Along with a child's entrance into the Japanese school system comes another rite of passage for parents (read "mothers" in 99 percent of cases): experiencing the Japanese PTA system.
Here, volunteering for the PTA often conjures up negative images, with the mere mention of those three initials enough to make many a Japanese mother grimace, giving the impression that it's a peculiar form of parental punishment. How do foreign women manage in such an environment?
Volunteering to be one of the class officers, or yakuin, for my son's first-grade class certainly hadn't been on my agenda. I knew that it was expected that a parent would be a yakuin once for each child during the six years of elementary school, but I figured I still had plenty of time to play with.