A childcare facility in the eastern Japanese city of Sayama has started a drill with its students showing them how to call for help if they are left alone on a bus by using the horn, following the death of a young girl who was left alone on a bus in Shizuoka Prefecture.
Musashino Junior College – affiliated with the childcare center in Sayama, Saitama Prefecture – incorporated the drill into its annual road safety course to teach children through experience.
Out of about 140 children in this institution, 42 of them from the classes of younger ages, and their guardians participated in the exercise on September 12, while until September 16 it is expected that all students will complete the exercise.
Officers from the Sayama police station gave an explanation to the children with a model steering wheel and told them to press where the horn symbol is and keep pressing it until someone comes.
After that, the little kids would blow the horn one by one and some of them for long periods while sitting on the wheel.
After the exercises, one of the students said that he was “surprised” by the loud noise, while another said that he and the others managed to perform the task well.
A caregiver told the Mainichi Shimbun, “My child is usually forbidden to touch the steering wheel, but I felt relieved that we had such an experience.”
In the incident in Shizuoka Prefecture, a 3-year-old girl died of a heart attack after being left alone for about 5 hours inside a bus at a children’s facility in the city of Makihonara on a day when the mercury soared above 30 degrees Celsius.
Her thermos of water was empty when she was found inside the bus.