KAWASAKI, JAPAN -- Graduation rehearsal at the Sunshine Kindergarten: 100 nearly naked kindergarteners stand expectantly, hands clasped behind skinny brown backs, as a teacher calls out the names of plucky 5- and 6-year-olds who will win the coveted "Naked Prize" for having survived the winter without once donning shirts.
Like dozens of kindergartens in Japan, Sunshine believes that exposure to the elements of every season builds physical and spiritual toughness. Aged 3 to 6, Sunshine's pupils wear nothing but blue gym shorts and white gym shoes, through snow and sunshine, in unheated classrooms and windswept playgrounds, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. six days every week.
"They insist, 'No, I'm not cold,' and that feeling makes them very healthy," said Soji Matsumoto, school deputy director. "Actually, they feel cold, I think. But they don't want to be defeated by the cold. I think that's what is important."
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"Naked Education" is not sweeping Japan. Several mothers admitted that friends view the school as peculiar and a bit hard on the kids.
But the movement is spreading because the philosophy resonates with the high value that Japanese place on enduring any hardship and persevering against all odds. It reflects, too, the ambivalence many Japanese feel toward their new affluence, and their desire to find some antidote to intense, unrelieved urbanization.
"The meaning of this is to bring kids closer to nature," said Matsumoto, surveying the apartment blocks and corrugated tin houses that press against the school in this suburb of Tokyo.
Nakedness is only a small part of the kindergarten's philosophy emphasizing active minds and bodies, Matsumoto said. Still, it's not an easy part to overlook.
On Jan. 16, in snow and near-freezing temperatures, 269 of 288 pupils stayed nearly naked. It's all there, in the Sunshine daily log. The children built snowmen nearly naked, threw snowballs nearly naked and, while mothers fretted, had a great time being nearly naked, said Matsumoto, looking a bit out of place in jeans and a gray woolen sweater.
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Naked Education began in the mid-sized city of Toyohashi in 1969, when the late kindergarten principal Yoshitaka Uesato began worrying that children were weakening as Japan grew wealthy.
"The worst thing for children is parents' overprotection," Tatsuo Uesato, Yoshitaka's son and successor as principal of the Little Lambs Kindergarten, said in a telephone interview. "But it's inevitable with affluence. Rooms become warm, food changes."
At first, he said, Little Lambs fought back with one-time events like "mud day" and "brick-building day." But teachers found the effects short-lived, and so Uesato hit on the idea of full-time nakedness.
"Parent reaction was, 'Oh, this is a great idea, but not for my child,' " said his son, 45. "So one May, we just did it."
As remains true at Sunshine, no one was forced to go naked. But the combination of peer pressure and, Uesata said, the delight and freedom of being unclothed soon persuaded most of the children there.
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The results, he said, were remarkable. Children became healthier, more adaptable, less timid, more active. "Kids who were drawing little pictures in one corner of the page suddenly were filling the whole paper, and speaking in a big voice," Uesato said.
At the Sunshine school, too, children spoke in big, happy voices on a recent morning filled with painting and singing, playing outdoors and in the gym, learning numbers and Chinese characters.
If she makes it through two more weeks, Tomoko Koizumi, 6, will finish her third year at Sunshine and become one of those rare children to win the Naked Prize all three years. Most pupils give in to the temptation of short-sleeved T-shirts once in a while, usually when their mothers sense a cold coming on.
But as she cut and pasted a collage in her chilly classroom, wearing only her skimpy shorts, Tomoko said shyly that she never feels cold. The secret, she said, is the morning "marathon," when the entire student body takes to the streets shirtless, jogging around the block and yelling "Fight-o!" to get pumped up.
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"Sometimes she had goose bumps, but we persevered," said Tomoko's mother, Eiko Koizumi. "It's not that we told her to do it, but it's something she wanted to do of her own free will. And that's what makes us proud."
Megumi Goto, 33, has one son in the Sunshine school and one who graduated last year.
"At first, it was rather hard," she said, recalling her older son's experience at the school. "Sometimes he felt cold, sometimes he cried, sometimes he had a fever.
"But by the third year, he became very healthy," Goto said. "Sometimes I would say, 'Better wear your shirt today,' but my son would just take it off."
Most children at the school seemed to accept the un-dress code as a matter of course. Hiroki Harada, 6, kicked off his shoes and shinned up a bamboo pole in the playground, the wind raising goose bumps on his arms and chest. Asked why he likes Naked Education, Hiroki thought for a moment and said, "Because the wind blows."
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