able to continue. To North American eyes, Japan remains a utopia of free range kids.
SPEAKER_07: Growing up between Osaka and New Jersey, Michi Weigood felt this difference profoundly. So when I was growing up in the States from 4 to 13, I was in suburban New Jersey.
SPEAKER_01: So the only place really that I could walk to was the public library down the street. Oh no, and then there was one strip mall as well that I could get to. But that was about it. That was the extent of our freedom. But when Michi's family moved back to Osaka, she and her friends would walk everywhere.
SPEAKER_05: Or get on their bikes and take off, go shopping, hang out in the park or in the rice paddies near school.
SPEAKER_01: And I don't think I really realized how special that was growing up just because it was, it just kind of seemed normal to me. I'm like, oh that's what we do in Japan and this is what we do in the States. And it wasn't until I was older that I realized, oh actually it's not a given.
SPEAKER_07: Today Michi and Owen Weigood do not live in Japan. They're raising their family in Quebec. But they still wanted their three kids to do a first errand.
SPEAKER_01: The idea of our kids being independent is 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's something that we really want to instill in our kids too.
SPEAKER_07: Coming up after the break, the Weigood kids do a first errand in Canada. I felt stressed, nervous, but when I did it, it wasn't that hard.
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SPEAKER_05: So the Waygoods have moved to Canada, but they still wanted their children to do a first errand. I wanted to get the kids perspective on all this. So we gave the mic to Myra and Thoma.
SPEAKER_04: So I'm Myra Waygood and I'm 13 years old. I'm Thoma Waygood and I'm 9 years old.
SPEAKER_05: Myra and Thoma grew up watching My First Errand on YouTube before the show was released on Netflix. They used it to practice their Japanese. Sometimes the episodes can be kind of funny though when they are like lost and they're like, oh no, what do I do? But they always end up finding their way.
SPEAKER_04: If they wouldn't find their way back, I don't think they would put it on Netflix.
SPEAKER_05: Myra and Thoma each did their first errand a bit later than the kids on the show.
SPEAKER_04: I was like six. It was in Quebec City and I just remember being excited because we're going to get like Japanese rice cakes mochi, which was a treat to us. So I was like, oh yeah, we can get a treat. Thoma also did his first errand when he was six, but where the family lives now in Montreal. He was supposed to go to the store and get ingredients for dinner.
SPEAKER_05: His parents were feeling a little nervous because Thoma does not have a great sense of direction. And so Owen decided to draw him a map.
SPEAKER_04: But I was still like, what if I go the wrong way and then I miss it and I get lost forever? You know, had him go over it over and over again, how he's going to get there, what he's going to do, what he's going to do when he crosses our little residential street.
SPEAKER_01: And then he took off. But I was really nervous about this one. So I tagged him the whole way.
SPEAKER_05: Michi followed Thoma at a distance, keeping out of sight by ducking behind parked cars like a producer on My First Errand.
SPEAKER_01: I probably looked really, really suspicious. She watched as he entered the store. One of the ingredients he needed to find was ginger.
SPEAKER_01: But the ginger was kind of on a shelf that was too high for him to reach. And so he went in there, probably couldn't reach it. And then I guess he did some quick problem solving. It was one of the things I couldn't reach. So I had to ask someone.
SPEAKER_01: He asked someone that was 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 then I felt proud of myself.
SPEAKER_05: How did Owen and Michi make this Japanese practice work in Canada? Partly through diligent preparation. You know, like another thing that I kind of want understood is that we don't just kick the kids out the door and be like, good luck, guys.
SPEAKER_01: You know, we really put in the groundwork. We practice with them a lot. You know, we go through different scenarios of if they get lost or if something happens. So by the time that they're ready to go out on their own, they're very, very confident and they feel really good about themselves for doing it.
SPEAKER_07: But the most important piece of groundwork was picking the right neighborhood in the first place.
SPEAKER_06: We didn't just like randomly choose a neighborhood to live in. To some extent, we looked for that neighborhood where it would be feasible. And they ended up in a dense and walkable part of town where most things they need are just a short walk away.
SPEAKER_07: So that acted a bit like a Japanese neighborhood in that fashion.
SPEAKER_05: In other words, they found a neighborhood that 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. There's one street in their neighborhood that actually gets closed to cars during the summer. It's kind of like a living street in Japan.
SPEAKER_04: It's nice because we don't have to really worry about there being cars there. And it's a big space where we can just like get our rollerblades or scooters or whatever and just hang around there.
SPEAKER_07: And when the kids do travel on streets with lots of traffic, they are extra careful. Especially when it's trucks because trucks are huge and at all times they can't see me.
SPEAKER_04: You make like eye contact with the drivers. Make sure they see you. When I was younger, I just like put my hand up like that so they can at least see your hand. Yeah, see like tips of your fingers. The way goods were able to find a little slice of Japanese urbanism for their kids growing up in Quebec.
SPEAKER_05: 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 the stigma of letting young children go off on their own.
SPEAKER_01: The judgment of friends and neighbors can fall especially hard on Michi.
SPEAKER_07: She says that mothers in particular are expected to always be hovering and protective of their children. But I definitely that's something that I had to actively try to ignore, if you will, while while doing this for the kids.
SPEAKER_01: Because I mean, every mother has all these terrible thoughts going through their head all the time about what might happen to their to their kids. But, you know, it's really my job to make sure that my kids are well equipped to be able to get to the streets. And that my kids are well equipped to live life and, you know, handle obstacles and all that stuff and not for me to be there all the time for them.
SPEAKER_05: A few years ago, a single father in Vancouver spent two years teaching his kids, ages seven and 10, how to use the city bus to get to 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.
SPEAKER_07: And he got lucky. In the U.S., parents can be fined or jailed for leaving their children alone in public. This is worse for parents of color, who are 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 a shift at a nearby McDonald's.
SPEAKER_05: But Mechie 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. Thoma and Myra are a little older now. Myra's 13. She takes the metro and the bus to school every day. It's a 40-minute commute that she does all by herself. I asked the kids whether they think other parents in the U.S. and Canada should give this a try. Yeah, because it gives kids much more liberty to go around places themselves, and they don't always have to wait for the parents.
SPEAKER_04: The parents can do their own things more, I feel like, if their kids can go out and they don't have to go with them. Thoma, do you have anything to say? Yeah, like, they should try it out. Like, if they're too scared, I understand. If they didn't do this already, they could ask their parents to maybe, like, 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.
SPEAKER_05: But the truth is, it wasn't the map of the neighborhood that got six-year-old Thoma to the store. It was the neighborhood itself, a place with mixed-use zoning, small streets, and low speed limits. There's also a local park he can easily get to on his own.
SPEAKER_07: 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 little kids safely walk to school. And so, if we want to give other families the chance to do this, it's going to require us to build our cities with six-year-olds in mind. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Henry Grabar, edited by Emmet Fitzgerald and Kelly Prime, original music by Suan Riao, sound mix and additional production by Martine Gonzalez, fact-checking by Graham Hacia. Our executive producer is Delaney Hall. Kirk Colstate is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivian Lay, Jason De Leon, Christopher Johnson, Chris Berube, Lasha Madon, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks to Megumi Yamamoto, who helped us with translation this week, and to producer Ellen Payne-Smith, who juggled multiple microphones to help us interview the Waygood family. Thanks also to Rebecca Clements, who turned reporter Henry Grabar onto my first errand. You can find the link to Henry's original story about the show in Slate on our website. Also, Henry has a new book coming out next year called Paved 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 am 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 Uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.
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