Are you Old Enough TV show

On the first episode of the Japanese reality show “Old Enough!,” now streaming on Netflix, we are introduced to Hiroki, who has been sent by his mother to the supermarket. Hiroki, who lives in Kagoshima prefecture, has been instructed to buy fish cakes and sweet curry, as well as some flowers for his grandmother’s altar, and a camera crew follows him while a man’s voice-over describes the events of his journey, from home to the store and back again—a round trip whose two-kilometre length takes up the bulk of the nearly eight-minute episode.

This might not sound like the most captivating conceit for a reality show, especially when compared to more physically tasking American offerings like “The Amazing Race,” or even Japanese game shows like “Takeshi’s Castle,” whose subjects compete against each other to complete far more arduous physical challenges. But “Old Enough!” does have one ante-upping trick up its sleeve: the protagonists are all small children. Hiroki is only two years and nine months old, and he carries a small yellow flag with which he signals for cars to stop as he crosses the street. “If you don’t mind me saying, your face looks more like a baby’s than a toddler’s!” the narrator wisecracks, but for at least some viewers even that distinction might be negligible. As I watched Hiroki, with his chick-fluff hair and ingenious expression, meandering across a busy road, and, later, at the supermarket, struggling to recall his shopping list (as yet illiterate, he must rely on his memory), I felt a mixture of empathy and worry no less intense than what one might feel when observing “Survivor” contestants as they attempt to roll an enormous boulder or slide through a mud pit.

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But, ultimately, “Old Enough!,” which has been running on Japanese TV for more than three decades, is a gentle series, and its thrills are mostly of the mild sort. The show’s eye-popping animated graphics and its voice-over’s winking tone (“What a sophisticated smile!” the narrator quips, as we see one toddler try out a tentative grin) reassure us that nothing bad is going to happen to the chubby-faced protagonists. As I watched, I found myself relaxing into the series’ dependable rhythms, which land somewhere between those of a Dodgers game and a David Attenborough-led nature show. The missions that the children go on take place largely in provincial towns, and much of the viewing pleasure relies on the modest details of everyday Japanese life that are revealed to us through these minor hero’s journeys: the fresh seafood at the market, the cabbages and onions growing in the vegetable patch, the trinkets sold at the gift shop of a local shrine.

It is a society, too, in which first-rate public safety appears to be the norm, and stranger danger a faraway concept. When Miro, who is two years and eight months old, goes on her first errand, to deliver an apron to her father at his soba restaurant, the community becomes part of her run: “She has her neighbors looking out for her, so mom feels at ease,” the narrator explains, as Miro toddles along the thoroughfare, passing by shopkeepers who offer words of encouragement. The segment has something of an Easter egg: dangling crosswise from Miro’s torso is a bag shaped in the likeness of Jiji, the sassy black cat from Hayao Miyazaki’s 1989 animated masterpiece, “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” a film about a young witch’s maturation into adolescence, which chronicles her leaving home and dealing with a variety of increasingly grownup challenges.

Jiji, a black cat, hitches a ride with the titular character of the Miyazaki children’s film “Kiki’s Delivery Service.”Photograph from Photo 12 / Alamy

The dangers in “Old Enough!” come not from without but from within. Will our protagonists overcome their fear of talking to strangers? Will they have the gumption to handle unexpected hurdles in their path? Will they be able to focus long enough to remember what their mission even is? (“The only worry is that she might change her mind on the way there,” the narrator says, as Miro makes her way to her father’s restaurant.) Will they curb their homesickness and their tears? “I’ll cry because you won’t be there, mom,” a three-year-old named Yuka tells her mother, reluctant to leave on her errand, which involves bringing home tempura from the fish market. “We were told she was over these regressions!” the narrator hectors.

Though all proceeds well enough, and a revived Yuka is soon seen walking to her errand “like a young bride . . . down the wide sidewalk,” I was reminded as I watched the show that education is a process involving a not unpainful exertion of control—of teaching one’s often apprehensive children to develop internal disciplinary mechanisms that will stand in for their parents’ directives. When a girl named Koiki, aged three years and nine months, embarks on a walk to bring her father a forgotten rice ball for his lunch, she is reminded by her mother that she must not cry, and the code word “pipi,” which her parents have devised to prompt her to dry her eyes, is written on her bag as both a reminder and a sort of warning. As a kindergartner named Sota struggles to climb up a hill, weighed down with fresh sashimi, oranges, cans of milk, and a pair of apples for his weaning baby sister, he fortifies himself by remembering his duty: “Errand for mom,” he mumbles. “Nearly there.”

It’s hard to imagine an American show in the vein of “Old Enough!”; as far as children and perhaps even adults are concerned, the world here is largely seen as something that should be watched out for rather than embraced. And, even if a local version were dreamed up, it would likely highlight the exceptional elements of its child protagonists; ours is, after all, a nation that is fascinated by extremes, by either prodigies or delinquents. For all its emphasis on its subjects’ young age, “Old Enough!” treats the kids it follows as completely normal, pursuing a natural path of maturation whose chief marks are achieving self-control and shouldering one’s load within the family unit. (It was impossible to watch the show and not contrast my own somewhat more petted ten-year-old with the stoic and responsible young children onscreen, a comparison which drew some ire at home: “I’m not a three-year-old Japanese toddler!”) “I’m counting on you,” the uncle of two-year-and-three-month-old Hana tells her, after Hana’s mother has instructed her to carry a flounder from the dark hatchery below the family seafood restaurant. “I’m counting on you,” the sushi-chef father of two-year-and-ten-month-old Ao says, giving his son a soy-sauce-stained white work jacket to take to the cleaner’s. “Should Daddy stop being a sushi chef?” Ao’s mother asks him, when the boy expresses reluctance about the errand. Though he is barely out of diapers, Ao knows what the answer is, and resolutely sets out. “When he grows up, a sushi chef!” the narrator says.

Is the show Old Enough staged?

Is the show Old Enough on Netflix real?

Will there be a season 2 of Old Enough?

How many episodes are in Old Enough?