A year in a Japanese elementary school

Cian has just finished his first year at the local elementary school and is pretty chuffed at moving up a grade. No longer will he be bottom of the pile. Now he gets to exercise his hard won 12 months of experience over the new first grade students, or 'cherries' as he has already taken to calling them. It has been a year of hard won experience for Daddy too. As first an ALT and latterly a researcher I have spent a fair bit of time in primary classrooms across Hokakido, but it is a very different encounter when one is a parent. What follows are some random observations about Cian's first year in school.
(1) He goes to school a lot; 205 days in a year, compared to 183 days in Ireland. That's over 4 more weeks of classes.
(2) The corollary to that is he has less holidays, particularly in summer, when he is only off for 26 days. This though only applies to Hokkaido and parts of Tohoku. For the rest of Japan summer holidays are approximately 6 weeks long and run through until the end of August. Which would be an ideal length of time to return home for the business end of the GAA championship. Instead Hokkaido has longer winter holidays, nearly 4 weeks compared to 2 everywhere else in Japan. Ostensibly this is so students can 'enjoy winter sports', but in practice it is to save on the heating bills for schools. Bar the bean counters at the prefectural board of education, nobody is happy with this arrangement; not the students, the teachers, nor the parents.
(3) Cian does not have to wear a school uniform. On occasion he has gone to school in his pyjamas (top only). Such feckless parenting can of course be entirely blamed on his Mammy.
(4) However, Cian and his fellow students all have identical school bags. They are rectangular in shape and made of the same material as the protective clothing worn by the bomb disposal team in the film The Hurt Locker. These things are indestructible. Which may explain why we ended up paying close on 200 Euros for the bag. Or rather Cian's grandmother did. Apparently the tradition in Japan is for grandparents to buy their grandchildren's first school bag. At 200 Euros a pop, it is one Japanese tradition I am very happy to uphold.
(5) Cian walks to school with group of 4 of his classmates. This is not mere chance. All first grade students are assigned to such groups and must follow a specific route to the school. Thus in the morning Cian meets his group at 7:40 at they all walk up to school together. Or they used to until Cian and his friend Ryuto got fed up with the other two girls talking and walking slow, and decided to run up to school instead so that they could have a quick game of dodgeball in the school gym before classes started.
(6) Students must be in the school by 8:10. Classes don't start immediately. First there is getting the books and other materials ready for that day's classes, then attendance is checked, class announcements read out, there is a 15 minute silent reading time where students can read what they like. Finally, at 8:40, the first class commence. There are 4 classes in the morning and one in the afternoon (though in second grade he will have two classes in the afternoon twice a week). He has a twenty minute break mid morning and an hour and ten minutes for lunch.
(7) Lunch is a hot school lunch delivered daily. Students in Cian's class are assigned in rotation to bring the lunch trolley to the classroom, serve the food, tidy up everything afterwards, and bring the lunch trolley back down to the school entrance. They don't get paid for this.
(8) Students also have to clean their classroom everyday. And the corridor in front of it. And the toilets. They don't get paid for this either.
(9) Unfortunately this behaviour doesn't transfer to the home. Ask Cian to help with the dinner or tidying up and you are met with comments about 'child labor' and 'in servitude'. Then he takes up a guitar and sings about 'not working on Maggie's farm no more' and how 'a change is gonna come'. These references, it should be pointed out, are completely lost on Mammy who gives a clip on the ear and orders him to set the table or he's going to spend the night in the bin station across the road. Again.
(10) The school building is quite old and in winter, quite cold. There are no radiators in the classrooms only a gas fired stove in the center of the room. The stove has two settings: molten metal making blast furnace hot, or off.
(11) I know this because there are three 'open class' days throughout the year, one in each term. As the name suggests, this when Cian's class is opened to the parents to come see the magic. Some parents bring cameras, others video the proceedings, and all of us hope that our respective offspring, please God/Buddha, don't do anything too embarrassing in front of us all.
(12) There is a lot of paperwork involved in being a student at a Japanese elementary school. Pretty much every single day Cian returns home with a sheaf of notices, flyers, requests and other assorted printed paraphernalia. As anecdotal evidence suggests that this is repeated all across the country, you can understand why the world's forests are disappearing so fast.
(13) One of the notices is the class diary. We usually get these 3 or 4 times a week, depending on how busy Cian's teacher is. Besides keeping parents updated on what the students are learning in class, they also contain copied examples of various students' compositions. After a while you begin to notice that (a) the same students' writings keep appearing; and (b) how well these students write, both in terms of content and handwriting skill. Cian by contrast has featured only once, in twelve months, and his writing resembled the sort of hieroglyphics found on the walls inside pyramids.
(14) Mind you the boy is a whizz at maths, but sums never get featured in the diary.
(15) Cian doesn't like his homeroom teacher. Or rather her gender. He'd rather have a man, because he's pretty sure a man would put maths in the class diary.
(16) You can imagine his disappointment then when he found out today that he is going to have the same homeroom teacher for second grade.