Danger from Traffic to Fear of Monkeys: Children's Independent Mobility in Four Diverse Sites in Japan

Abstract

The study reported on in this article was based on a study of children's independent mobility in four different areas in Japan. Interviews were given to the head principals of the sampled schools, and the Parents and Teachers Association (PTA) members, and questionnaires were sent to a total of 530 children aged 7-15 years and their parents. These were conducted in order to obtain information regarding the possibilities for children to engage in independent mobility within a variety of community settings. The findings showed that many young children in Japan are allowed by their parents to travel to and from school alone. The older the children were the more they were granted many varied licenses and freedoms for independent mobility. However, a change in children's attitudes toward the home-school journey was identified in this study. While it is a common norm in Japan that children should go to school on foot or by public transportation, the findings showed that some children have started to rely on private cars as the main transportation to travel to and return from school. In particular this was evident with children who live in small towns and rural areas. This study reveals that in a diverse geographical environment, the extent to which Japanese children can engage in independent mobility is varied. Overall, for children living in the capital city of Tokyo it appears they have more freedom to engage in independent mobility than their counterparts in suburban, small town and rural areas.

Children as urbanites: mapping the affordances and behavior settings of urban environments for Finnish and Japanese children

“…Safety programs in schools are widespread and school communities typically have initiated many activities (e.g. patrolling school journeys, surveillance cameras, warning buzzers carried by students, children's safe houses, and 'security eyes' by parent-teacher associations) to improve children's safety during home-school travel (Drianda and Kinoshita 2011;Fujita 2011;Mori, Armada, and Willcox 2012).…”

The last free-range children? Children’s independent mobility in Finland in the 1990s and 2010s

“…Also, the various measures of CIM (i.e., mobility licenses and actual mobility measures) sometimes produce inconsistent findings. For example, Drianda and Kinoshita (2011) reported a high degree of mobility licenses in urban settings, where actual mobility was low.…”

“…Furthermore, few studies reveal whether children's or parents' concerns differ across these settlement types (Behrens and Muchaka, 2011;Kamargianni et al, 2012). Fortunately, recent international research is providing greater insight into rural children's mobility patterns (Behrens and Muchaka, 2011;Bwire, 2011;Carver et al, 2013;Drianda and Kinoshita, 2011;Gutiérrez-Zornoza et al, 2014;Yatiman et al, 2012). This paper contributes to this work by providing a comparative study of CIM from the 1990s to the 2010s across five different settlement types to identify whether similar situations are occurring in Finland.…”

“…This includes matters regarding weight of school bags, convenience, families spending time together, and trip chaining (Johansson, 2006;O'Connor and Brown, 2013;Witten et al, 2013). Environmental factors such as weather, urban form, pathways, connectivity, presence of green spaces, and distance to school and other destinations also affect CIM (Broberg et al, 2013a,b;Giles-Corti et al, 2011;McMillan, 2005;Rothman et al, 2014), as do mode of transport, traffic speeds, and volumes (Carver et al, 2008;Drianda and Kinoshita, 2011;Woldeamanuel, 2014). Increasingly, the role of social trust and conceptions of risk have been identified as significant influences on decision making about children's freedom to go places on their own (Jackson and Scott, 1999;Madge and Barker, 2007;Rudner, 2012;Tomanović and Petrović , 2010).…”

“…Focusing on school travel as an indicator, Finland, along with Norway and Japan (Drianda and Kinoshita, 2011), has recently been identified as having a higher level of CIM compared with many countries. Carver et al (2013) found that 26% of English and 33% of Australian children travelled to and/or from school on their own, whereas according to Shaw et al (2013), 67% of German children travelled without adult accompaniment.…”