Hello Minim Family,
It is the last humid stretch of August. The uniform that fit in June has become a sleeve problem, nobody can find the water bottle, and somewhere in the apartment there is a reading log with two entries in it. The new term is closer than it feels.
There is a particular strangeness to this moment: the whole city around you is in the middle of its school year, and your family is at the start of one. The trains are normal. The cicadas are loud. And your household is quietly days away from a 7am alarm it has not heard since June.
The short version. The international-school restart catches families out because it lands while Tokyo is still in high summer, and because the routine that has to carry it was dismantled eight weeks ago. Below is the checklist we use with the families we teach: the supplies run, rebuilding the routine, the afterschool decision (this is the window), and the part nobody writes down, the child's re-entry. You need about five things, done early enough that the first week is boring.
Why the August restart catches Tokyo families out
Two calendars run side by side in this city, and only one of them is yours.
Japanese schools run April to March, so the national rhythm, the stationery displays, the shingakki energy, all of it arrives in spring. International schools restart in August or early September, on a calendar imported from somewhere else. Nothing around you reminds you it is coming: no cue in the supermarket, no wave of neighbours doing the same thing on the same weekend.
The second reason is structural. Over the summer, four things went at once: the fixed school day, the weekly lesson, the after-school routine, and the parent's habit of asking about it. Families often blame the child for the September wobble. It is not the child. A routine is a structure held up by other structures, and yours were taken down in June.
The good news is that structures go back up faster than they came down, if you start before the term does rather than during it.
The supplies and uniform run
Best done before the final weekend, when every other international-school family in Minato-ku has had the same idea.
- Nishimatsuya for uniform basics, socks, and indoor shoes. Unglamorous, well-priced, branches across the city.
- Akachan Honpo for the same ground, plus most of what you need for labelling.
- Daiso or Seria for onamae name stickers. Iron-on for fabric, waterproof for lunchboxes and water bottles. Buy more than you think you need, because you will lose the sheet.
- Muji for a pencil case and drawer storage that will survive the year, and the plain notebooks some schools ask for.
- Hands or Loft for a laundry marker, the one thing you will want at 9pm the night before.
- Ochanomizu Shimokura if an instrument needs new strings or a check-over before lessons resume. A ukulele that sat in a hot Tokyo apartment for eight weeks will not be in tune, and a child who picks up a badly tuned instrument concludes they have got worse. If you would rather not make the trip, a five-minute YouTube tutorial will get a ukulele back in tune perfectly well.
Label everything before the first day. Not because the school demands it, but because a labelled water bottle comes home and an unlabelled one does not.
Rebuilding the routine, ideally a fortnight out
This is the part that actually determines how the first fortnight goes. If term is already next week, compress it rather than skip it. A few days of adjustment still beats none.
Move bedtime earlier in fifteen-minute steps rather than one heroic jump. Ten days of gentle adjustment costs you nothing. One night of "we start the new schedule tomorrow" costs you the first week of term.
Pull screens away from the hour before sleep first. It is the change with the largest effect and the loudest complaints, so do it while there is still slack to absorb them.
And restart the practice habit before the school routine lands on top of it. A music habit that resumes two weeks before term becomes part of the new routine; a music habit that resumes two weeks after term is a thing being added to an already full day, and it will lose. If the instrument has not been touched since July, start with five honest minutes rather than the twenty you had in May. Our piece on the 10-20-30 method is the longer version of why the number of days matters more than the number of minutes.
The afterschool decision is happening now, whether you make it or not
This is the window. Afterschool programmes at most Tokyo international schools fill in the first weeks of term. Families who decide in late September are choosing from what is left.
It is worth asking the question properly rather than defaulting to last year, because a seven-year-old is not the child who signed up at five. Our afterschool decision framework walks through it in full.
The short form, if you only have three minutes: name the goal honestly, ask what your child actually wants rather than what they will agree to, look at what the week can genuinely hold, and find out what happens when your child is sick before you commit. That last question is the one every parent forgets, and regrets by week three.
The re-entry nobody puts on the checklist
Every year, in the first fortnight of lessons, our teachers see the same thing. A child who was fine all summer becomes tearful about something small. A child who changed class is suddenly certain nobody likes them. A returnee, back from a summer in their passport country, spends a week not quite in either place.
This is normal, it is temporary, and it is not a sign that anything has gone wrong.
Every year this shows up a little differently. A new student who is cautious about the room will often sit at the edge and simply watch for a while, rather than join in straight away. That is fine. Within a few classes, most children choose to jump in on their own, usually because they can see their new classmates having a good time.
It shows up again for children who have just arrived from another country and are not yet confident in English. Music, maths and dance do not need much English to begin with, so we often see children who speak Mandarin, Spanish or German at home settle into the room just as quickly as anyone else, because the class gives them something to do together rather than something to say.
What helps is unremarkable. Keep one thing in the week completely unchanged, an anchor the new term cannot touch. Ask about lunch and the walk to the classroom rather than about lessons, because those are where the small anxieties actually live. Let the first week be under-scheduled on purpose. Children do not need a good first week; they need a boring one.
For a child new to Tokyo, add one more: find the thing they can do here that they could not do at home, and do it in the first fortnight. It reframes the move as a gain rather than a subtraction.
A first-week reset
Five small things, the Sunday before:
- Pack the bag together, not for them.
- Walk or ride the commute once, at the real time of day.
- Decide where the school things live. A shelf, a hook, a box by the door. Anywhere, as long as it is the same place every day.
- Put the lunchbox routine on paper for the first week so nobody is improvising at 6:45am.
- Leave one slot in the week with nothing scheduled in it, and try to keep it that way.
If the weather turns on you, which it does most Septembers, our tsuyu indoor guide works just as well for a typhoon afternoon as it does for June rain.
FAQ
When does the international school year start in Tokyo?
This year ASIJ and TIS both start on 25 August. Other schools vary, and dates move year to year, so check your own school's calendar to be sure. Most Tokyo international schools restart in August, with some beginning in early September. Japanese schools run April to March, which is why the city around you feels no different in the last week of August.
When should we sort out afterschool?
Before term starts, or in the first week. Popular programmes at schools like Nishimachi International School fill quickly once the term is underway. If you are still deciding, the framework linked above is faster than asking around at pickup.
How do I help a child who is nervous about going back?
Under-schedule the first week and keep one part of it unchanged. If a child is still distressed after two or three weeks, that is a different signal, and worth raising with their class teacher.
If a new term is a good moment to start something
The start of a school year is when most families find a slot for the thing they meant to do all summer. If that is music, our Minim Afterschool programmes run inside a number of Tokyo international schools, and each school's page shows what is running. There is no rush. The instrument will still be there in October, and so will we.
Love, all of us at Minim.
Written by the Minim teaching team.
