While studying and traveling through cities around the world, one of the most striking urban scenes I witnessed was a square in Tokyo filled with uniformed children playing during their school recess. The square had only a low fence, yet a diverse range of people (like myself) could mingle and interact among the children. Childhood independence in Japan is world-renowned and was recently depicted in the Netflix series "Old Enough," where children under six run errands outside the home alone, without their parents. While these might be ordinary scenes for a Tokyo resident, for someone with a different urban reference point, the question "how is this possible?" immediately arises, so far removed is it from the reality of most of our large cities.
