No Longer Getting Bullied, No Matter How Far We Are From Home, We No Longer Cried

From the Front Page Sections, translated…

It’s four in the afternoon, the boys started riding their bicycles, and gathered up in the small parks, in the hot summer sun, they finished one popsicle, and started on a game of water gun wars, the sea breezes would interrupt the boys’ games, Sato, who was over four hundred kilometers away from home stated, that life on Unishima is one hundred times than the life he once had.

The eleven year old boy, is the youngest of the immigrated student of this term, he’s only been on the island for three months, he was originally a student of Kanagawa Urban Elementary School, but, he wasn’t happy, “I don’t want to go to school every single day”, he’d told, “Started in the third grade, there are more bullies in my class, “they would use a very hard ball and hit me with it”.

And now, he’d left home, to Unishima, as the only fifth grader.  Going home is a seven hour drive, and he didn’t cry because he missed his mom, “I’d cried more, because I was bullied by others from before.”

Another pair of siblings, the Asano brothers, followed their father as he had a transfer, from somewhere else, and this is their second year here, the sixth grade older brother, Yuta said, “I no longer needed to go to cram school, I’m playing every single day.”  The third grade younger brother also didn’t have any complaints of not having a 24-hour super convenience shop either, “we get by.”, the grocery stores on the island opens at ten in the morn and closes at five in the afternoon, and, the things are thirty-percent more expensive than the mainland.

The homeroom teacher, Matsu observed, the children on the island learn to get along with their peers, deal with conflicts and resolve their own differences themselves.”  The elementary and middle school combined, only had no more than thirty students, from cleaning up the classrooms, taking care of the plants on the outside, to the cultural celebrations, the performances, the older kids would lead the younger ones.

And so, this, is a brand new way for education to take place, take away the competition, the being bullied, returning to a simpler world, and, the kids are flourishing there.