Every morning my wife and I walk our son out to the front of our residence where he says goodbye ("ittekimasu! 言ってきます！）and we wish him farewell ("itterashai..! 言ってらしゃえ！and each morning there's a stream of kids appearing from their various homes and apartments via little streets running up and down the hill, connecting to the main street, where they join hundreds of other kids as they make their way, slowly, but surely toward school. The flow of kids almost resembles the flow of water running down a mountain, with lots of little rivers running into and feeding a bigger, rushing river.

 On some days, every now and then, I'll walk with him all the way to school. This past year, I've walked to school with him probably 1-2 dozen times, and the majority of that was during his first few weeks as a newly minted 1st grader, new to Japan and never having walked by himself on public streets. I had a lot to worry about: Cars piloted by grandmas and grandpas squinting fiercely over dashboards then can barely see over, aggressive taxis plummeting down the streets, leviathan buses, not to mention all the older kids from the 5 grades above him, and even more older kids from the junior high up the street.  He did great.

ご挨拶 go-aisatsu - the ritual greeting

The walk with my child is always awkwardly interesting to me.  I wear a special badge hung around my neck, like one of those laminated lanyard badges one wears at a convention.  One side identifies me immediately to any onlooker as a parent of a child from the school. Flip it around and the other side is for identifying parents along the "Patrol" route, for PTA volunteers who stand guard diligently at various points along the way to school, watching to make sure the children stay on course.  As the children march on toward school, the PTA Patrol Parents greet each one of them with a strong, clear and pretty loud Ohayougozaimasu! ("Good morning!"), and it's expected that the children will reply Ohayougozaimasu! in return.  This morning ritual is called ご挨拶 go-aisatsu, or the greeting.

This ritual of morning greetings happens everywhere in Japan. At offices, schools, hospitals, on the street. The Japanese politely acknowledge each with a vocal "good morning" as the day begins. It's not unusual to hear this a good 30-60 minutes of greetings every morning in a typical Japanese office. And this practice is ingrained into Japanese early in life.  I see Japanese mothers urging their 2-3 year old children to bow and say good morning to their preschool teachers ("use a big voice!"). It's culture imprinted early in life, and like anything else boringly redundant, quickly becomes a habit. 

Japanese language, in practice, includes dozens of greetings, farewells, thank yous and other formalities.  You can't go for longer than a few minutes without hearing people address each other this way.  In fact, I personally think that learning these phrases should be taught to students of Japanese right from the start.  It's that important, and Japanese seriously appreciate it when you address them the right way.  To say that the Japanese are a polite people is a pretty fair observation, but like anything else, it would be bad to generalize.  Some people are more polite than others.

Which was why I thought it was interesting that, today, my older son and his friends weren't uttering the greetings of the day with the same vigor and demonstrated zeal that mama had taught him to up until now.  As we walked down the street I noticed that the majority of kids, now in 2nd grade, were in what I assumed to be a sort of "cool-kid" cruise control. With every patrol parent we passed along the route to school I found myself exclaiming Ohayougozaimasu!, but without the echos of Ohayougozaimasu! I expected around me.  I noticed that my son and other kids not only weren't saying Ohayougozaimasu! to others around them, they also weren't really acknowledging the PTA Patrol Parents along the walk to school.  I may be a gaijin (foreigner), but this really bugged me.  When a known-safe PTA parent, not a stranger, says Good Morning to you, you reciprocate. That's how I was brought up. I don't care what culture you're from, polite acknowledgement is important.  So I decided to press on that point.

The ご挨拶 go-aisatsu game

A few years ago my son's teacher taught me two important principles that they use daily in teaching.  The first is observation.  Just paying attention to not only what happens, but also to what doesn't happen.  The second is how to engage a child at the right level. In this case, I decided to make up a game with "points".  

"Aren't you going to do go-aisatsu?" I asked my son. He looked like he wasn't paying attention.  Or was he ignoring me? I've seen that before, too. Selective listening.  I decided to get a lot more direct. "Ok, here's the deal. We're going to play a game."  There's nothing quite like telling your 1st or 2nd grader we're going to play a game.  It has a pavlovian effect on them from their first several years of life. You immediately get their attention, as well as a sort of ooh-ooh-lets-play! look that comes over their face.  "Every time you walk by a PTA Patrol Parent or teacher from your school, if you don't say Ohayougozaimasu! you lose a point."  We walked past another PTA Patrol Parent, and I voiced Ohayougozaimasu! but my son didn't.  "That's minus one point."

"Now, every time you say Ohayougozaimasu! in a normal, everyday voice, you get 1 point." I continued, "But, if you say it like you're tired and just woke up, or you don't care, you get zero points."  I had his attention.  His buddy, our neighbor, who doesn't understand English, was looking at me with this intense, puzzled look. He's never seen me spout out so much English at once.  "And here's the big win: If you say Ohayougozaimasu! in a strong, powerful voice that gets the attention to someone you already know at your school, you get FIVE POINTS."   

I added a rule to this: It only applies to people related to your school.  I didn't want them talking to or acknowledging strangers.

What happened next was pretty amazing. He started visually scanning ahead to see who was coming into range. OHAYOUGOZAIMASU! he bellowed as he came up upon PTA Patrol Parents along the route. The reaction by most of the parents was great. Most of them seemed pleasantly surprised, even with body language reacting to the greeting as if they were waking up a bit. They'd respond with Ohayougozaimasu! followed by an いいね ("very good!").

By the time we got to the school entrance, he had racked up 40 points, and he was having a blast.  On the way home from school - I decided to meet him at the school entrance and walk back with him - he racked up 70 points.  His friends from school, totally curious about what was going on between my son and I, got in on the game too.