To bookend this, a family member who lectures at a Japanese university has to endure "parent teacher" meetings for her twenty-one year old students.

based on what I've heard about universities there this surprises me, unless it's teacher's business to help get students a job there shouldn't really be much to have interventions over.

That's a tough commute to school. The kid isn't just taking a train. The kid has to take the Yamanote line, one of Tokyo's busiest lines, and change at Shinjuku station, the world's busiest transport hub.

Japan has very low speed limits in dense areas: 40km/h in cities, 30km/h on side streets. That reduces the risk to pedestrians a lot.

Japan also has two things the USA doesn't: High density, resulting in low walking distances between important points; and a very good public transit system, reducing walking distances even more. Both of these contribute a lot to minimizing child/car interaction, in addition to the strict traffic laws.

sorry but kids walk a pretty good distance to school. high density doesn't mean school is down the block, plus some school is based on your skill level not your distance from, so you may be in the upper public school across town because you did so well. What Japan has is a lot more responsibility and empathy at crosswalks. They are used to traffic and respectful of others. Selfishness leads to speeding, mistakes which leads to crashes.

You underestimate just how low density many parts of the USA are: https://www.google.de/maps/@41.5585724,-87.6995585,6409m/dat...

In that area without parents driving their kids around, it would mean many kilometers of walking, due to the lack of public transit.

I wonder if kids in NYC are also taking trains to school like kids in Tokyo. On a separate note, growing up in Japan, the concept of renrakumou (telephone contact graph) was quite interesting. When there is something important from school announcement, people on this graph would traverse down the tree and contact the node to spread the word. http://oshirase.x0.com/jpg/templtes/renrakumou.jpg

These graphs were a staple of emergency procedures in the pre-Internet era. Still are in some places. My mom was a teacher; this is how school closings worked.

That's something schools and organizations (such as high school marching bands) used for announcements in America, too.

..two minutes in and queue the white guy in a kimono giving social commentary on Japanese culture.

yeahh that looked pretty cheesy but it's more of a comfortable summer clothes he's got on I thought, not actually a man's dress kimono or anything. He's a writer too so it's like he's just hanging around the house in his pajamas