Japanese teens living on their own in Anime/Manga

[Densuke Mifune]

I've seen a ton of this in anime and manga: A teenage kid living on their own while their parents are working in another city, or overseas and they live off money their parents send them. Is there any truth to this, or is it just anime and manga make believe?

[Neo-Rio]

Yeah, I noticed this trend in anime as well. Except perhaps with the exception of Doraemon, Testuwan atom (robot family), Crayon Shinchan, and Sazaesan.

Doesn't surprise me though. Parents seem to have next to zero over-protective influence on their kids here (for the most part anyway).

[dimwit]

I've seen a ton of this in anime and manga: A teenage kid living on their own while their parents are working in another city, or overseas and they live off money their parents send them. Is there any truth to this, or is it just anime and manga make believe?

I would assume that at least the more clever of this is trying to be metaphoric or ironic. Child protection laws, plus teacher home visits are supposed to act as checks to make sure everything is on the up and up. Obviously there are cases of child abuse and neglect but I have never heard of a situation like that.

Remittance cases are not unusual among the readers of manga methinks.

[omae mona]

Koreeda's 2004 film "Dare mo shiranai" ("Nobody Knows") is fictional but apparently based on a true story. A teenage boy takes care of his younger siblings when their mother skips town, occasionally sending money. So there's at least one famous incident along these lines.

[Mulboyne]

In most cases, though, it's just a standard storytelling device to get the parents out of the way.

[Ptyx]

i have three japanese friends, all of them girls, that lived in Tokyo while their parents were sending them money from the countryside
They weren't little kids but teenagers, they went in highschool in Tokyo and went on going to college there.
I don't know if it's common but none of them are talking about it as if it was a strange situation.

[Mulboyne]

i have three japanese friends, all of them girls, that lived in Tokyo while their parents were sending them money from the countryside
They weren't little kids but teenagers, they went in highschool in Tokyo and went on going to college there.
I don't know if it's common but none of them are talking about it as if it was a strange situation.

Were they living on their own or with friends/relatives or perhaps some kind of school dorm?

[Ptyx]

One of them was on her own. The two others were living with their younger sisters. I didn't went much further into the topic but i think they had their own places.
The three of them comes from very remote places, one is from central kyushu and the two others are from very small towns in the middle of Akita-ken.
It's weird that they got sent to Tokyo rather to go to the big cities in their prefecture. I guess it has something to do with Tokyo being the center of everything in Japan in the mind of their parents.
One of them told me her grandmother used to be the village "shaman", i can't think of a better term from what i understood, using weird herbal remedies and balms to cure the people from that area. That's how remote the places they come from are.

[Mulboyne]

One of them told me her grandmother used to be the village "shaman", i can't think of a better term from what i understood, using weird herbal remedies and balms to cure the people from that area. That's how remote the places they come from are.

Was she thirteen years old with a black cat called Jiji?