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BRING THE FAMILY
My son’s obsessed with Bakugan action figures, and now it seems his interest has broadened to all things related to Japan. Recently, Nate came home from school and announced he wants to learn Japanese. Later that night, we located Tokyo on the globe and marveled at how far it is from Boston.
Not long after, we headed to the Japanese House at the Children’s Museum. Tucked in the back on the third floor, the house was a gift from the City of Kyoto, carefully reassembled inside the museum.
We took off our shoes and walked across the woven tatami mats that cover the floors. The kids insisted on lying down on a small bed roll, complete with a Hello Kitty pillow, my daughter’s favorite. We sat cross-legged around the formal dining table, and peered into the home’s golden Buddhist shrine and back yard rock garden. We paged through several children’s books, examining the characters and trying to imagine what the stories said from the pictures.
For all the differences between the museum’s traditional Japanese home and our side-entrance colonial, there were some similarities. The Japanese house has only one bathroom, too, Nate was quick to point out.
Without planning it, we had visited at storytime. A young museum employee told the assembled crowd the tale of Kenjyu, a little boy who wanted to create a park for his friends. He asked his parents for 700 cedar seeds and planted them in an unused field. Years later, the little town had developed into a big city, and the trees had grown into a lush forest.
A craft table was set up nearby and the kids were shown how to make pretty decorations with washi paper, Japanese maple leaves, wooden sticks, and bits of patterned paper. As a final touch, the teachers wrote all the kids’ names on their creations in Japanese. Nate and I hung it in his bedroom window as soon as we got home. Somehow, Tokyo didn’t seem so far away anymore.
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