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Japanese missing boy: How did Yamato Tanooka survive?
- xufi 10y agoSmart kid. Shame on the parents for leaving him like that. At least he knew which way it was to find the military base while being lost in a forest.
- williamscales 10y agoCounterpoint: stupid/belligerent kid, how could he think that his parents would not come back for him?
- mjevans 10y agoThey had just left him. With little other stateful information how would you react in a similar situation?
- 9818379191 10y agoProbably 99.99% of all children would have stayed at the same spot for half an hour before moving.
- placeybordeaux 10y agoHalf an hour is a long time for a child. I know I wandered off from my parents with much less notice.
- dopamean 10y agoI didn't read anything that said they left him for half an hour.
- Dylan16807 10y ago"briefly" and "minutes later" is generally smaller than half an hour.
- yarou 10y agoHe's a curious child - he may even become an engineer one day.
- jcoffland 10y agoRunning off into the woods is smart?
- WeiliNgo 10y agoIsn't it a bit weird that he could just wander onto a military base? Aren't these surrounded by some kind of fence?
- ars 10y agoIt was an empty unused base.
- ojii 10y agoFrom what I understand, this wasn't a "military base" but rather a shelter owned by the SDF. No need for a fence really.
- fenomas 10y agoOn news reports here it looked like a couple of prefab storage buildings in a clearing. I imagine they mean that the land was owned by a military base.
- abhi3 10y agoApparently the parents are getting some support in Japan. "Raising kids is hard" seemed to be the collective sigh heard around social media, TV talk shows, andproverbial water coolers. One famous morning talk show host, Tomoaki Ogura, sympathised with the parents on Monday, onhis Fuji TV show "Tokudane!". Mr Ogura said: "To say 'If you're so bad, we can't take you along, just stay here' is a valid way of scolding a child." Many recalled how they too were shut out of their homes as children, left throwing a tantrum on the toy shop floor, or shut in a dark closet. A well-known literary critic, Yumi Toyozaki, tweeted on Tuesday: "I was a restless, rambunctious, cantankerous child, so I feel very much for the father who left his child in the woods for a bit in order to discipline him. I hope people stop condemning him." The incident has had many sharing childhood memories of how parents pretended to leave them or their siblings for refusing to listen. The lost boy and Japan’s parenting debate - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-36441875 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-36441875
- cardamomo 10y agoThank you for adding some cultural context!
- abraae 10y agoI feel for the parents too. They were just digging deep into their bag of parenting tricks to try and get little Yamato to stop throwing stone at people and cars (though the presence of bears in the woods made their strategy a little ill-advised). But mainly I feel sorry for them for the monster they may have created now. Yamato charted his own course. He didn't just sit there sobbing and chastened. Instead he hiked for miles, demonstrated incredible self-sufficiency, survived against the odds and became a national hero and treasure, while his parents have been vilified. He will be the one putting his parents out of the car from now on. And he's only 7, so they have many years more to come. He's probably filling his pockets with stones right now.
- illumin8 10y agoThis is a pretty clear cut case of negligence. Leaving your child unattended in the woods where brown bears are known to be located is negligence, plain and simple. The fact that it is common in asian cultures to discipline children in horrible ways, like locking them in dark closets, or corporal punishment, doesn't excuse the parents from these horrible crimes.
- honkhonkpants 10y agoTL;DR he slept in a building and drank tap water from the plumbing.
- Animats 10y agoHow? He found a defunct military base with an unlocked Quonset hut equipped with mattresses and a water tap. Not exactly a mystery.
- oh_sigh 10y agoDid you know that before reading the article?
- dzdt 10y agoSurviving a week in the wilderness isn't a big trick. You need water, and someplace warm enough not to freeze. He wasn't in a desert or a frozen wasteland. With the headline you wonder if people expect to die if they are out of contact with civilisation for 5 minutes.
- abhi3 10y agoHe's 7.
- cardamomo 10y agoHe may be young, but 7 year olds can show great resourcefulness and mastery of environments they're familiar with. Certainly, this boy did. I'm curious about his general relationship with the forest environment he was left in. Is this a place he already knew much about?
- stouset 10y agoSo? Given both the water and not freezing bit, even seven year olds are surprisingly resilient. Hunger is a big deal, but an otherwise well-fed human can survive (miserably) without food for 30 or more days. Most potentially-threatening wildlife (e.g., bears) will do their best to avoid you. So what, exactly, would you have expected a seven year-old to have died of over the course of a week, if not dehydration or freezing? The biggest concern, IMHO, would have been not finding him for several weeks.
- Dylan16807 10y agoThat doesn't change how your metabolism works. A seven year old can generally manage not to break their neck.
- logfromblammo 10y agoThat's too young to even have a starter Pokemon, so I'm guessing he just avoided the tall grass.~ But seriously, the environment that he was in is just not very dangerous. Sure, Hokkaido can get cold at night, but it's late Spring now. The biggest danger would have been from waterborne diseases and wild animals, and the latter mostly avoid humans, even the snack-sized ones.
- sickbeard 10y agoWhat I don't get is how they didn't find him sooner. Apparently they did a sweep of the base and missed him. Was he asleep? Signs of someone being there should have been obvious..
- gjkood 10y agoJust a suggestion for parents of young boys. Joining the Boy Scouts of America is a great way to learn a lot of outdoor survival skills in a gentle and fun way that will stay with them for the remainder of their lives. In one of the Summer Camps that I attended as an adult leader, many of the boys from my troop attended an overnight survival training in which all they could take was the clothes on their backs and their "10 Essentials". They had to go to a nearby location away from their normal campsite and make a shelter and sleeping arrangements with only the things that they could find or forage and stay the night. You would think you will meet a bunch of frustrated and unhappy boys the next day but what I found instead was a bunch of the happiest boys asking when they can do it again. I don't know what all they learnt but I was comfortable that they could survive at least one night in a national forest after that experience.