#japanese reality show

Netflix keeps on trying to get me to watch “Old Enough!”, a reality show of extremely young children (we’re talking 2-4 year olds here) being sent alone on errands for the first time (likely because I’ve watched other Japanese content and it doesn’t recognize the genre differences in foreign material). Not my kind of programming.

Anyway, sitting here contemplating the whole thing- if this were to occur here in the USA, several things would happen simultaneously:

If the child was even allowed to use mass transit or to walk into the stores (many stores and malls here ban all children under the age of 18 without a parent), the cashier would not sell to them, and likely delay them and call the police, who would turn them over to child protective services and the child would be put into foster care for parental neglect. That is, if the child gets to the store at all and wasn’t kidnapped by a violent pedophile along the way.

And we see this as normal behavior.

WTF is wrong with this country???