Preparing for the Move to Minato City
Last week Maria wired the deposit money for our apartment in Minato City (which is not actually its own city – it’s the central district of Tokyo where the apartment is). And yesterday she called Minato’s school department to find out about registering Kai for the public school kindergarten in Konan, which is the name of our ward in Minato. She wrapped up the whole thing in one call – Kai is now registered for 1st grade, which in Japan starts in April. He’ll also get a spot for kindergarten in January, but he may end up in a neighboring ward, since we’ll be arriving in the middle of the school year and the Konan school might be full.
Check out this web page for the Minato City schools. The first thing to notice is that it’s written in excellent English. The second thing to notice is that it has very clear instructions for foreign residents to register their kids for school. As an American used to generally lousy public services, this just amazes me. Can you imagine a US public school being this accommodating to foreign residents, and having a web site just for foreigners that’s this good? Minato has a high percentage of foreign residents, which is undoubtedly the motivation behind the web site, but again, as an American, I’m amazed to see a city district do something so eminently sensible, and do it well.
We’ve also made our travel plans for getting to Japan. First we’ll first ship all the stuff for our 6 month stay to a friend’s place in San Francisco. Then we’ll go to Newport for Christmas. It’s a Christmas we don’t want to miss – my 14 year old nephew, who lives in Australia with his father, will be in Newport for the first time since he was 6 years old. Then on Dec. 28th we’ll fly from Boston to San Francisco, and spend a day and a half there (since we’re travelling with the boys, we decided it would be wise to break up such a long journey). We wanted to arrive in California sooner, so we could we more time there, but we couldn’t get the flights to work out. But we’re looking forward to seeing our friends in the Bay Area again! Since it’s such a short visit, we’ll probably have a party one night and invite everybody. Then we’ll load up all our stuff and fly from San Francisco to Tokyo. The Japanese have great delivery services (takkyubin), so we’ll use one of those to pick up all our stuff at the airport and take it to the apartment. We’ll arrive at our little apartment just in time to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Tokyo. We’ll still be on US time, so we’ll be up!
