Where do the children play?

I think this heavily depends on location. At 7 my child can check nearly all the boxes for independent activities. My wife may not like it, but the surroundings are probably safer than anywhere else in the world. The only thing we don’t have is forests.

This is central Tokyo.

Kids still spend a lot of time on Roblox because everyone tends to be deathly afraid of letting them ring each other’s doorbells.

I also live in Suginami! There's always a lot of kids running around together, especially after school, but that feels quite normal for anywhere in Japan, no?

Seeing tiny tiny kids walking around is one of my favourite qualities of Japanese life, and on the flipside I sensed a quiet but shared responsibility/interest everyone took in making sure no harm befell the child on their journey. One the purest luxuries of living in such a high trust society

It's great, you just need to be Japanese.

I can’t speak to the rest of Japan, but in Tokyo, yes.

Suginami in particular seems to be very kid focused in terms of infrastructure development efforts. 6 years ago the was a wild sprouting of daycare facilities everywhere around, and these days new parks pop up everywhere. They were going to close the nearby jidoukan, and the new major seems to have reversed all of that. Japan is absolutely making an effort to reverse population decline xD

In Los Angeles we let our 8 year old walk half a mile to school and someone called the cops on us.

What did the cops say?

That feeling of shared societal responsibility probably has at least something to do with the birth rate. Japan is down to just 686K babies born per year from a population of 123 million.

My kid was interrogated for walking about 50 ft 'alone' ( I was actually watching further away and intervened before the Karen got to the point of calling it in) on our own property.

In the middle of nowhere, rural desert. Random Karen drove by at the wrong place and time, saw my kid, stops and questioned. Unbelievable. Literally the second you give a child independence a Karen will appear like clockwork, it's insane.

This is why so many libraries, etc in US ban kids without parents. No one wants the slightest annoyance of even the possibility they could hypothetically be bothered to assist a child.

They followed them to school and told the teachers that someone called the police for escort.

There's nothing illegal about this and nobody got in trouble but it still sucks.

You are lucky they called the police and not CPS.

CPS have nearly unlimited ability to fuck with your family, whereas police generally can't fuck with you without probable cause a crime has occurred. There is no such process or due process with child protection services as breaking apart families and tossing kids into the abusive foster system is considered 'civil.' CPS doesn't require a criminal law be broken to take action and can declare weaknesses in your parenting for things as simple as dirty dishes in the sink or your refrigerator empty because you're at the end of your grocery cycle.

I grew up in Tokyo-like(maybe less big) Asian cities too. and I can't agree more. I would definitely not be going to raise my kids in the US or anywhere where kids can't go to school on their own and are literally stuck at home. It sounds like systemic child abuse to me.