To Our Friends

@Hi ! Nice to meet you! We are 11 or 12 year-old pupils of an urban elementary school in Tokyo. This is not a school catalog but a virtual classroom where we express ourselves to communicate with friends like you.
@Where are you from? How nice is your city or village? Are you happy at your school? What is your everyday life like? We'd like to know about you and your country, and make friends with you. We will tell you a lot about ourselves, and our country, Japan. By writing to each other, we believe we will be able to enrich our mutual understanding and make the world smaller and friendlier .

@This homepage is a place where ordinary elementary school children express their opinions and display their literary and art works under the approval and with the support of their parents. The ward government and its education board, however, do not allow us to have a homepage like this one. They say that it is against the ward's ordinance issued to protect 'personal information of the individuals'! The ordinance prohibits connecting computers in any ward-run facilities to computers outside the ward..
@For this reason, the teacher in charge of this class acquired a private account from a local Internet service provider and then opened this homepage, using nicknames of the students instead of their true names. He also replaced the name of the school with an assumed one. To the deepest disappointment of the teacher, the pupils and their parents, however, the ward and its education board ordered him to close this page, saying that the ordinance bans the ward and its officials, including teachers of the schools run by its board of education, from publishing any personal information which might lead to identification of the individuals involved.The teacher and the parents are still negotiating with the education board
@We, the children, the teacher, and the parents alike, do hope to keep this homepage public. We have been receiving encouragement from all corners of the country since it was first webpublished. We have experienced the joy of expressing ourselves. We are not unmindful of diverse opinions on this matter. However, we still firmly believe that we are entitled to express ourselves, to speak of ourselves, to exchange ideas with people, using our own names. Other schools do this on their homepages, and we DO NOT UNDERSTAND why we are not allowed..
@The children create their own pages by themselves with the PC's installed in school, and the teacher take the files home and load them onto the server of his IPS from home. We would welcome encouragement and/or advice from you.