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f you have a foreign kid in a pre school in Japan, they will be bullied on a daily basis for sure (not necessarily physically, but verbally).
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I think that to make this leap you have to do a lot of exaggerating. Foreign kids don`t necessarily get bullied on a daily basis even in higher grades, let alone in kindergarten/preschool where bullying itself is pretty close to nil.
Maybe kids will be curious. Maybe they will be cautious. But bullying is a completely different world.
In preschool kids barely NOTICE, let alone discriminate based on skin color. My son looks pretty foreign and the difference kids can come up with when pressed is that he has lighter colored hair. Not a single experience of bullying even though he is slower than the rest of the kids and has other issues.
The type of bullying you`re thinking of is the 3rd grade and up stuff. When the kids are old enough to notice the difference, know what it is, but not be able to reason and deal with feelings about it and the reactions of other children to it.
Fukui, Shiga, and Ishikawa get very little snow along the coast. Niigata is famous for the snow, but even there along the coast it is fairly mild. It`s stuff that is on the other side of the mountains from the coast (Warm ocean air rises and hits the colder drier air from the other side of the mountains - overtaking it and snowing like crazy on the mountains and the opposite side from the ocean.)
When there is snow along the coast it tends to melt right away and not stick. I think I have seen maybe one or two cases of snow actually sticking in the 10 years we`ve been hopping back and forth to the Fukui coast.... And it is almost always warmer up there than here.
When it comes to preschool/kindergarten... I really do not think things are going to be anywhere near as simple as it may seem.
The long day places aimed at working parents (hoikuen) generally have waiting lists. You register your child at least 6 months before you need them to start, and in some cases a year if there are more kids than spots. You cannot just walk up and enroll, especially if you need to make use of longer hours. Also - when it ends at 5, it ends at 5. You need to be there BEFORE 5pm or your emergency contact will be called. I have seen cases of parentss not getting there by 5:15 and the preschool handing the child over to the local children`s service, while contacting the parent`s work, relatives, and the police.
It does get slightly easier in elementary school as you can register for afterschool programs... But as a single parent, you may not find those what you want. For every one in this area at least, you are obligated to volunteer one day every two weeks at the least, and one weekend a month. The volunteer days are weekdays and begin at around 1:30pm, so you will need to have those days off work.
I don`t know how JET will handle this, but employers of single parents in Japan require childcare information to even receive the position. They will refuse to hire a person who cannot show that they have proper care for the child. This drops a lot of people in a catch-22 loop as in order to receive long hour childcare they have to display a need (a job with longer hours), but in order to get the job they have to show they have care providing the necessary hours.