Credits: Social Media
American mother ‘was not prepared’ for strict list of Japanese school supplies she had to buy
If you thought you had a lot of school supplies to buy for your children, be thankful that they don’t go to private school in Japan.
An American mother who now lives in Okinawa has gone viral after showing the long list of things she had to purchase for her son.
Strict Japanese private school supplies
“You can not procrastinate when you sign your child up for private school in Japan,” Moriah, who documents her life in the country, said on TikTok. “I was absolutely unprepared for the level of organisation.”
She then showed everything she had to buy for her son’s first day, starting with a fancy uniform with different items for each season. The summer uniform includes a white bowler hat and three pairs of shoes: smart black loafers for outside, white plimsoles for inside and white sneakers for gym and recess.
Every day, he also has to take a pianica, a handheld musical instrument that features a keyboard on top the top and a mouthpiece that fits into a hole on the side. That’s what they learn to play at school in Japan, far fancier than a recorder.
Other items include a water bottle with a strap, a bento box, a cutlery set with chopsticks, a cap, a waterproof zip bag for letters to parents, a sleep mask for nap time, a shoe bag and a school project bag – and that’s not all.
The school also requires parents to get very specific art equipment, including pastels, coloring pencils, clay, a clay box, scissors, crayons and markers. They also need a stamp with their name in Japanese, and every individual item must be labelled.
Every single thing has to go into the backpack every day in a specific way, with no extras, and the exhausted mother said she’s totally “beat” after organizing the strict school supplies all day.
The Japanese school system begins with six years at elementary school, followed by three years at lower high school and three years at upper high school, Japan Educational Travel explains. This means children undergo 12 years of formal�education in total.
Mother spends $420 at the school
In a second video, she revealed that she spent 65,000 yen, which is around $420, on supplies bought directly from the school. That doesn’t even include things she had to buy separately!
That included two summer hats, a name tag, a backpack, the summer uniform, gym uniform, art smock, bow tie and three pairs of shoes. Every item of clothing has to have the child’s name sewn onto it in Japanese.
The pianica, a jump rope and many of the art supplies are also bought directly from the school, but some items have to be purchased elsewhere too.
School supplies aren’t the only thing they do differently over there. Americans are shocked by the ‘common’ method of sneezing in Japan too.
People in the US are gobsmacked by the huge list of items that are needed, but many across the rest of the globe say that’s actually pretty normal.
One person wrote: “As an Australian I am not shocked at all. What do parents provide in American schools?”
“I’m so confused what it’s like in America, because for the rest of the world this is normal,” said another.
A third person added: “Apart from the uniforms and specific crayons my kids in public school in Canada have similar items.”
“It’s almost the same in private schools here in Mexico,” someone else said.
Another agreed: “I thought this was normal. We do most of this in almost every day in the Bahamas.”
Is it normal where you live?
