Our Pippi

Lucinda as Pippi Longstocking for Nishimachi Int'l School's annual Book Parade, held today.

Nishimachi's birthday

Lucinda's school, Nishimachi International School, is celebrating its 60th anniversary. It was founded by an American-educated Japanese woman, Tane Matsukata, in 1949, to build understanding between people by, in part, having all students study English and Japanese.

I went to a cocktail party tonight (on Founder's Day, which is Tane Matsukata's birthday) and snapped some archival photos on display.

From the 1950s.


From the 1960s, dancing around the maypole in front of the Matsukata family home, which was built in the early 1900s and survived the war. Now it's the recently earthquake-proofed admin building.


From the 1970s, Miss Matsukata and students.


Lucinda's kindergarten class in 2007-8. Lucinda is in the second row behind Rhen, the boy in the blue shirt. Compare this photo to the 1950s one; the school has fulfilled the goal of selecting students from many nations.

Winter concert

Tonight was Nishimachi's annual winter concert, and most songs had a "peace" theme. Peace and mutual understanding are key elements of the "Nishimachi values" they promote at the school, which was founded in 1949 by a US-educated Japanese woman, Tane Matsukata, to promote international understanding. That's one reason all students study English and Japanese.

The school song is called "Let Peace Begin with Me," and most students seem to take it to heart - or Lucinda does, anyway.

Lucinda wore a lovely red dress that we bought last summer in Denver. She was very composed at center stage during the song "Hanukkah Shalom." And the school borrowed our little menorah for that song, which was fun for our 2nd grader, too.


The school's only Christmas tree is decorated with origami cranes, also a symbol of peace in Japan.

Karaoke with 2nd graders

Last Saturday afternoon, Lucinda and I met school friends and their moms for two hours of karaoke. We went to a place in Roppongi, the famously sleazy nightspot where Americans get robbed after imbibing spiked drinks. But it's perfectly harmless in broad daylight.


I've never sung karaoke and had no idea what to expect; a stage with a microphone? Totally wrong. We took the elevator up to the 4th floor and found super-mod living rooms, each with shiny couches, cocktail tables and a flat-screen TV on the wall.



Ours had couch seating for 9 people and 2 shiny silver microphones. Btw, each mother-daughter pair paid a very cheap 1000 yen (about $11) because one mom joined the karaoke club.


You choose the songs out of this enormous phone book-sized listing, with songs in English, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog for Filipinos (click the pic for a close-up view)...


...and you punch the song ID numbers into this wireless device.


The television queues up the songs and shows the words over very cheesy B-roll video. Among our selections: "Summer Lovin'" from Grease, "Piano Man" by Billy Joel, a few songs from High School Musical, "Stop in the Name of Love," "Holiday" and "La Isla Bonita" by Madonna, and a bunch of others.

Lucinda loved it (she'd gone with a friend once before), and so did her friends. Here are a few pix...



...and one potentially headache-inducing video of the high-speed "It's a Small World."

Fun with math

Math was something of a chore for Lucinda in 1st grade and she really resented my efforts (last summer) to make her practice basic addition and subtraction on worksheets every few days.

But we're having a better time with math this fall because her school purchased access to an Australian website/company called Mathletics (link here: www.mathletics.com.au). It lets children practice equations at their grade level and compete against the computer or children in countries all over the world to answer questions in 60 seconds.

Lucinda usually avoids overtly competitive situations (i.e. swim team, Student Council elections, aggressive soccer team), yet she loves, loves Mathletics. When Mathletics scans the globe to match her with other kids who are looking for a contest, she gleefully announces the players' names and countries ("Audrey from Australia! Mohammed from Qatar! John from the United States!) and doesn't mind whether she wins or loses.

Mathletics also lets teachers arrange homework for children to complete on their own time, and it's available to anyone with an Internet connex who buys the annual $100 subscription.

Weird science

The Japanese are the healthiest people on earth - but they do have some odd health-related ideas.

For example, the preschoolers at Arno's school gargle with water every time they return from the nearby public playground. Is it supposed to cleanse the throat of bacteria or viruses? I have a hard time believing it works.

Then there's the pinworm test. At Lucinda's school, students in grades 2-5 have several swim lessons at a pool in a nearby elementary school. But before they can swim, every student has to be tested for pinworms. Never mind that the US Centers for Disease Control website says, "It is unlikely that pinworm infections can be spread through the use of pools."

A pinworm test arrived in Lucinda's homework packet. It included a small envelope with this charming diagram. (Click on the pic for a close-up view.)


And inside, the 2-day test: 2 outside layers of clear tape, each with a bullseye, that you stick to a central layer of plastic after the procedure.


The school assures us that no Nishimachi student has ever tested positive, and we assume that Lucinda doesn't break that record.

Humming along

Lucinda is in her 3rd week of school and Arno is in his 2nd week, and it's a delight to see how they're both calm and happy about their surroundings at Nishimachi and Willowbrook.

Lucinda and several of her close friends have a wonderfully warm teacher, Ms. Greene, who has been nicely encouraging in math and reading from the start. Lucinda marched straight into class on Day 1, and Blaine and I can see her fresh confidence, sense of self, and comfort at school. It seems that 7-year-old girls know themselves pretty well.

Arno was disconcerted that his closest friends from last year all left for kindergarten (he's in a mixed-age 3-5 class). But he's making new friends - particularly those with a similar love of action figures - and already seems very pleased with his teachers. He's not reading yet - and I would love to see that happen this year - but he's become drawn, again, after a slow period, to making his own spaceships out of Legos.

Meanwhile, Lucinda has a new, energetic Japanese tutor (a teacher from Arno's school) and will participate in Nishimachi's afterschool ballet and "active games" (kickball, basketball, wiffleball, soccer) classes. Arno is again taking an afterschool art class. And we're inheriting a friend's okay-but-not-great piano; maybe we'll try piano lessons?

So much for underparenting?

7th Birthday Girl

We celebrated Lucinda's birthday at our house today with 14 of her friends! The girls were incredibly well behaved and nice to one another. Each time a girl arrived at the door, the rest rushed over to welcome her.

There were two crafts: decorating a birthday crown and decorating a wooden picture frame and a postcard to put in it. Some girls went a little crazy with the glitter glue! Blaine ran the games: (1) Simon Says and (2) Musical Statues. The menu was easy American food: PB&J, tuna sandwiches, Lays potato chips (a huge, huge hit), crudites, watermelon and birthday cake.

I made the cake with a very successful recipe from an expert-baking mom at Willowbrook but both layers mysteriously fell when I took them out of our screwy French oven. Fortunately, it tasted great despite its pound-cake density.

When the girls sang a boisterous rendition of Happy Birthday, Lucinda looked as happy as I've ever seen her.

Global flu

Well, well, well, as my friend Adrienne put it on April 30, when Stevens Elementary School in Seattle was closed for a week to combat seemingly non-existent flu cases in the school:

The H1N1 flu has arrived in Japan, despite the government's aggressive efforts to test and quarantine foreigners arriving on suspicious airplanes.

A bunch of high school kids in Osaka and Kobe have it. And now 2 students -- that is, 2 human beings out of 35 million people in Greater Tokyo - also have it.

So what's the proper overreaction? Lucinda's school has canceled tomorrow's planned Sports Day to prepare just in case the city of Tokyo orders all schools to close indefinitely. The teachers would use the school's website to post assignments for students to complete (and parents to manage), and if this disaster comes to pass, I'm sure all the kid-friendly places (like the Children's Castle or Children's Hall) would also be closed. And we would all go crazy.

Lucinda's art

Lucinda loves making art and she's always very confident and comfortable about trying out new styles and media, and Nishimachi has a terrific art program - it was one of the main reasons why, 2 years ago, we decided it was the best school for her.

And today Lucinda brought home a packet of work from school and laid it out on the dining room table like a gallery show. She and Arno laid out the rules for Blaine and me: no eating and drinking in the gallery and no touching the art! Photographs were, however, allowed.

For comparison, here's a self-portrait that Lucinda made 2 years ago, in pre-kindergarten at the Parkside School in Seattle.


Here are the self-portraits she brought home today.




Here's a paint-print made from a layered-cardboard self-portrait - sort of like a Japanese woodblock print.


And, yes, here's yet another self-portrait on a canvas-like board, which was her final project after the 1st grade's art unit, when they studied cave art, the Renaissance, Impressionism and modern art. She gave this painting a title, "Night with Sun."

Pattycake

Lucinda's latest craze is hand-clapping songs. She taught me a Japanese one recently, and I kept making mistakes! She's the expert.

Hanami

It's hanami - flower viewing - season in Japan, when people flock to parks and cemeteries and wherever to see sakura, or cherry blossoms. I'm definitely getting into it, and here's my photo-fest to prove it.

We went to Ueno Park a week ago; it's been a chilly spring, so the cherries have emerged more slowly than the Japanese weather service predicted (these predictions and pronouncements are taken quite seriously). But there was still a good crowd. You constantly see people photographing the blossoms. But how can they tell one year's trees apart from the next?


We set out a tarp, which is common in Japan, to eat the picnic lunch we bought in the Ueno train station.


Lucinda had fried calamari.


I had an obento (lunch) box with ginger beef, rice, and sauteed leeks, and a bottle of green tea.



People take naps under the flowers...


... meet friends and sit around box-tables set up for this purpose...


and have hanami parties with fellow suit-wearing salarymen.


Lucinda's entire school had a hanami lunch in Arisugawa Park on Friday.


And the children and I saw a lovely tree at a temple that's 1 block from our house.

Lucinda's violin

Lucinda has been taking violin lessons for the past six weeks and she's learned the basic four notes and fundamental hand and arm positions.



It's pretty intense because she's getting a private lesson during what was expected to be a 1-hour group lesson at Nishimachi. And sometimes it's a struggle to convince her to practice, though my friends here assure me that that's a near-universal problem for children who take music lessons.

Lucinda seems (to me, the untrained eye) to be quite good at sight-reading. I think she has a strong visual memory and fine motor skills, which makes sense considering how much she likes folding origami and practicing hiragana.

Next step: learning how to finger the strings to add the other whole notes. We'll have to see if she's willing to continue lessons past this semester.

Teacher lottery

Last October during Nishimachi's annual Food Fair, Lucinda won the teacher lottery -- that is, we bought raffle tickets and Lucinda's name was selected -- to spend a few hours with her Japanese teacher, Noriko Hayashi. Lucinda has always been impressed by Hayashi-sensei ("sensei" means teacher), who has been at Nishimachi for (I think) more than 30 years.

Hayashi-sensei is very good at origami and very precise in teaching the children how to write hiragana - and Lucinda loves doing both of those things. So we planned the lottery get-together so they could do crafts together at the Tokyo Metropolitan Children's Hall near Shibuya.

In honor of the day, Lucinda wore her favorite dress, which my mother and Lucinda made together last summer.


In the paper art section, they noticed a box of paper "sushi" and decided to make their own set. Hayashi-sensei folded some flat cardboard into a box. Then, using paper, tissue paper, and styrofoam for the rice, they made a crab roll, cucumber roll, tuna roll, tuna sushi, rice and tofu sushi, and a pair of "hashi" (chopsticks).

Lucinda was very proud of the finished project.


Lucinda carefully and neatly wrote the hiragana on the chopstick; it says "o te moto," which means "king hand formally" - which really means that Blaine and I can't figure it out.

Trying new things

Lucinda has taken her first violin lesson. The classes are after school at Nishimachi, so they're reasonably priced -- and how lucky! - she is the only student in the Tuesday class.

I thought Lucinda would continue to take hula lessons, but she'd seen and heard friends play instruments during "music sharing" days at school and wanted to give music a try. We'll see how it goes this spring.

Origami of the week

Lucinda learned a new origami fold this week, a little box.


She came home from school and folded about 10 of them, lined them up, and made a dragon.

Underparenting

Lately there's been heaps of talk about "overparenting." The New Yorker labeled it "The Child Trap": when accomplished well-educated people view their children as their latest project, as extensions of their successes as adult, and coddle them to distraction.

Overparenting is over-catering to your children and signing them up for every imaginable afterschool activity to sharpen their developing brains, turn them into little geniuses, and set them up for Ivy League educations.

I'm worried that I'm underparenting.

Most 1st graders at Nishimachi have unbelievably busy schedules. On top of 30-60 minutes of homework every night in reading, spelling, math, writing and Japanese, most children have afterschool lessons four days a week. It's typical to hear that these 6 or 7 year olds are learning piano or violin; soccer, tennis or ballet; French or Chinese; have tutoring in Japanese at least once a week, and/or go to Kumon to practice speed-math.

The academic and music training (and pressure to do all of it) may be more intense here than in the US, though, having said that, my 6 yr old nephew, who goes to public school in Iowa City, takes Suzuki piano, scores heaps of goals on his soccer team, and adds up 3-digit numbers in his head.

In any case, knowing and hearing about these other children is making me insecure that I'm the outlying underparent. I keep telling myself that "She's only 6 years old!", but maybe I'm too laid back about Lucinda's schedule.?

This is what Lucinda does every week: She wanted to take hula lessons on Mondays. She has a Japanese tutor on Thursdays. She sometimes has Brownies on Fridays. She doesn't like sports where there's a winner and a loser, quit soccer after one semester last year, and has so far refused tennis. She plays tag for three recesses a day and likes to come home after school to draw pictures, play with her little brother, have a playdate when I can arrange it, watch TV for an hour while I make supper, and do her homework before bed.

Am I underparenting? I'm not sure. Lucinda is doing well in school but not astonishingly so, and I worry that adding new tasks will make her feel exhausted and pressured. But maybe I'm missing an opportunity to introduce her to experiences - especially music or Kumon's math program - that require a fair amount of time and practice? It's a parenting dilemma for the modern age.

Visitors from Denver

My mom, Sheila, and stepfather, Blake, are visiting for a few weeks. Sheila's cousin Lisa gave them two "buddy passes" from Delta, where Lisa worked for a very long time (Thanks, Lisa!), and helped them find flights in business class to Tokyo.

This is the second visit for Sheila and Blake together and the third for Sheila overall - we and the children greatly appreciate their presence. They've done some sightseeing and went to Kyoto for 3 days and 2 nights, returning this evening.

Now the kids want their attention for Halloween tomorrow, Lucinda's Brownie investiture, and various events over the weekend and next week. Meanwhile, I'm editing for Kateigaho International and doing other work, and volunteering for Nishimachi's upcoming book fair and spring auction. Lots going on these days.

We are also all waiting impatiently for next Tuesday's election to be over and done with.

1st grade conversations

Lucinda and I have been talking about social situations in 1st grade, and I liked the dialogue enough to share it. One background detail: In Japan, children often settle disputes by playing "rock, paper, scissors," or "jankenpoi."

On Friday night, Lucinda told me that she and a friend, Anathea, disagreed about how they would play tag at recess. Lucinda preferred "fairy tag," and Anathea wanted "zebra tag." So they did jankenpoi and Lucinda won repeatedly; Anathea got upset. What, Lucinda asked me, should she do in that situation? I told her to think it over and we'd discuss the next day.

Yesterday (Saturday) I took her to a clothing store and lunch in Omotesando, while Blaine took Arno to the park to play baseball. On the train, Lucinda and I talked things over.

Me: Did you think about your choices in the situation with Anathea? What could you do when a friend is upset about losing?

Lucinda: I could tell her that the next time, I'd be "scissors" and she should be "rock."

Me: That's a good idea. What else could you do?

Lucinda: I could tell her that I'd be "rock" and she could be "paper."

Me: Okay, you could set it up so that she would win and feel better. What else could you do?

Lucinda: I could say that we could play zebra tag first and then fairy tag.

Me: What else?

Lucinda: Well, since I won, I could tell her that we could play fairy tag and then zebra tag.

Children are so literal sometimes, but they also eventually assess the big picture.

Origami of the week

Lucinda is back in school - and is making new origami in her daily Japanese class. Today's new fold is a seasonally appropriate cicada.


Every August - not every 17 years, as in the Washington, D.C. area - Tokyo hums with the sounds of cicadas. The body (not the wings) of each bug flexes like a tiny bellows and gives off a noise like a very loud fax machine. In bulk, it's quite a din.