[steven]

Nyororin that was indeed an interesting post! dogsbody70 always asks the most interesting questions and you have all of the best answers.

I wanted to make a comment about the welfare housing situation though. I'm sure they vary a little depending on the area. One day I was driving to the mountains as I always do, but I had stopped off at one of my local hardware stores on the way there and took kind of a different road than I usually do. I stumbled upon almost like a slum. My wife happened to be in the car with me at the time and I asked her what the deal was as I had never seen anything like that in Japan up to then. She said it was probably government/welfare housing. It was pretty crazy... there were like holes in the walls and windows missing and the whole nine yards. At the time it was hot and humid so I'm sure that was working out, but now that it's winter and snowing almost every day I'm not so sure. I still don't know for sure what they were though so I really can't say.

As far as "orphans" go (situations where the parents are having a hard time with their kids or have jobs which are not condusive to raising kids)-- every case that I've heard of, which is not many, seems to have ended up with an aunt/uncle getting the child.

I don't know how much relavance this has in cities now-a-days, but I can imagine that this practice stems from houses and land kind of staying in the family (where the oldest son gets the house and where the younger sons might build a house of their own on that same land or marry someone who is the oldest daughter where there aren't any sons involved).

Dogsbody, what you're describing in the UK is interesting. What you're saying is that if the parents were on drugs or something like that then the courts would be kind of against sending the kids to the grandparents, right? To me that kind of makes sense because if you think about it the parents that turned to drugs were raised by those grandparents... I know this isn't true some of the time, but I think that the way the grandparents raised their kids might have influenced their drug use... so why start the process all over again with the grand children? I've kind of seen that happen in America before...

Which makes me wonder-- if people get caught with meth in Japan do their kids get taken away or anything along those lines? I know in America after the umpteenth time after being caught with hard drugs kids start getting taken out of the picture... but with Japan being more strict in regards to drugs I wonder if they don't have any policies like that?