Kids Meet Japan

Working in Tokyo, I see my little niece just once a year when I go home to England. Soon she’ll be old enough to start asking questions and I won’t be there in person to answer them, so I wanted to give her a mini Japanese culture class in my absence.

The result is this little book, designed to help traveling mums, dads, family and friends in explaining things better to their young loved ones. I hope it can also give kids from any background a broader view of the world outside their home countries.

KidsVsLife began with a rather complex question from a curious kid: Where does rain come from?

On the surface, it seems like a simple question. The words are simple. For an adult mind, the water cycle concept is simple. But when I tried to explain the concept to my 4-year-old, I was met with the dreaded barrage of “why?”

I was sharing this story with a colleague, who shared a similar story of a daddy stunned by the complex question their child asked and their inability to explain it on a child’s level. We joked that there could be and should be a manual on how to answer these questions. Then the laughing turned into a moment of seriousness.

We work at a very creative company, and one of our colleagues is an extremely talented artist. We approached the artist with the idea, and he joined us.

To get things going, we would meet once a week during our lunch hour to select the story and talk about how to get this project off the ground. Our initial goal was to complete a book; that took 2 months. We learned a lot doing it, and had a lot of fun. We decided to make another one using the lessons from our first experience.

At the time of this website, we’re working on our 5th book.

The topic is KidsVsLife: we try to introduce more mature concepts, places and things to young children using interesting stories.