Stuff I find cool and HAWWT!

Much thanks to @aussie_jew (Damien) for suggesting this photo of Nick Topel and Dominic Calvani sunning themselves. Photo credit goes to Mark Jenkins. #handsome #hunk #totallytempted

Much thanks to longtime BosGuy reader and former blogger (2 Cents Down Under and 2 Shoes and a Broom), Damien, a.k.a. @aussie_jew on Twitter who shared this doubly tempting photo of model / fitness trainer, Nick Topel (left), and Brazilian model Dominic Calvani (right) taken by the talented photographer, Mark Jenkins. Past Temptation Tuesday Posts

The premise of Old Enough!, a Japanese reality show newly streaming on Netflix, is childishly simple. In each 10-minute episode, a tiny kid sets off to complete the child’s first errand alone. (Well, “alone,” with the cameramen.) The children totter off into the neighborhood, forget what they’re supposed to be doing, burst into tears, and ultimately make their way back to Mom and Dad laden with plastic shopping bags, having succeeded in their mission. Hajimete no otsukai, which is based on a children’s book of the same name from 1977, has run on Japanese TV for more than 30 years—long enough that some kids on the show’s newer episodes have parents who were on the show!

In the first of the 20 episodes made available to Netflix subscribers, a 2-year-old travels to the town convenience store to buy groceries for Mom. In the fourth, 3-year-old Yuka crosses a five-lane road in Akashi, a city the size of Cincinnati, to get to the fish market. “Can you go all the way to Uonotana without getting hit by any cars?” Mom asks.

Needless to say, if the show were set in the United States, the parents would be under investigation by child protective services, and the children in foster care. Like many things about Japan, it would be easy to attribute Hajimete no otsukai (literally, “First Errand”) to some cliché about Japanese essentialism. But the Japanese are not so different from us. They’ve just made policy choices that make it possible for kids to run their first errand a decade before their American counterparts get to do the same.

“In Japan, many kids go to neighborhood schools on foot and by themselves, that’s quite typical,” said Hironori Kato, a professor of transportation planning at the University of Tokyo. Typically, Japanese children don’t actually run errands for Mom and Dad in the city at 2 or 3 years old, he notes, as they do in the show. But the comic, TV-friendly premise exaggerates a truth about Japanese society: Children in Japan have an unusual degree of independence from an early age.

“Roads and street networks are designed for kids to walk in a safe manner,” Kato said. Among the factors, he said: Drivers in Japan are taught to yield to pedestrians. Speed limits are low. Neighborhoods have small blocks with lots of intersections. That means kids have to cross the street a lot—but also keeps drivers going slow, out of self-interest if nothing else.

The streets themselves are also different. Many small streets do not have raised sidewalks but depend on pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers to share the road. Curbside parking is rare, which creates better visibility for drivers and pedestrians and helps give the smaller streets of big Japanese cities their distinctive feel. In fact, I first heard about Hajimete no otsukai from Rebecca Clements, a research fellow at the University of Sydney who has written a dissertation on Japan’s approach to parking: Car-buyers must show proof of an off-street parking space to make their purchase. For Clements, the show is evidence of how Japan gives children a “right to the city.”

Japanese kids make a lot of weekday trips on foot—especially those between 7 and 12 years old, who walk for almost four in five trips. Neighborhood schools are the driving force behind a lot of this travel, with many schools employing “walking school buses”—a morning parade of kids in which the older ones help guide the younger ones. But the school trips also introduce children to their neighborhood, which can facilitate other kinds of travel.

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