Starting Elementary School in Japan: From Anxiety to Reassurance

Bringing a child to Japan and helping them start school turned out to be much easier than I had imagined. I want to share a few honest impressions from our own experience.

After arriving in Japan, once you complete the move-in registration at the local city office, you can usually apply for school on the same day. One important point is that Japan does not force foreign-national children of compulsory school age to attend school. If you want your child to enter a public school, you need to clearly say so yourself. Private schools are outside the scope of this article.

After submitting the school application, you wait for the school to contact you for a meeting. The wait should not be long. In our case, the school called after two days to tell us when to come in. The day before the appointment, they called again to confirm that we could still visit as planned.

Many people may worry about interpretation. From what I know, if your Japanese is not strong enough, you can bring your own interpreter, or the local government may arrange one.

One detail worth noting: the interpreter arranged for us was Japanese. Her Chinese was quite good, but during the conversation it was still better to speak clearly and briefly. If you explain things in a long and scattered way, the interpreter may find it hard to express your meaning precisely.

At the meeting, several teachers were present, including the principal, the homeroom teacher, and a Japanese-language support teacher. The main purpose was to decide the official start date, explain a lot of school matters, and fill out some documents.

The whole process took about two hours. The details may vary by region and school, but overall it should not be complicated.

Once the start date is confirmed, you can begin buying what your child needs: a school bag, clothes, shoes, stationery, and so on. Then you can practice the school route together. On the first day, you can usually feel comfortable letting your child go to school independently.

Because I have been quite busy with work, and because Japanese schools try not to bother parents too much, I still do not have a deep understanding of compulsory education in Japan. Below are a few simple observations from my limited experience:

• Most Japanese schools use a three-term school year, though some use a two-term system. The new school year begins in April.
• Tuition is free during compulsory education. Some schools also provide free lunch. At our school, lunch and milk are free. I have also heard of schools where families pay for lunch first and receive some government subsidy. After two terms, I also learned that if a child brings lunch from home, there may be a lunch subsidy based on that year’s standard.
• School still involves some small fees, such as materials used in class and activity costs. These are listed clearly. I do not know the overall situation across Japan, so I can only speak about our school: the total is roughly 20,000 to 30,000 yen per year.
• The elementary-school subjects look similar to what I knew back home. The difference is that subjects like math and English feel relatively simple, while other classes are quite rich: arts and crafts, sewing, cooking, and more. The school seems to take these subjects seriously rather than treating them as classes that can be casually replaced.
• There is no parent chat group and no parent committee in the way many Chinese parents might imagine. There is an association called the PTA, though I have not looked into it closely. Parents usually receive updates and notices through an app. So far, being a parent here feels many times easier than back home. The school and teachers do not constantly ask parents to do this and that.
• Normal dismissal time is similar to China, but there is much less homework, especially on weekends. My child often finishes homework at school. Since parents do not need to pick up and drop off children every day, even a 3 p.m. dismissal is manageable without after-school care.
• Public elementary schools do not seem to have formal uniforms. Only the PE clothes and cap are standardized, and the hat worn on the way to school is also usually uniform.
• The government provides free Japanese-language support for foreign-national children. The exact form may vary by region. In our case, the government sends a teacher to the school twice a week, with one-on-one Japanese lessons for two hours each time.
• There are also free Japanese classes outside school. Some only require an application and an available seat, while others may have additional conditions, such as being limited to low-income families, roughly below an annual household income of 3 million yen.
• The school even gives each student a laptop for free, though it should be returned after graduation. I had been thinking about buying a computer for my child, so luckily my slow hands saved me some money. On my second school visit, I noticed almost every student had a laptop and wondered, “Why does every child bring a computer to school?” A few days later, my child brought home a document saying that once the parent signed it, the school would issue a laptop. Only then did I understand.
• With this laptop, my child can practice typing, use translation tools, and check class-community information both at school and at home.

Overall, I feel Japan is truly thoughtful toward children in many ways. A lot of details moved us. If parents themselves do not get too caught up in competition, I feel children here can return to a childhood even better than the one many of us had: freer, more relaxed, and exposed to far more things and knowledge than we could access back then.