Nagoya Based Child Care Company Sued In Tokyo

Sekimachi Kita, Tokyo

When the Asc Sekimachi-kita day care center opened in Tokyo's Nerima Ward in 2007, it surrounded its yard with a three-meter high sound isolation wall, the kind of wall seen along expressways. It limited the time for children to play in the yard to two hours a day and the facility has double-paned windows.

Despite these efforts, the center was sued by neighbors who claimed the children’s loud voices constituted noise.

Hiromi Yamaguchi, head of Nagoya-based Japan Nursery Service Inc., which runs the day care center, said the facility was treated as a troublemaker in the lawsuit.

“I have managed day care centers with the sense of a mission, but I don’t feel like establishing new facilities if it causes trouble,” Yamaguchi said.

Tokyo govt mulls review of the ordinance.

In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs’ claims were based on a stipulation in the metropolitan government’s environmental security ordinance that states, “No one should make noises exceeding the regulatory standards.”

The metropolitan government had received complaints saying that it was unreasonable to equate children’s voices with the noise of factories and from other causes.

Sixty-five percent of local governments in Tokyo also have called for review of the ordinance.

Given this, the metropolitan government has started to consider excluding children’s voices from the stipulation.

The metropolitan government plans to revise the ordinance as early as next spring. An official of the metropolitan government’s Environment Bureau said: “Although it is considered undesirable to control children’s voices from the viewpoint of [its effects on] their growth development, it is also true that some people cannot abide noise. It’s necessary to strike a balance in the review.”

Some day care centers have started making efforts from the planning stage to communicate with neighbors to avoid possible trouble with local residents.

A day care center that is scheduled to open in Ota Ward in April next year plans to welcome local people to events such as a summer festival, by joining a local residents’ association. Yoshitaka Nishio, president of Blossom Co., a Chuo Ward-based company running the day care center, said: “It’s impossible to make children follow the instruction, ‘Keep quiet.’ This is a matter that adults rack their brains to solve.”

“I suppose more people feel that children’s voices are noisy because it has recently become rare to hear their voices in our daily lives due to the declining birthrate,” said Masako Maeda, professor of Konan University who specializes in social security studies. 

“Still, if such voices are considered noise, the educational environment would become suppressed. So, the revision of the ordinance would be reasonable,” she said.

Maeda was involved as deputy mayor of Yokohama in the city’s efforts to tackle the issue of children on day care waiting lists.

“It’s also necessary to make compromises. Operators of day care centers need to provide more thorough explanations, and local residents may need to exercise patience,” she added.Speech