A.S.

Hello everyone. My name is Aoi and I am part of the Japan Youth. Today I am going to talk about my foster care experience based on “normalcy”.
I was often strongly aware of the differences between myself and my surroundings living under foster care. I would like to present three experiences that remained firmly in my memory. First are the details of my entering a foster care facility. I entered the foster care facility when I was three years old. The reason being so called neglect and, due to my parents’ divorce, my mother worked nonstop and with concerns over my 10-year-old sister bearing the responsibility of my care, a child consultation center took guardianship.
First and foremost, at the time that the child consultation center took guardianship of me and handed me over to a foster care facility, my siblings lived separately. Among my four siblings, my oldest sister stayed with our birth family, my second oldest sister lived in a foster care facility in the metro area, my older brother and I were sent to another facility in the metro area. After entering the facility at the age of three, we lived separately until the measures were revoked, and I remember it was quite some time before I got to see my two sisters. Not only did I experience being separated from my mother, but from my siblings as well. This was the first experience.
Afterwards, while being swayed by the hierarchical relationships between children at the facility I was blessed to have encounters with people like the facility staff members and my school teachers and friends, but the turning point from middle school to high school was my second frustrating experience.
The children at the facility did not make it a habit to study from elementary school to middle school but I made an effort to study seriously, there was a high school I was aiming towards. However, entrance exams to private high schools weren’t allowed at the foster care facility I was living in at the time, I couldn’t take exams for private high schools as a backup plan, and I couldn’t make an attempt at a high level high school. Unless I enrolled in a high school I couldn’t continue being admitted to foster care facilities and you can only go to the school you passed the exam for with certainty. In the end, I took exams for many schools at a lower level than my dream school and was enrolled into one of them. Even though I studied diligently, being barred from a place that would challenge me was a very frustrating experience.
Also, another frustrating experience is something I still haven’t been able to forget. As a result of being admitted into high school I decided to give up soccer, something that held major weight in my life since the first grade. Joining the soccer club was a tough decision for those of us who had to get a job to save money given that we were going off to college, and to buy a cell phone because almost everyone besides us had one, when nearly the whole week was filled with practices and matches. This time I was very worried and after considerable worrying I thought about the future and decided to give up on soccer and save money at my part-time job. Although I had prepared, although I eventually joined the soccer team with little practice, I saw my soccer teammates practicing on campus after school and I was often laid low. The experience of giving up on something important to me is a frustrating event I cannot forgot even now.
This is one part of the experience I remember based on normalcy in a foster care facility. These experiences are only a few. I was constantly confronted by my being different from my surroundings, I suffered and I lived. From now on, I also want to act positively to make this a society that does not give up based on one’s differences from their surroundings and the situation one is placed in so that children who live in foster care, like me, will actively live their own lives.