okosama: The Sacred Status of Children Before Nursery School

okosama: The Sacred Status of Children Before Nursery School is the age-bound status the narrator describes for young children in Japan: from birth until entry into nursery school, a child is treated as a god. Nishio-san turns that principle into an intimate household practice, making the narrator a favored, almost divine child. The status is not permanent. At three, the narrator understands the birthday as a threshold beyond which something precious has been lost, linking a change in social standing to the first serious disturbance of childhood’s imagined security.

Definition and Age Limit

The narrator explains that a child is a god from birth until going to nursery school. The child in this account is an okosama, glossed as an honorable, excellent child and a lord child. The status distinguishes the very young from older children: the narrator’s brother, sister, and Nishio-san’s twin daughters have already passed beyond this sacred stage, so they are addressed in an ordinary way. The category therefore depends not simply on being a child, but on occupying a particular period before nursery school.

The account presents this belief through the narrator’s childhood experience rather than as an impersonal description of every family in Japan. Its force comes from the contrast between the exceptional deference the narrator receives and the ordinary treatment of the other children. The term names a social distinction, but the narrator also makes it part of a personal identity: to be an okosama is to be treated as someone whose wishes command attention.

Nishio-san’s Household Practice

Nishio-san treats the narrator as a divinity in everyday encounters. In the morning, when the narrator comes downstairs to the kitchen, she bends to the child’s height and gives whatever is requested. If the narrator wants food from her plate, Nishio-san lets the child take as much as desired and waits to eat herself, even when little or nothing remains. The sacred status is thus expressed through posture, service, and the priority given to the child’s appetite.

The practice becomes especially clear at lunchtime. Mother sees the narrator eating this way and sharply scolds the nanny, asking her not to let herself be tyrannized. Her effort fails: once Mother is out of the room, the narrator returns to the arrangement. The child has a concrete reason to prefer Nishio-san’s kitchen food, including okonomiyaki and rice with pickled vegetables, to the pureed carrots and meat served elsewhere. There are, in effect, two meals: the narrator nibbles in the dining room to leave room for the more appealing second meal in the kitchen.

That repeated choice gives the status a household consequence. The narrator weighs parents who treat the child like the other children against Nishio-san, who behaves as if the child were a god, and declares that becoming Japanese follows from choosing the nanny’s side. At two and a half, in Shukugawa in Kansai, the narrator says that this is what happened. The claim turns an everyday preference into an account of belonging: cultural identity is represented not as an abstract inheritance but as something entered through language, attachment, and repeated domestic acts.

Divine Identity and Its Audience

Nishio-san’s reverence extends beyond food. She traces the narrator’s features with a delicate finger and praises the mouth, forehead, and cheeks, declaring the face exceptionally beautiful. The narrator enjoys being held in her arms and takes her adoration as confirmation of a divine self. Her affection is therefore both a relationship and a mirror in which the child’s elevated identity appears assured.

The narrator connects that identity to language. Japanese is the first language in which the child’s knowledge is revealed, and the narrator interprets this as fitting the cult of the self: followers need an idiom in which to communicate with their god. The imagined audience is small but important, comprising Nishio-san, the twins, and passersby. Walking hand in hand with Nishio-san, the narrator expects public praise with serenity. The ordinary gestures of being accompanied and admired become, in the child’s interpretation, the ceremonial recognition of a lord child.

The Third Birthday and the End of the Status

The third birthday is the first birthday the narrator remembers, so it seems cosmically significant. That morning, the child wakes believing the whole village of Shukugawa must be on holiday and wakes a still-sleeping sister to ask to be the first to receive birthday wishes. This scene conveys the scale of the child’s expectation before the age-bound status has been understood as ending.

In retrospect, the narrator says that turning three brought nothing good and agrees with the Japanese view that this age marks the end of the divine state. What is lost is described as belief in the goodness of the world, not merely the right to special treatment. The coming of nursery school threatens to separate the narrator from the garden and to place the child among a group of other children. At the same time, the lush garden begins to seem overripe and uneasy. The account does not reduce this change to a formal rite; it shows how the approach of a new social stage becomes entangled with the child’s growing awareness that the familiar world may not remain benevolent.

Narrative Significance

The status of okosama gives the narrator a framework for interpreting both indulgence and its disappearance. Nishio-san’s deference offers a lived contrast to the earlier family and medical responses to a child who did not move or speak: specialists called the condition pathological apathy and recommended hospitalization, while the parents rejected that advice and tenderly called the child the Plant. After the awakening associated with white chocolate, the narrator recalls being born as a speaking self at two and a half; the special treatment that follows is another way the child is recognized as distinct.

The narrator’s account also ties identity to memory. The narrator claims to remember everything after February 1970, while acknowledging that the claim cannot be proved and that the period before the white chocolate must be reconstructed from other people’s recollections. The remembered third birthday consequently serves as more than a date: it is the first birthday available to the narrator’s own memory and the moment retrospectively associated with the end of sacred childhood. By placing Nishio-san’s kitchen rituals beside that later loss, the narrative makes okosama both a concrete privilege and a fragile story of who the child was allowed to be.