Do Japanese kids need to wear special slippers at school? One part of Tokyo doesn’t think so

Uwabaki are becoming less and less common in Minato Ward.

For a lot of kids in Japan, the first thing they do when they get to school in the morning isn’t to sharpen a pencil, take out a sheet of paper, or open a textbook and stand it up on their desk in just the right position so that the teacher won’t see they’re sleeping behind it. Instead, just after coming through their school’s front entrance, most kids take off their shoes.

Classes aren’t being conducted with pupils in their stocking feet, though. After taking off their shoes, students slip on a pair of flexible plastic slippers called uwabaki (pictured above). Each student keeps their uwabaki inside a small cubby inside the school’s entry way when not wearing them, and they’re strictly for indoor use, so that the slippers’ soles, and by extension the school’s floors, stay clean.

But are uwabaki really necessary? Though they’ve been the norm at Japanese elementary, middle, and high schools since the 1950s, they’re falling out of favor in Tokyo’s Minato Ward, where out of the district’s 19 ward-administered public elementary schools, 18 of them have done away with the practice and switched to an issokusei, or single shoe-set, policy, allowing students to continue wearing the same shoes they came to school in throughout the day.

According to the Minato Board of Education, the reason its elementary schools have been phasing out uwabaki has to do with enrollment sizes. While Japan’s population as a whole may be shrinking, the number of Tokyo residents continues to increase. 20 years ago, Minato Ward had roughly 10,700 kids between the ages of 5 and 14, but by the start of the last school year in April of 2024, that number had grown to nearly 24,000. As schools are becoming increasingly crowded, many of them have decided that there are better and more important ways to utilize their available space then with hundreds of shoe lockers, so they’ve removed them and done away with uwabaki at the same time.

The lack of indoor-only slippers is also allowing for better use of students’ and teachers’ time, says Naoto Miyazaki, principal at Minato Ward’s Shibahama Elementary School. “Not having everyone changing their shoes [at the same time in the morning] makes for less congestion and helps students to get to their classrooms more smoothly.” Miyazaki also believes that allowing students to continue wearing their regular shoes during class is a safety measure in that it makes for quicker, more orderly evacuations in the case of an emergency, as uwabaki generally aren’t sturdy enough for extended outdoor use.

The immediate ostensible downside that comes to mind, though, is that students wearing their regular shoes indoors will result in dirtier school interiors. After all, the ostensible point of changing into uwabaki is to prevent students from tracking dirt, dust, mud, and other sorts of grime into the hallways, classrooms, and cafeteria. That focus on cleanliness also aligns with social norms for homes in Japan, as everyone takes their outdoor-use shoes off in the entryway. Taking your shoes off is also the norm when visiting traditional Japanese buildings or restaurants with tatami reed or classical/preserved wooden flooring, and some offices in Japan ask employees to change into indoor slippers when they show up for work.

▼ As demonstrated in this photo from SoraNews24 HQ, where our shoe/slipper rack can be seen right inside the door. Please note, though, that most offices in Japan do not, in fact, have Pikachu in them.

That said, there are also plenty of offices, shops, and even restaurants in Japan where everyone keeps their outdoor-use shoes on, and yet are not considered dirty, unhygienic, or otherwise gross spaces. Especially in urban and suburban neighborhoods, it’s unlikely that people have been walking through farm fields or across muddy riverbanks before arriving at their destination, and that goes for kids showing up at school too.

Minato does, however, have a single ward-administered holdout elementary school that still requires uwabaki. Akiko Kani, principal of Aoyama Elementary, explains her school’s policy with “Children’s moods change to a surprising degree when they change their footwear. By having them change into different shoes, it’s a changeover in mood [to get ready to study].”

So for now, there’s still at least one elementary school in Minato Ward that this weasel might want to visit.

Source: TBS News Dig via Yahoo! Japan News via Jin
Top image: Wikipedia/トトト
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