Six-year-old Nozomi Fujioka is a first-grader at Yanagidani Elementary School. She’s a bright, articulate, and energetic kid, but even if she wasn’t, she’d still make a big impression on all the school’s teachers and staff. Why? Because she’s the one and only student in her entire class.
Nestled in the mountains of Ehime Prefecture, the Yanagidani district of the town of Kumakogencho only has about 540 residents, and not a lot of them are kids. The Japanese school year starts in April, and in 2023, 2022, and 2021 Yanagidani Elementary had zero new first-graders. As a matter of fact, the town has so few elementary school-age kids that for 2023 they simply shut the elementary school for an entire year.
But 2024 is different, as Nozomi, whose father Tsuyoshi was born and raised in Yanagidani, became the school’s first new first-grader in three years, and in keeping with Japanese school customs, Yanagi Elementary held an entrance ceremony for her, which can be seen in the video below.
“New students for 2024: Nozomi Fujioka,” an administrator calls out. Nozomi stands and says “Present,” and the administrator replies “One new student.”
Like many rural communities in Japan, Yanagidani’s number of residents has been steadily shrinking in recent years as Japan’s population ages and what young people there are head to bigger cities for more ample academic and professional opportunities. But Nozomi likes living in Yanagidani, her father says, and he wants her to have a connection to the town too.
Although Nozomi is the school’s one and only first-grader, she won’t be entirely without schoolmates. Partially thanks to local promotional efforts to encourage people to move to the area, two families have relocated to Yanagidani since last school year, and there will be a total of four children taking classes at the elementary school this year. Nozomi will be the youngest, but she isn’t worried about getting along with her upperclassman. “I’m looking forward to school,” she says at the point in the video below, followed by a confident “I’m not worried about anything. I can make friends wherever I go.”
Her schoolmates attitudes seem equally outgoing, with one of them, a fifth-grade boy, telling her “If there’s something you don’t understand, please ask me. Let’s be friends and have fun at school.”
Nozomi’s father is happy that she’ll have social interactions with other students while learning. “I’m glad the school could be reopened. I thought she might be alone there, so it’s a relief that there are other kids who have transferred in.”
▼ Yanagidani Elementary School
During Nozomi’s entrance ceremony, Yanagidani Elementary principal Masatoshi Fukuda, dressed in a formal coat with tails, said “Everyone in town has been looking forward to this. Please enjoy your school life and trying many new things.” Following the ceremony, Nozomi was issued her textbooks and greeted by a contingent of representatives from the town, who held up a banner congratulating her on the start of her elementary academics.
▼ If you need an extra dose of adorableness, here’s the point in the ceremony where Nozomi declares “Benkyo wo ganbarimasu” (“I’ll study hard.”).
Though overcrowding definitely won’t be an issue, the school plans to teach separate lessons for different-year students in the same room, which should help bolster school spirit and comradery. PE classes also look like they’ll be a group affair, as the video shows Nozomi and her upperclassmen playing soccer together.
What makes the whole situation extra heartwarming is that prior to starting elementary school, Nozomi attended a local preschool where she was friends with three younger children. Knowing that Yanagidani Elementary is up and running again, and with a happy, if small, student body just might be enough to convince those younger kids’ families to stay nearby as their kids go through elementary school, and help keep a few more people in the community.
Source: NHK News Web, YouTube/eatニュースチャンネル【愛媛朝日テレビ】
Read more stories from SoraNews24.
-- Is Japan overworking its teachers? One exhausted educator says, “YES!”
-- Japanese teacher criticized for attending son’s entrance ceremony instead of her own school’s
© SoraNews24
28 Comments
Login to comment
buchailldana
I used to go to their Junior high school at the end of the 90s to teach English.
Most of the schools I visited in rural ehime are closed now.
himawari23
Running an elementary school with only four children seems pretty wasteful to me.
I get wanting your children to have a connection to your hometown but it’s also a little selfish to deprive them of making social connections. I think it would be better both socially and financially to have a regional school shared among neighboring towns.
Mr Kipling
How to waste tax payers money.
YeahRight
A single school bus (van) to the next town over would be a much more effective use of taxpayer money and lead to a better chance of socializing with others. I feel sorry that this kid's father is so selfish to keep her from reaching her full potential.
餓死鬼
That was very sweet to watch and hopefully the kids will enjoy their elementary school lives as much as possible. However, I wonder how the school could survive after being closed for three years in a town that apparently has eight other elementary schools.
Yanadani.
First15
Yes and no. I mostly I disagree on the matter because, here in America, focussing everything on the big metropolises littered across the country have done more societal damage than being isolated to more rural communities. That's not to mention that the economies in cities are absolutely broken these due to the amount of white collar jobs (Especially those in the government) that exist for no other reason than just to exist. Not sure about the situation over in Japan, but there is a MASSIVE skill gap issue taking place over here where all the blue collars workers are reaching retirement age, meanwhile kids are graduating from colleges with useless Liberal Arts and Political Science degrees that have absolutely zero practical application in the real world. And those kids that ARE smart enough to get involved in the trades, are being brainwashed by the schools into thinking that it's their birthright to be a top manager in a company just on the fact that they exist and went to college.
browny1
A nice story about the little girl and people's efforts to revive the school.
However, as others alluded to, it seems a huge waste of resources and perhaps a small bus shuttle service around the district, going to a centralized location would be better.
The social benefits for the children would be greater as would the designated school with a concentration of resources.
Looking at the photo of the school building, I can't help but think how desolate it must be for a handful of kids.
Just maintaining it as a safe environment alone must be costly.
100s of small towns/districts across the country will never be as they once were. Some very rare cases are successful, but in the main, society has to re-organize, re-invent and re-strategize for the coming century.
And this will mean many little village schools will not be viable.
Kazuaki Shimazaki
On the other hand, the entire process of kids being able to walk (rather than be bused) to their primary school is a small but valuable way to increase their independence. As it is, the practice that some areas have of forcing them to go as a flock is degrading this training opportunity because of One-Kid-Died.
As it is, Japanese kids don't get as many opportunities as say American kids to do things independently. For example, 13-year-olds babysit in America, but babysitters in Japan are adults. The average Japanese middle or high school kid joins a club that uses up their excess hours after school but also keeps them from wondering about to make independent decisions. And of course there's the studying.
Busing the kids would be just another opportunity deprived from them.
Open-minded
This is financially and socially irresponsible both from the village and the father. Like others have said, the school would not generate any revenue, but it would save a a lot more money. The saved costs could be used to bus the kids to a school populated with more kids and also add other amenities to the village. With so few students or young kids, this older population probably already have public services like free van transportation for the elderly population to go up and down the mountain. They could easily alter one of the routes to include another school.
To operate the school like this is waste of village funds, and it could stunt the social development of the children at that school which could lead to social and academic issues. It could even increase their chances of dangerous situation because people running the school may be more lax with so few students around.
First15
It's a "waste" for the village to use government taxes to keep a school open, but isn't a "waste" to use those same funds to pay for a bus to another school who knows how far away?
Isn't the same argument made for why kids shouldn't be home schooled, only for the stats to come out and show that home schooled students excel far better than kids at public school?
robert maes
Mad. Another extreme example of Japans incapability to accept reality.
the responsible minister, governor and mayor should be fired for incompetence.
it is about milking subsidies from federal government by local government.
NOMINATION
I remember teaching at a school in deep Southern Nara that had between 2-4 students in each grade. The town went all out to build a new beautiful school for the less than 20 kids in the entire school. My salary was pretty nice too. I am not sure how the taxpayers felt about everything.
Yubaru
Can not imagine just how much money will be spent by the municipality, prefecture and national government, to keep this one school with what, 5 students, open and operational.
Xachan86
Every single reaction I read here is about money and taxpayer this and taxpayer that.
Honestly, I prefer my taxes (yes I pay my taxes in Japan) to be "wasted" on that than to be wasted on Kishida and the likes, or on acquiring F35 jets.
kohakuebisu
This only warms the heart if you assume tiny schools must be a positive experience for the child and that the handful of kids at this school must get on like a house on fire. They have no choice if this is not the case.
Our experience of raising kids in inaka is that they and their friends can't get away fast enough. This includes kids who hang out down the river every weekend in summer, the kind of Tom Sawyer/Totoro idyllic upbringing city people project onto inaka kids.
elephant200
Poor little girl, she goto a school has no classmates, no friends, just only her there.
kohakuebisu
This will like have been newly built when schools were amalgamated. Merging schools in Japan often means buying a new one in between. There is money earmarked for this, and rural towns like to grab it and give it to a local construction company.
Some schools only get to operate for 25 years or so till they too close and are merged with another one. There are rules on elementary schools which mean a minimum level of facilities will need to be provided regardless of the number of kids. Sports field, pool, sports hall etc. You can't just knock up a couple of prefabs and use the local park for sports. A youchien can do that, albeit with huge potential for noise complaints from people living next to the park, but not a public system school.
chotto_2
I hope she has a lovely time, nonetheless.
wolfshine
Hard to imagine a part of Japan like Shikoku really being able to support many people in the coming decades.
It's not a popular suggestion, but I think some parts of Japan need to be deindustrialized. As villages and small cities start to empty out, bulldoze everything except for historical monuments and return them to nature. Parts of Japan like this don't need service economy jobs or manufacturing anyway. What Japan needs is more farming. Since the 1960s Japan has gone from producing over 60% of its food to under 40%.
wallace
The next nearest Elementary School is Habu, 37 km. It is not unreasonable to travel by a school bus.
himawari23
I’m sure the ¥¥¥ used for providing gas and electricity to the school and paying for the salaries of all the teachers and staff is far greater than what it would cost to charter a van to bring students to the nearest school, assuming there already isn’t a public bus.
Taxpayers would have to contribute either way, but having a regional school would be more environmentally friendly and socially beneficial to the students in my opinion.
WoodyLee
This is truly a heart warming story, glad to see the little girl being taken care of and offered the education she need to make it into the future.
Thanks to all involved for making it happen, ARIGATO.
browny1
Kazuaki - interesting points about kids walking and getting opportunities to do things independently.
I don't disagree with that.
But I fail to see how busing a handful of kids to a larger school - with all of it's offerings - deprives children of such opportunities.
I'm sure the few kids in the village have way more independence and chances to learn, integrate, develop in an environment that would be denied to most city kids.
zibala
It's not unreasonable to walk to school.
It's unreasonable to walk 37km to school.
ushosh123
When they grow up, it's not going to be a one on one experience, so I do agree the bus makes more sense than schooling locally. But we also have to consider sunk costs and if the local teachers actually would have a job elsewise.
kohakuebisu
Personally, I think the solution in cases like this is to close the school and set up a satellite campus (Japanese "bunko") of a fully equipped school that operates as a hub for that area. An inexpensive existing local building could be used as the satellite school. Any community that has drastically shrunk like this will have unused buildings galore. Three days a week, the children go to the satellite school and do mostly academic work. Two days a week you bus the children to the fully equipped school, and do things like sports and music that benefit from being group activities. That way, you minimize the amount of days with travelling but allow the child to still engage in proper group activities and socialize with more children of similar ages.
It should be obvious but there are lots of cherished-by-people aspects of Japanese school life that cannot happen if you only have one or two pupils. Is this one pupil on the rota every day for all the things kids have rotas for? Does she wipe the floor, clean the toilets, act as blackboard monitor, do the PA announcements etc. etc. Does she elect herself seito kaicho? Like walking to school, these things form what Japanese people think elementary school life is. Take them away and what you are left with is something else.
First15
If that's seriously your first concern, then you have seriously screwed up priorities.
Home school kids are excelling far better both in education and outside of school than grade school kids. One of the constant complaints I hear about education here in the U.S. is that teachers are being overwhelmed by classes consisting of up to 40 students, yet here's a girl who has every teacher all to herself and that's a "bad thing"?
njca4
Well at least the ceremony would be over quickly.
My daughter graduated a couple of months back. 330 kids in her year, the worst part is she was in class 1, and our family name starts with A ...