Play dates

When I was a kid (starts the rant), we always seemed to be playing outside. Our street was a cul-de-sac of solid semidetacheds where the neighbors could always be relied to look out for our pack of kids as we bombed up and down on our bikes, pretending to be circus riders or racing drivers or whatever happened to catch the fancy of the group that day. Or climbing apple trees in the back garden, making show-jumping courses out of flower pots and bean poles, and swinging the rickety swing so hard we yanked the foot-long pegs that anchored it in the lawn clear out of the ground.



Life looks a bit different for city kids in Japan these days.

Kentaro and I wouldn't buy Kei a Nintendo DS, despite his pleas. We both instinctively dislike children spending all their time playing with them. But we did compromise by letting him save to buy one himself, and as he'd saved up all his pocket money for over a year and even earned extra by cleaning shoes and weeding, it didn't feel fair to tell him he couldn't use it to buy something he so desperately wanted.

In fact, in the end I even helped him mortgage a wobbly tooth to the Tooth Fairy for 500 yen so he would have enough money to buy Super Mario Cart software for his newly purchased DS, to play with on the 12-hour plane journey to England. (The tooth fell out the night we arrived, and he punctiliously paid me back the money from under his pillow the next day.) So when yet another little friend arrives after school and makes a beeline for the DS, or more frequently pulls out their own, I do realize it's not entirely Kei's own responsibility that so many of his play dates are spent on the sofa immersed in Pokemon or Super Mario Brothers over other children's shoulders.

It's not always like that. We do go to parks, and play baseball or soccer (occasionally both at once) in the street with neighborhood children. But as the rainy season drags on and the stifling heat of summer looms uncomfortably close, it seems likely Nintendo DS will be the play date occupation of choice at least until the autumn. Unless, of course, the boys can save up enough between them for a Wii.