Like in Netflix Show ‘Old Enough!,’ I Went Shopping Alone as a Kid in Japan

During summers as a child in Tokyo, I’d frequently do things that would’ve been unthinkable back home, in New York City. 

I’d shop alone. If my mother needed extra tomatoes for our dinner, she’d thrust some change into my hand and ask me to run down the street to the grocers. On days when the summer heat felt unbearably sticky, I’d walk five minutes from my grandmother’s house to buy an ice cream. Solo trips to the local bakery were a given, as I’d spend ages drooling over melonpan (sweet bun) and choko corone (cornet-shaped buns filled with chocolate), undisturbed by a parent waiting for me to make up my mind. 

Such outings are similarly seen in the Japanese reality show Old Enough!, which began streaming on Netflix in March. 

A heartwarming series that’s been airing in Japan for around three decades, Old Enough! (aka My First Errand) follows toddlers sent out to complete an errand, entirely without parental supervision, for the very first time. Camera and safety crew are always nearby to ensure the child’s protection, of course, but the kids don’t know that—they’re too busy trying to remember what errands their parents tasked them with. Sometimes the trip goes awry. Vegetables are dropped on the road as one snack becomes two, but every episode always elicits a few tears of pride for me, as children earnestly waddle around their towns. 

But shopping alone isn’t the only way Japanese parents—or society—instills independence in young children. 

At elementary school in Japan, which I attended during my summer break from school in the United States, my classmates and I always took turns serving each other lunch. Those assigned kyuushoku touban (lunch duty) that day would wheel out carts of rice, miso soup, fish, or vats of curry—whatever was on the menu—and dish out individual portions (which we had to finish, no matter what). We were also expected to clean our classrooms at least once a week, getting on our hands and knees to scrub the floor.

According to my mother, notwithstanding going to school when we should be on summer vacation, sending my younger brother and me to school in Japan was good for us. “It taught you to be responsible and think on your own, whereas when we were in New York, we decided everything for you,” she said. 

“So you learned to hold your own change and what time to come home—you learned time management,” she said. 

But since Old Enough! began streaming in the West, it’s sparked a debate about the striking differences in child safety between Japan and the U.S. For some Western viewers, letting children walk alone outdoors is unimaginable, as there are concerns over road safety and high crime rates. My parents would agree. 

I would go out on my own in Tokyo by the time I was 6 years old, but that would change once we were back in New York. I wasn’t allowed to walk unsupervised to elementary school, located in a small and safe suburb of Queens, until I was 10 years old. A solo trip into Manhattan was out of the question, until I was at least in high school. I was also always expected to share my friends’ phone numbers with my parents, so if I were ever in an emergency, they’d have someone to contact. 

“We constructed a life for you and your brother so that we didn’t have to worry about your safety,” my father told me over FaceTime. “We chose neighborhoods that were safe and homes that were more closed off to avoid you getting whisked away,” he added. 

Guns were also a concern for my parents, something that never even crossed their minds while in Japan. 

Since my brother and I were kids, my parents taught us to be suspicious of strangers. My father would talk about our “inner radar,” a sensor he said we inherently had that could tell when a situation or someone wasn’t right. 

But after the Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people, 20 of whom were children, my father constantly drilled us with the maxim, “Run. Hide. Fight.” He was referring to a video developed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security with the City of Houston, Texas, which offers advice about how to survive an active shooter attack: Always run away from the shooter. If you can’t, then hide. As a last resort, you should fight for your life. 

“Every morning I dropped you off at the station for school, I repeated that phrase to you. I was reinforcing the message because the day you need it, it needs to be a reflex,” he said.

My parents even considered moving to Japan when I was about 5 years old because Tokyo was safer than New York. They eventually decided against it due to my father’s work. 

The completely different standards I was expected to abide by while living in Japan and the U.S. were at times perplexing to me. 

Since my parents had been so adamant about not going anywhere alone in New York, I remember feeling scared when I first went to a local pool in my grandmother’s neighborhood in Tokyo without parental supervision. Responsibility for myself in the public sphere was a new concept, and I was worried I didn’t know how to pay for a ticket or whether I parked my bike in the right spot. 

But in all my trips to the pool, swim cap in tow, I never experienced danger. Whether that was because my parents taught me well or because Japan has the social structure for such freedom to exist, I don’t know. What’s clear is, each of my hometowns required the same thing from me—adaptability. 

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