Watch it happen
In Japan the children clean the school.
There are no cleaners. After lunch the music comes on, everybody puts on a bandana, and the whole school cleans it together. Watch a real class do it before you try it yourself.
Say it together
Three kinds of writing, all at the same time.
Japanese is written with three sets of characters at the same time. Hiragana and katakana are alphabets of sounds; kanji are characters borrowed from Chinese that carry meaning. A child in Tokyo learns all three. Sakura would greet you with こんにちは, which means hello.
Every word here has a voice. Tap the ear on a card to hear it before you say it yourself. One word was recorded by a Japanese speaker; the rest are spoken by a Japanese voice engine.
The Japanese you can hear is spoken by a Japanese speaker. The words with no sound yet are waiting on a reader from Tokyo.
Your turn
Ten minutes is nothing. Thirty people is five hours.
Sakura's class has thirty children in it. Give the room your ten minutes and see what ten minutes buys. Then add everybody else.
Tap the room to take your ten minutes.
O-souji, your week
Six ways to leave it better than you found it.
Sakura said it plainly: we use this room every day, so we are the ones who keep it shining. Nobody is coming to do it. Pick one and start.
You have been somewhere real. Now it is about you.
Tokyo is not tidy because somebody comes at night. It is tidy because the people who use a room are the people who keep it.
Do o-souji with your class for one week. Then come back and take your stamp.
For grown-ups
Running Tokyo with children
What your child walks away with
In their words: “A whole school cleans itself, every day, and nobody is being punished. I can do my ten minutes on something everybody uses.” The lesson is not about tidiness. It is about a room belonging to the people who use it.
Before you go: how Tokyo moves
Tokyo runs on trains, and children ride them alone from a young age. The Yamanote line is the green loop that circles the centre; the Ginza line, opened in 1927, is the oldest subway in Asia. Stations have melodies instead of buzzers, a different tune for each stop, so you can hear where you are. People queue on painted marks on the platform and stand aside to let others off first. Ask your child what they notice about the sound of a station.
Where you are going
Yanaka Ginza is an old shopping street that survived the war. Senso-ji in Asakusa is Tokyo’s oldest temple. Shibuya Crossing moves thousands of people at once and nobody bumps into anybody. Ueno Park holds museums and a great many trees. Tokyo Skytree is the tallest tower in Japan. Every stop in the ride is a real address.
Doing o-souji at home or in class
Ten minutes, same time each day, for one week. Everybody has a job written on a card, and the job nobody wants gets passed along so each person takes it once. Photograph the room on the first day and the last. Talk about the day somebody forgot.
A note on safety and scope
Nothing is broken and nothing is repaired. No lacquer, no sharp tools, no unknown materials. Cleaning only, and only surfaces a grown-up has approved. Kintsugi belongs to a later conversation and only after a practitioner has reviewed it.
If there is no device
The whole thing works on paper. Write the jobs on cards, draw the room on the first day and the last, and keep a tally of who took the job nobody wanted.
About this lesson
Built for ages 8 to 11. The lesson describes one way a Tokyo classroom works, not the only way.
Film and audio sources
The short films in this lesson come from AJ+ and Muramasa, shown in their own YouTube players. The spoken Japanese is recorded by a Japanese speaker and shared through Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Map and image sources
The lesson map is drawn with OpenFreeMap and OpenMapTiles, using OpenStreetMap data under the Open Database License. The map component is MapLibre.