Japanese missing boy: How did Yamato Tanooka survive?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
"Raising kids is hard" seemed to be the collective sigh heard around social media, TV talk shows, andproverbial water coolers.
One famous morning talk show host, Tomoaki Ogura, sympathised with the parents on Monday, onhis Fuji TV show "Tokudane!". Mr Ogura said: "To say 'If you're so bad, we can't take you along, just stay here' is a valid way of scolding a child."
Many recalled how they too were shut out of their homes as children, left throwing a tantrum on the toy shop floor, or shut in a dark closet.
A well-known literary critic, Yumi Toyozaki, tweeted on Tuesday: "I was a restless, rambunctious, cantankerous child, so I feel very much for the father who left his child in the woods for a bit in order to discipline him. I hope people stop condemning him."
The incident has had many sharing childhood memories of how parents pretended to leave them or their siblings for refusing to listen.
The lost boy and Japan’s parenting debate - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-36441875
But mainly I feel sorry for them for the monster they may have created now. Yamato charted his own course. He didn't just sit there sobbing and chastened. Instead he hiked for miles, demonstrated incredible self-sufficiency, survived against the odds and became a national hero and treasure, while his parents have been vilified.
He will be the one putting his parents out of the car from now on. And he's only 7, so they have many years more to come. He's probably filling his pockets with stones right now.
The fact that it is common in asian cultures to discipline children in horrible ways, like locking them in dark closets, or corporal punishment, doesn't excuse the parents from these horrible crimes.
In one of the Summer Camps that I attended as an adult leader, many of the boys from my troop attended an overnight survival training in which all they could take was the clothes on their backs and their "10 Essentials". They had to go to a nearby location away from their normal campsite and make a shelter and sleeping arrangements with only the things that they could find or forage and stay the night.
You would think you will meet a bunch of frustrated and unhappy boys the next day but what I found instead was a bunch of the happiest boys asking when they can do it again.
I don't know what all they learnt but I was comfortable that they could survive at least one night in a national forest after that experience.
With the headline you wonder if people expect to die if they are out of contact with civilisation for 5 minutes.
But seriously, the environment that he was in is just not very dangerous. Sure, Hokkaido can get cold at night, but it's late Spring now. The biggest danger would have been from waterborne diseases and wild animals, and the latter mostly avoid humans, even the snack-sized ones.
Given both the water and not freezing bit, even seven year olds are surprisingly resilient. Hunger is a big deal, but an otherwise well-fed human can survive (miserably) without food for 30 or more days. Most potentially-threatening wildlife (e.g., bears) will do their best to avoid you.
So what, exactly, would you have expected a seven year-old to have died of over the course of a week, if not dehydration or freezing?
The biggest concern, IMHO, would have been not finding him for several weeks.