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We don’t want to bury the lede: we have raised a $100M Series B, led by a new strategic partner in USIT with participation from all existing Oxide investors. To put that number in perspective: over the nearly six year lifetime of the company, we have raised $89M; our $100M Series B more than doubles our total capital raised to date — and positions us to make Oxide the generational company that we have always aspired it to be. If this aspiration seems heady now, it seemed absolutely outlandish when we were first raising venture capital in 2019. Our thesis was that cloud computing was the future of all computing; that running on-premises would remain (or become!) strategically important for many; that the entire stack — hardware and software — needed to be rethought from first principles to serve this market; and that a large, durable, public company could be built by whomever pulled it off. This scope wasn’t immediately clear to all potential investors, some of whom seemed to latch on to one aspect or another without understanding the whole. Their objections were revealing: "We know you can build this," began more than one venture capitalist (at which we bit our tongue; were we not properly explaining what we intended to build?!), "but we don’t think that there is a market." Entrepreneurs must become accustomed to rejection, but this flavor was particularly frustrating because it was exactly backwards: we felt that there was in fact substantial technical risk in the enormity of the task we put before ourselves — but we also knew that if we could build it (a huge if!) there was a huge market, desperate for cloud computing on-premises. Fortunately, in Eclipse Ventures we found investors who saw what we saw: that the most important products come when we co-design hardware and software together, and that the on-premises market was sick of being told that they either don’t exist or that they don’t deserve modernity. These bold investors — like the customers we sought to serve — had been waiting for this company to come along; we raised seed capital, and started building. And build it we did, making good on our initial technical vision: We did our own board designs, allowing for essential system foundation like a true hardware root-of-trust and end-to-end power observability. We did our own microcontroller operating system, and used it to replace the traditional BMC. We did our own platform enablement software, eliminating the traditional UEFI BIOS and its accompanying flotilla of vulnerabilities. We did our own host hypervisor, assuring an integrated and seamless user experience — and eliminating the need for a third-party hypervisor and its concomitant rapacious software licensing. We did our own switch — and our own switch runtime — eliminating entire universes of integration complexity and operational nightmares. We did our own integrated storage service, allowing the rack-scale system to have reliable, available, durable, elastic instance storage without necessitating a dependency on a third party. We did our own control plane, a sophisticated distributed system building on the foundation of our hardware and software components to deliver the API-driven services that modernity demands: elastic compute, virtual networking, and virtual storage. While these technological components are each very important (and each is in service to specific customer problems when deploying infrastructure on-premises), the objective is the product, not its parts. The journey to a product was long, but we ticked off the milestones. We got the boards brought up. We got the switch transiting packets. We got the control plane working. We got the rack manufactured. We passed FCC compliance. And finally, two years ago, we shipped our first system! Shortly thereafter, more milestones of the variety you can only get after shipping: our first update of the software in the field; our first update-delivered performance improvements; our first customer-requested features added as part of an update. Later that year, we hit general commercial availability, and things started accelerating. We had more customers — and our first multi-rack customer. We had customers go on the record about why they had selected Oxide — and customers describing the wins that they had seen deploying Oxide. Customers starting landing faster now: enterprise sales cycles are infamously long, but we were finding that we were going from first conversations to a delivered product surprisingly quickly. The quickening pace always seemed to be due in some way to our transparency: new customers were listeners to our podcast, or they had read our RFDs, or they had perused our documentation, or they had looked at the source code itself. With growing customer enthusiasm, we were increasingly getting questions about what it would look like to buy a large number of Oxide racks. Could we manufacture them? Could we support them? Could we make them easy to operate together? Into this excitement, a new potential investor, USIT, got to know us. They asked terrific questions, and we found a shared disposition towards building lasting value and doing it the right way. We learned more about them, too, and especially USIT’s founder, Thomas Tull. The more we each learned about the other, the more there was to like. And importantly, USIT had the vision for us that we had for ourselves: that there was a big, important market here — and that it was uniquely served by Oxide. We are elated to announce this new, exciting phase of the company. It’s not necessarily in our nature to celebrate fundraising, but this is a big milestone, because it will allow us to address our customers' most pressing questions around scale (manufacturing scale, system scale, operations scale) and roadmap scope. We have always believed in our mission, but this raise gives us a new sense of confidence when we say it: we’re going to kick butt, have fun, not cheat (of course!), love our customers — and change computing forever.
How it started Four years ago, we were struggling to hire. Our team was small (~23 employees), and we knew that we needed many more people to execute on our audacious vision. While we had had success hiring in our personal networks, those networks now felt tapped; we needed to get further afield. As is our wont, we got together as a team and brainstormed: how could we get a bigger and broader applicant pool? One of our engineers, Sean, shared some personal experience: that Oxide’s principles and values were very personally important to him — but that when he explained them to people unfamiliar with the company, they were (understandably?) dismissed as corporate claptrap. Sean had found, however, that there was one surefire way to cut through the skepticism: to explain our approach to compensation. Maybe, Sean wondered, we should talk about it publicly? "I could certainly write a blog entry explaining it," I offered. At this suggestion, the team practically lunged with enthusiasm: the reaction was so uniformly positive that I have to assume that everyone was sick of explaining this most idiosyncratic aspect of Oxide to friends and family. So what was the big deal about our compensation? Well, as a I wrote in the resulting piece, Compensation as a Reflection of Values, our compensation is not merely transparent, but uniform. The piece — unsurprisingly, given the evergreen hot topic that is compensation — got a ton of attention. While some of that attention was negative (despite the piece trying to frontrun every HN hater!), much of it was positive — and everyone seemed to be at least intrigued. And in terms of its initial purpose, the piece succeeded beyond our wildest imagination: it brought a surge of new folks interested in the company. Best of all, the people new to Oxide were interested for all of the right reasons: not the compensation per se, but for the values that the compensation represents. The deeper they dug, the more they found to like — and many who learned about Oxide for the first time through that blog entry we now count as long-time, cherished colleagues. That blog entry was a long time ago now, and today we have ~75 employees (and a shipping product!); how is our compensation model working out for us? How it’s going Before we get into our deeper findings, two updates that are so important that we have updated the blog entry itself. First, the dollar figure itself continues to increase over time (as of this writing in 2025, $207,264); things definitely haven’t gotten (and aren’t getting!) any cheaper. And second, we did introduce variable compensation for some sales roles. Yes, those roles can make more than the rest of us — but they can also make less, too. And, importantly: if/when those folks are making more than the rest of us, it’s because they’re selling a lot — a result that can be celebrated by everyone! Those critical updates out of the way, how is it working? There have been a lot of surprises along the way, mostly (all?) of the positive variety. A couple of things that we have learned: People take their own performance really seriously. When some outsiders hear about our compensation model, they insist that it can’t possibly work because "everyone will slack off." I have come to find this concern to be more revealing of the person making the objection than of our model, as our experience has been in fact the opposite: in my one-on-one conversations with team members, a frequent subject of conversation is people who are concerned that they aren’t doing enough (or that they aren’t doing the right thing, or that their work is progressing slower than they would like). I find my job is often to help quiet this inner critic while at the same time stoking what I feel is a healthy urge: when one holds one’s colleagues in high regard, there is an especially strong desire to help contribute — to prove oneself worthy of a superlative team. Our model allows people to focus on their own contribution (whatever it might be). People take hiring really seriously. When evaluating a peer (rather than a subordinate), one naturally has high expectations — and because (in the sense of our wages, anyway) everyone at Oxide is a peer, it shouldn’t be surprising that folks have very high expectations for potential future colleagues. And because the Oxide hiring process is writing intensive, it allows for candidates to be thoroughly reviewed by Oxide employees — who are tough graders! It is, bluntly, really hard to get a job at Oxide. It allows us to internalize the importance of different roles. One of the more incredible (and disturbingly frequent) objections I have heard is: "But is that what you’ll pay support folks?" I continue to find this question offensive, but I no longer find it surprising: the specific dismissal of support roles reveals a widespread and corrosive devaluation of those closest to customers. My rejoinder is simple: think of the best support engineers you’ve worked with; what were they worth? Anyone who has shipped complex systems knows these extraordinary people — calm under fire, deeply technical, brilliantly resourceful, profoundly empathetic — are invaluable to the business. So what if you built a team entirely of folks like that? The response has usually been: well, sure, if you’re going to only hire those folks. Yeah, we are — and we have! It allows for fearless versatility. A bit of a corollary to the above, but subtly different: even though we (certainly!) hire and select for certain roles, our uniform compensation means we can in fact think primarily in terms of people unconfined by those roles. That is, we can be very fluid about what we’re working on, without fear of how it will affect a perceived career trajectory. As a concrete example: we had a large customer that wanted to put in place a program for some of the additional work they wanted to see in the product. The complexity of their needs required dedicated program management resources that we couldn’t spare, and in another more static company we would have perhaps looked to hire. But in our case, two folks came together — CJ from operations, and Izzy from support — and did something together that was in some regards new to both of them (and was neither of their putative full-time jobs!) The result was indisputably successful: the customer loved the results, and two terrific people got a chance to work closely together without worrying about who was dotted-lined to whom. It has allowed us to organizationally scale. Many organizations describe themselves as flat, and a reasonable rebuttal to this are the "shadow hierarchies" created by the tyranny of structurelessness. And indeed, if one were to read (say) Valve’s (in)famous handbook, the autonomy seems great — but the stack ranking decidedly less so, especially because the handbook is conspicuously silent on the subject of compensation. (Unsurprisingly, compensation was weaponized at Valve, which descended into toxic cliquishness.) While we believe that autonomy is important to do one’s best work, we also have a clear structure at Oxide in that Steve Tuck (Oxide co-founder and CEO) is in charge. He has to be: he is held accountable to our investors — and he must have the latitude to make decisions. Under Steve, it is true that we don’t have layers of middle management. Might we need some in the future? Perhaps, but what fraction of middle management in a company is dedicated to — at some level — determining who gets what in terms of compensation? What happens when you eliminate that burden completely? It frees us to both lead and follow. We expect that every Oxide employee has the capacity to lead others — and we tap this capacity frequently. Of course, a company in which everyone is trying to direct all traffic all the time would be a madhouse, so we also very much rely on following one another too! Just as our compensation model allows us to internalize the values of different roles, it allows us to appreciate the value of both leading and following, and empowers us each with the judgement to know when to do which. This isn’t always easy or free of ambiguity, but this particular dimension of our versatility has been essential — and our compensation model serves to encourage it. It causes us to hire carefully and deliberately. Of course, one should always hire carefully and deliberately, but this often isn’t the case — and many a startup has been ruined by reckless expansion of headcount. One of the roots of this can be found in a dirty open secret of Silicon Valley middle management: its ranks are taught to grade their career by the number of reports in their organization. Just as if you were to compensate software engineers based on the number of lines of code they wrote, this results in perverse incentives and predictable disasters — and any Silicon Valley vet will have plenty of horror stories of middle management jockeying for reqs or reorgs when they should have been focusing on product and customers. When you can eliminate middle management, you eliminate this incentive. We grow the team not because of someone’s animal urges to have the largest possible organization, but rather because we are at a point where adding people will allow us to better serve our market and customers. It liberates feedback from compensation. Feedback is, of course, very important: we all want to know when and where we’re doing the right thing! And of course, we want to know too where there is opportunity for improvement. However, Silicon Valley has historically tied feedback so tightly to compensation that it has ceased to even pretend to be constructive: if it needs to be said, performance review processes aren’t, in fact, about improving the performance of the team, but rather quantifying and stack-ranking that performance for purposes of compensation. When compensation is moved aside, there is a kind of liberation for feedback itself: because feedback is now entirely earnest, it can be expressed and received thoughtfully. It allows people to focus on doing the right thing. In a world of traditional, compensation-tied performance review, the organizational priority is around those things that affect compensation — even at the expense of activity that clearly benefits the company. This leads to all sorts of wild phenomena, and most technology workers will be able to tell stories of doing things that were clearly right for the company, but having to hide it from management that thought only narrowly in terms of their own stated KPIs and MBOs. By contrast, over and over (and over!) again, we have found that people do the right thing at Oxide — even if (especially if?) no one is looking. The beneficiary of that right thing? More often than not, it’s our customers, who have uniformly praised the team for going above and beyond. It allows us to focus on the work that matters. Relatedly, when compensation is non-uniform, the process to figure out (and maintain) that non-uniformity is laborious. All of that work — of line workers assembling packets explaining themselves, of managers arming themselves with those packets to fight in the arena of organizational combat, and then of those same packets ultimately being regurgitated back onto something called a review — is work. Assuming such a process is executed perfectly (something which I suppose is possible in the abstract, even though I personally have never seen it), this is work that does not in fact advance the mission of the company. Not having variable compensation gives us all of that time and energy back to do the actual work — the stuff that matters. It has stoked an extraordinary sense of teamwork. For me personally — and as I relayed on an episode of Software Misadventures — the highlights of my career have been being a part of an extraordinary team. The currency of a team is mutual trust, and while uniform compensation certainly isn’t the only way to achieve that trust, boy does it ever help! As Steve and I have told one another more times that we can count: we are so lucky to work on this team, with its extraordinary depth and breadth. While our findings have been very positive, I would still reiterate what we said four years ago: we don’t know what the future holds, and it’s easier to make an unwavering commitment to the transparency rather than the uniformity. That said, the uniformity has had so many positive ramifications that the model feels more important than ever. We are beyond the point of this being a curiosity; it’s been essential for building a mission-focused team taking on a problem larger than ourselves. So it’s not a fit for everyone — but if you are seeking an extraordinary team solving hard problems in service to customers, consider Oxide!
Sometime in late 2007, we had the idea of a DTrace conference. Or really, more of a meetup; from the primordial e-mail I sent: The goal here, by the way, is not a DTrace user group, but more of a face-to-face meeting with people actively involved in DTrace — either by porting it to another system, by integrating probes into higher level environments, by building higher-level tools on top of DTrace or by using it heavily and/or in a critical role. That said, we also don’t want to be exclusionary, so our thinking is that the only true requirement for attending is that everyone must be prepared to speak informally for 15 mins or so on what they are doing with DTrace, any limitations that they have encountered, and some ideas for the future. We’re thinking that this is going to be on the order of 15-30 people (though more would be a good problem to have — we’ll track it if necessary), that it will be one full day (breakfast in the morning through drinks into the evening), and that we’re going to host it here at our offices in San Francisco sometime in March 2008. This same note also included some suggested names for the gathering, including what in hindsight seems a clear winner: DTrace Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con. As if knowing that I should leave an explanatory note to my future self as to why this name was not selected, my past self fortunately clarified: "before everyone clamors for the obvious Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con, you should know that most Millennials don’t (sadly) get the reference." (While I disagree with the judgement of my past self, it at least indicates that at some point I cared if anyone got the reference.) We settled on a much more obscure reference, and had the first dtrace.conf in March 2008. Befitting the style of the time, it was an unconference (a term that may well have hit its apogee in 2008) that you signed up to attend by editing a wiki. More surprising given the year (and thanks entirely to attendee Ben Rockwood), it was recorded — though this is so long ago that I referred to it as video taping (and with none of the participants mic’d, I’m afraid the quality isn’t very good). The conference, however, was terrific, viz. the reports of Adam, Keith and Stephen (all somehow still online nearly two decades later). If anything, it was a little too good: we realized that we couldn’t recreate the magic, and we demurred on making it an annual event. Years passed, and memories faded. By 2012, it felt like we wanted to get folks together again, now under a post-lawnmower corporate aegis in Joyent. The resulting dtrace.conf(12) was a success, and the Olympiad cadence felt like the right one; we did it again four years later at dtrace.conf(16). In 2020, we came back together for a new adventure — and the DTrace Olympiad was not lost on Adam. Alas, dtrace.conf(20) — like the Olympics themselves — was cancelled, if implicitly. Unlike the Olympics, however, it was not to be rescheduled. More years passed and DTrace continued to prove its utility at Oxide; last year when Adam and I did our "DTrace at 20" episode of Oxide and Friends, we vowed to hold dtrace.conf(24) — and a few months ago, we set our date to be December 11th. At first we assumed we would do something similar to our earlier conferences: a one-day participant-run conference, at the Oxide office in Emeryville. But times have changed: thanks to the rise of remote work, technologists are much more dispersed — and many more people would need to travel for dtrace.conf(24) than in previous DTrace Olympiads. Travel hasn’t become any cheaper since 2008, and the cost (and inconvenience) was clearly going to limit attendance. The dilemma for our small meetup highlights the changing dynamics in tech conferences in general: with talks all recorded and made publicly available after the conference, how does one justify attending a conference in person? There can be reasonable answers to that question, of course: it may be the hallway track, or the expo hall, or the after-hours socializing, or perhaps some other special conference experience. But it’s also not surprising that some conferences — especially ones really focused on technical content — have decided that they are better off doing as conference giant O’Reilly Media did, and going exclusively online. And without the need to feed and shelter participants, the logistics for running a conference become much more tenable — and the price point can be lowered to the point that even highly produced conferences like P99 CONF can be made freely available. This, in turn, leads to much greater attendance — and a network effect that can get back some of what one might lose going online. In particular, using chat as the hallway track can be more much effective (and is certainly more scalable!) than the actual physical hallways at a conference. For conferences in general, there is a conversation to be had here (and as a teaser, Adam and I are going to talk about it with Stephen O’Grady and Theo Schlossnagle on Oxide and Friends next week, but for our quirky, one-day, Olympiad-cadence dtrace.conf, the decision was pretty easy: there was much more to be gained than lost by going exclusively on-line. So dtrace.conf(24) is coming up next week, and it’s available to everyone. In terms of platform, we’re going to try to keep that pretty simple: we’re going to use Google Meet for the actual presenters, which we will stream in real-time to YouTube — and we’ll use the Oxide Discord for all chat. We’re hoping you’ll join us on December 11th — and if you want to talk about DTrace or a DTrace-adjacent topic, we’d love for you to present! Keeping to the unconference style, if you would like to present, please indicate your topic in the #session-topics Discord channel so we can get the agenda fleshed out. While we’re excited to be online, there are some historical accoutrements of conferences that we didn’t want to give up. First, we have a tradition of t-shirts with dtrace.conf. Thanks to our designer Ben Leonard, we have a banger of a t-shirt, capturing the spirit of our original dtrace.conf(08) shirt but with an Oxide twist. It’s (obviously) harder to make those free but we have tried to price them reasonably. You can get your t-shirt by adding it to your (free) dtrace.conf ticket. (And for those who present at dtrace.conf, your shirt is on us — we’ll send you a coupon code!) Second, for those who can make their way to the East Bay and want some hangout time, we are going to have an après conference social event at the Oxide office starting at 5p. We’re charging something nominal for that too (and like the t-shirt, you pay for that via your dtrace.conf ticket); we’ll have some food and drinks and an Oxide hardware tour for the curious — and (of course?) there will be Fishpong. Much has changed since I sent that e-mail 17 years ago — but the shared values and disposition that brought together our small community continue to endure; we look forward to seeing everyone (virtually) at dtrace.conf(24)!
Here’s a sobering thought: today, data centers already consume 1-2% of the world’s power, and that percentage will likely rise to 3-4% by the end of the decade. According to Goldman Sachs research, that rise will include a doubling in data center carbon dioxide emissions. As the data and AI boom progresses, this thirst for power shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Two key challenges quickly become evident for the 85% of IT that currently lives on-premises. How can organizations reduce power consumption and corresponding carbon emissions? How can organizations keep pace with AI innovation as existing data centers run out of available power? Figure 1. Masanet et al. (2020), Cisco, IEA, Goldman Sachs Research Rack-scale design is critical to improved data center efficiency Traditional data center IT consumes so much power because the fundamental unit of compute is an individual server; like a house where rooms were built one at a time, with each room having its own central AC unit, gas furnace, and electrical panel. Individual rackmount servers are stacked together, each with their own AC power supplies, cooling fans, and power management. They are then paired with storage appliances and network switches that communicate at arm’s length, not designed as a cohesive whole. This approach fundamentally limits organizations' ability to maintain sustainable, high-efficiency computing systems. Of course, hyperscale public cloud providers did not design their data center systems this way. Instead, they operate like a carefully planned smart home where everything is designed to work together cohesively and is operated by software that understands the home’s systems end-to-end. High-efficiency, rack-scale computers are deployed at scale and operate as a single unit with integrated storage and networking to support elastic cloud computing services. This modern archietecture is made available to the market as public cloud, but that rental-only model is ill-fit for many business needs. Compared to a popular rackmount server vendor, Oxide is able to fill our specialized racks with 32 AMD Milan sleds and highly-available network switches using less than 15kW per rack, doubling the compute density in a typical data center. With just 16 of the alternative 1U servers and equivalent network switches, over 16kW of power is required per rack, leading to only 1,024 CPU cores vs Oxide’s 2,048. Extracting more useful compute from each kW of power and square foot of data center space is key to the future effectiveness of on-premises computing. At Oxide, we’ve taken this lesson in advancing rack-scale design, improved upon it in several ways, and made it available for every organization to purchase and operate anywhere in the world without a tether back to the public cloud. Our Cloud Computer treats the entire rack as a single, unified computer rather than a collection of independent parts, achieving unprecedented power efficiency. By designing the hardware and software together, we’ve eliminated unnecessary components and optimized every aspect of system operation through a control plane with visibility to end-to-end operations. When we started Oxide, the DC bus bar stood as one of the most glaring differences between the rack-scale machines at the hyperscalers and the rack-and-stack servers that the rest of the market was stuck with. That a relatively simple piece of copper was unavailable to commercial buyers — despite being unequivocally the right way to build it! — represented everything wrong with the legacy approach. The bus bar in the Oxide Cloud Computer is not merely more efficient, it is a concrete embodiment of the tremendous gains from designing at rack-scale, and by integrating hardware with software. — Bryan Cantrill The improvements we’re seeing are rooted in technical innovation Replacing low-efficiency AC power supplies with a high-efficiency DC Bus Bar This eliminates the 70 total AC power supplies found in an equivalent legacy server rack within 32 servers, two top-of-rack switches, and one out-of-band switch, each with two AC power supplies. This power shelf also ensures the load is balanced across phases, something that’s impossible with traditional power distribution units found in legacy server racks. Bigger fans = bigger efficiency gains using 12x less energy than legacy servers, which each contain as many as 7 fans, which must work much harder to move air over system components. Purpose-built for power efficiency less restrictive airflow than legacy servers by eliminating extraneous components like PCIe risers, storage backplanes, and more. Legacy servers need many optional components like these because they could be used for any number of tasks, such as point-of-sale systems, data center servers, or network-attached-storage (NAS) systems. Still, they were never designed optimally for any one of those tasks. The Oxide Cloud Computer was designed from the ground up to be a rack-scale cloud computing powerhouse, and so it’s optimized for exactly that task. Hardware + Software designed together By designing the hardware and software together, we can make hardware choices like more intelligent DC-DC power converters that can provide rich telemetry to our control plane, enabling future feature enhancements such as dynamic power capping and efficiency-based workload placement that are impossible with legacy servers and software systems. Learn more about Oxide’s intelligent Power Shelf Controller The Bottom Line: Customers and the Environment Both Benefit Reducing data center power demands and achieving more useful computing per kilowatt requires fundamentally rethinking traditional data center utilization and compute design. At Oxide, we’ve proven that dramatic efficiency gains are possible when you rethink the computer at rack-scale with hardware and software designed thoughtfully and rigorously together. Ready to learn how your organization can achieve these results? Schedule time with our team here. Together, we can reclaim on-premises computing efficiency to achieve both business and sustainability goals.
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When our family arrived in Japan in 2022, we faced a major decision: whether to enroll our children in Japanese public schools, or send them to an international school. Neither my husband nor I spoke Japanese well yet. Our two children also, despite our best efforts with Japanese lessons, couldn’t say much more than “Kawaii!” (“Cute!”) and “Ringo ga suki desu” (“I like apples”). Nonetheless, after much consideration, we decided to send our kids to Japanese public schools. Now, four years later, we have successfully enrolled our children in public elementary schools in both Tokyo Prefecture and Nara Prefecture. Both times it was the right decision for our family. I would recommend the same to other immigrants with young children, who also plan to remain in Japan long term. What international parents should know about Japanese public schools Why we chose Japanese elementary schools over international schools Are Japanese public elementary schools free? How to enroll your child in a Japanese elementary school My top five tips for navigating the Japanese school system Accommodations and support for non-Japanese speakers How to help your children with homework in Japanese Our education situation now Conclusion What international parents should know about Japanese public schools International children living in Japan can attend public elementary and junior high schools, even if they don’t speak Japanese. Public elementary schools don’t charge tuition, although families still pay for things like school lunches, uniforms, supplies, and field trips. Enrollment is handled through your local city or ward office. Once you’ve registered your address, the municipality will normally tell you which public school your child can attend and guide you through the enrollment process. Children can also enroll partway through the Japanese school year. Japanese-language support varies considerably depending on the municipality, school, and faculty, but both of our children’s schools provided additional help while they were learning Japanese. Why we chose Japanese elementary schools over international schools There are sometimes excellent reasons to choose international schools. If your children are in high school already, or you know you’ll be departing Japan in a few years, it makes sense to select a school environment that will feel more familiar to your children. Asking your kids to become both fluent and literate in Japanese, as well as to adjust to a new culture “on the fly” in a classroom setting, is not something to be taken lightly. Nonetheless, my husband and I had several good reasons for choosing to enroll our kids in local schools. We had no plans to leave. Exiting Japan is still a possibility, but we’d prefer to remain here long-term. It therefore made sense to work on integrating our children into Japanese culture, and schools are the fastest way to do that. We had young children. When we arrived, our daughter was in kindergarten, and our son in second grade. They were at a good age mentally to acquire Japanese. It wasn’t their first experience with a non-English school. They also briefly attended a small school in Mexico, where all classes were taught in Spanish. Frankly, we couldn’t afford to have two children in international schools. That last point isn’t just about tuition and fees, because international schools also come with location restrictions. The vast majority of international schools are located in major cities like Tokyo and Osaka, and typically near expensive neighborhoods. Those options suited neither our pocketbooks nor our lifestyle, as we much prefer the countryside. Also, house-hunting for a non-Japanese couple with two small children, two dogs, and a shakuhachi player (my husband) has meant that, despite the best efforts of our heroic real estate agents, pickings are always slim. That was true when we first landed in 2022 and rented a house in Hachioji, and again when we relocated to Nara in 2024. If we’d needed to remain within a few kilometers of an international school, I’m not sure what we would have done! Are Japanese public elementary schools free? The short answer is “Yes,” because public elementary schools in Japan do not charge tuition fees. However, depending on your school’s location and uniform policies, you may pay more than you expected. If your household is having problems paying for things, you can inquire at the school and at city hall about assistance (支援, shien). Many regions provide financial assistance for school lunches, textbooks, supplies, uniforms, and even school trips and activities, as a part of programs intended to encourage families to have kids and remain in the area. Lunch fees Elementary schools provide a hot lunch, but whether you’ll be paying for it depends on where you live. Shortly before we left Hachioji, school lunches were made free for all students, which as of 2023 was also the case in around 30% of municipalities in Japan. However, the free lunch trend hasn’t reached our current elementary school in Nara. We pay between 5,000 and 6,000 yen per child every month for their meals. I don’t mind, since Japanese school lunches are widely famous for being well-planned, high-quality, and nutritious. Every month my kids bring home a detailed menu of the lunches they’ll be eating, with a nutritional breakdown and estimated calorie count for each one. Other fees Field trip fees, new textbook fees . . . it all adds up. Combined with the school lunch fees, I estimate that we spend around 10,000 yen a month per child, which seems in line with national averages. That’s not counting the big field trips. Traditionally sixth graders in elementary school and those in their third year of junior high school take a longer trip of 2-3 days. These trips can be expensive; as one example, the municipal government of Naruto found that the average cost for elementary students was about 35,000 yen, and for junior high students about 80,000 yen. However, this is another cost that may be subsidized depending on where you live. Starting in 2026 Naruto will cover the entire cost of those public school field trips, and is also preparing similar subsidies for the parents of those students attending private schools outside the city. Another example is Katsushika, which in 2025 became the first Tokyo ward to make all school field trips free for students at municipal elementary and junior high schools. Expensive school supplies Your children will need the usual pens, pencils, crayons, etc., as well as some daily supplies more unique to Japan. However, these are usually widely available and inexpensive. What you may need to budget for are backpacks, special craft and music supplies, and uniforms if your school requires them. Randoseru These unique, box-shaped backpacks (ランドセル, randoseru) deserve their own special note. Many Japanese families consider shopping for them a special ritual that marks the beginning of a child’s education. Grandparents often shoulder the cost, which can range as high as 100,000 yen. I, however, didn’t invest even close to 100,000 yen into these bags. I ordered my son’s on Amazon for less than 10,000 yen. A year before my daughter was due to start elementary school, I spotted a purple randoseru in a secondhand store and snagged it for around 4,000 yen. Uniforms, gym clothes, and swimsuits Gym clothes and swimsuits have been identical at all my children’s schools: navy blue sports shorts and plain white t-shirts (short or long-sleeved) for gym, and navy-blue swimsuits with different colored swim caps for different grades, i.e. red for first grade, blue for second-grade, etc. These clothes are so ubiquitous that you can just type “elementary swimsuit” or “elementary gym clothes” into a site like Amazon JP and immediately find what you need. One thing that can change across schools is the type and placement of the name tag, which usually has the school’s name on it. Schools will often have a preferred supplier or two in town that keeps all of these things on hand. As for uniforms, here your mileage will vary more widely. Some public elementary schools require uniforms, and some do not. The elementary school in Hachioji didn’t require any uniforms, and my kids wore their own regular clothing every day. As is typical for schools in Japan, however, they were not permitted to wear jewelry (including earrings) or watches. My children’s current elementary school in Nara does require uniforms. This particular style of uniform is widely-used across Japan, and is therefore available online and in many low-cost clothing stores. They are a bit more expensive than I initially expected: school skirts and shorts were around 4000 yen a piece, and their jackets were 7000 yen each, which added up to an initial high bill. The clothing is also adjustable in size and very long-lasting, though, so it’s worth the investment. Special school supplies Throughout the year, you may be asked to purchase additional items for class: musical instrument(s), calligraphy sets, painting kits, sewing kits, wood-carving kits, and more. You’ll know when your kids need these because they’ll come home with a stack of catalogues. Just select whichever version suits your taste and budget, fill out the form, and send it back with your children to order the supplies through the school. The average price per item or kit runs between 4,000 and 6,000 yen. If you’re a bit strapped for cash, I’ve often been able to find the same items cheaper on Amazon JP or Mercari. However, the teachers have subtly conveyed that they’d prefer I not order these myself. How to enroll your child in a Japanese elementary school We were fortunate in that, when we arrived in Japan, we accidentally landed in Hachioji, the #1 city in Japan for immigrants. However, we also had no friends or family there to ease the transition. Although we’d been studying Japanese, we’d only been in-country a few months when the kids started school, and still struggled with even basic communication. You can imagine how nervous I was when it came time to enroll my children in Japanese schools. Then, two years later, we moved to Nara and I got nervous about it all over again, only to discover that the process was functionally identical. The basic steps for enrollment should be as below. Details may vary from city to city, so you should seek guidance from your city hall and the schools themselves on exactly what you need to do. Note that public elementary and junior high schools will accept foreign students even mid-year, but high school is not compulsory in Japan, and even public high schools still require entrance exams. Some systems exist to ease the exam requirements for non-Japanese speaking students, such as the specialized quota system in Tokyo, but these programs are highly regional. Much of what comes next will depend on when you arrive. The Japanese school year starts at the beginning of April, so your priorities might be different depending on whether you arrive in February, or in October. 1. Register your address in Japan It won’t be possible to enroll until you have a fixed address that you have registered with city hall, so acquiring housing comes first. If you’re looking at very rural areas, you should also double-check that an elementary school is accessible from your potential new home. Due to falling birthrates and the depopulation of the Japanese countryside, over 8,580 public schools closed between 2002 and 2020. You don’t want to accidentally find yourself in an “education desert.” 2. Talk to city hall The staff there can tell you, based on the location of your house, which school your children are supposed to attend. They’ll provide paperwork and instructions for enrollment and arrange for you to meet with the school. They can also inform you of what Japanese language-learning support the city offers, as well as other potential benefits and programs for your children. 3. Decide when your children will start school Your decision, and the advice of city hall, might be different depending on when you arrive. If you’ve come in October, which is mid-year for schools in Japan, the consensus might be to enroll your child at once. If you’ve arrived in February, you might be advised to wait until the next academic year begins in April. In 2022, we arrived in the middle of the school year. I asked Hachioji’s education department if we could delay my son’s enrollment until April, so he could finish his current online school program. They had no problem with that. I met with them again in February to finalize our school selection and start his enrollment process. We moved to Nara in October, just before their new school’s Sports Day. We ended up delaying their start date by a week so that my children, who hadn’t rehearsed for the event, wouldn’t be required to participate unprepared. Otherwise, there were no objections to them starting classes immediately. Although this should be discussed with the local education office, parents do have some leeway about when their children begin formal education in Japan. Homeschooling, and other non-accredited programs including many international schools, exist in a gray area. Theoretically, Japan’s compulsory education laws mandate that children between the ages of 6 and 15 must receive education from a recognized school. That being said, the law is interpreted very differently depending on the regional school board or even individual schools in question According to new Permanent Residency requirements issued October 1st 2026, PR applicants must ensure that their school-age children have been attending school during their compulsory education period from ages 6 to 15. It’s not yet clear whether non-accredited programs will also count toward that schooling requirement, or if children must be enrolled in institutions accredited by the Japanese government. A lengthy period of homeschooling might raise issues, but a short delay in enrollment, to finish online schooling or to study Japanese, is unlikely to cause problems. 4. Confirm which school your child will attend Depending on the neighborhood, you may or may not have a choice in which school your children attend. In Hachioji we were situated almost exactly between two elementary schools, and so were allowed to make a choice between them. The principal of my daughter’s kindergarten personally knew one of the elementary school principals, so we went with her recommendation. 5. Complete enrollment paperwork You’ll be expected to provide, at a minimum, detailed medical information and vaccine records for your child. You may also be asked to fill out paperwork describing your child’s usual habits and temperament, so the teachers can start getting to know them. 6. Get physicals for your children Many schools will arrange for physical examinations (健康診断, kenkou shindan) at the school itself, usually in March, but in some cases you may need to visit a clinic separately. 7. Arrange payment for school expenses Many schools in Japan automatically withdraw school lunch fees and other expenses. You may need to open a new account at a bank specified by the school. The school should give you instructions on this, as well as any paperwork you need to take to the bank. This process went smoothly for us in Hachioji, but not in Nara. Despite our best attempts, neither we nor the other international family that attends the school have been able to open an account with the school’s preferred bank. While deeply annoying, this is unfortunately not an uncommon issue in Japan. Instead, the school has arranged for us to pay in cash. 8. Buy uniforms, backpacks, and other school supplies In addition to the more expensive school supplies I outlined above, you should receive a detailed list of everyday supplies from the school. Some items are, as near as I can tell, universally required by Japanese elementary schools. School shoes (上靴, uwagutsu or 上履き, uwabaki depending on the region)—white, rubber-soled shoes specifically for wearing indoors A cloth bag for the school shoes Several other cloth bags, often quilted, for carrying gym clothes, books, musical instruments, and more Washcloths and handkerchiefs, for cleaning the school rooms and children’s faces respectively A pencil box with the usual supplies (pencils, tape, glue sticks, crayons etc.) Notebooks for different subjects A special contact notebook used to exchange written messages with your child’s teachers (連絡帳, renraku-chou) These sorts of supplies are widely available and can be purchased online, at supermarkets, at Daiso and other 100-yen stores, or at low-cost lifestyle stores like AEON Big Extra and Shimamura. Schools can get quite specific about different colors and types of items. For example, those white school shoes are often sold with color-coded toes, and some schools use different colors for different grades. Check your list carefully to make sure what you’re buying is appropriate for your children. Also, some supplies may be purchased in bulk by the school and distributed afterwards, and that will usually be indicated on the supply list. 9. Download the school app, if there is one It’s common for schools to use an app to send updates and announcements. The app can also be an easy way to give notice that your child won’t be attending due to illness, an appointment, etc. App usage is not universal, however. The school in Hachioji required an app, but the school in Nara uses Google Forms to report the children’s absence or tardiness online. Or you might be very lucky like Paul McMahon, the founder of TokyoDev, whose children’s school uses no less than four apps! 10. Learn the school commute and start school This might be more complicated than it sounds, depending on your school’s walking or bus policies. The elementary school in Hachioji was near our house, so once our son knew the route, he was able to walk to and from school himself. They did have organized walking groups, accompanied by a teacher, for the first-graders. At our current school in Nara, many families live up to a 20-minute walk away. The school organizes official student walking groups, which meet at certain street corners at 7:45 a.m., then proceed to school under the supervision of a selected sixth-grade student. In all these cases, the school explained the transportation arrangements well in advance. My top five tips for navigating the Japanese school system If you decide that public Japanese schools are for your family, here are my top five tips for a smooth transition into the local school system. 1. Use the resources at city hall freely You’ll need to visit city hall anyway, to register as residents. Both times, once the staff there realized I also had two school-age children I intended to enroll, I was immediately steered to the correct departments. Not all city or town halls are created equally, but I’ve always had positive experiences. At Hachioji’s city hall they offer translators on-site or via tablet, to help with the language barrier, and are happy to answer questions. I once lost an important piece of my daughter’s enrollment paperwork, and eventually had to go ask city hall for a replacement. (I didn’t organize my mail well. Learn from my mistakes, please.) They cheerfully provided one in just a few minutes, and also helped me fill it out. The town hall in Nara, while a little less equipped to deal with non-Japanese speakers, is also staffed by kind and patient people who go out of their way to help us figure out the necessary paperwork. 2. Always meet with the schools in advance You’ll need to visit the school in advance anyway—part of the enrollment process involves bringing the children to the school for physical exams and meetings in March, before the new school year begins. However, it’s a good idea to arrange an earlier, private meeting with school staff, to discuss language-learning options and get a feel for the school’s culture. At our children’s current school, my first meeting with school staff actually happened before we’d even made a firm decision on moving. In the summer of 2024 I took a quick trip to Nara by myself, to scout for our new location. My real estate agent and I ranged all over the prefecture in search of that magical house that would combine reasonable rent with tolerance for dogs and foreigners. I fell in love with one small town in particular. While I was there, I made a quick visit to the school my kids would attend. Since it was summer I didn’t expect to encounter any students or staff; I mostly wanted to sneak a peek at the building and grounds. A man sweeping leaves off the path greeted me, and I told him my children might attend this school. He quickly summoned the vice principal, who spoke a bit of English. I was treated to a spontaneous tour and reassured that my children would be welcomed there. I was also told that the class sizes, while quite small at 15–20 students per grade, were consistent from year to year. (By comparison, the average class size in Japan is around 26 students.) This gave me confidence that the town’s population wasn’t shrinking so rapidly that the school was likely to close in the near future. I left feeling much more at ease, and the school’s friendly reception was a deciding factor in our final decision to move. 3. Get out your phone (and a filing cabinet) The single biggest difference between a Japanese school and an American one is the mountains of paperwork. Every day, our children come home with a new landslide of school announcements, lunch menus, schedules, field trip reminders, and more. Google Translate only gets us so far. Often our phones deliver nothing but word salad, particularly when it comes to lists of supplies. “Honey, it says we need to provide a ‘single boiled fish glue,’ do you have any idea what that could actually be?” Unless you arrive in Japan with a solid grasp of kanji, though, you’ll absolutely need a little phone help. But that’s just for what’s in the paperwork. It doesn’t account for cultural expectations that aren’t written down—like that my daughter needed to wear a specific “ceremony dress” for her elementary school entrance ceremony. 4. Make parent friends—ASAP! I read the paperwork regarding the entrance ceremony several times, and nowhere did it mention a required outfit. If several parent friends hadn’t let me know that my daughter was expected to wear a specific “kind of like a school uniform, but not really” dress for the occasion, I would have had no idea. That’s why making friends with other parents is truly my top tip. In both cities we’ve lived in, we were extremely fortunate to immediately befriend other immigrant families. In each case the parents had already lived in Japan for 20 years or more and were fluent in Japanese. We’d have been lost without them! Also wonderful have been those Japanese parents who speak English and kindly help translate on the spot. One mother at my daughter’s kindergarten basically adopted me; she saved a seat for me at everything from sports day to the class play, and whispered ongoing updates so I’d understand what was happening. But what if you aren’t lucky enough to have fellow immigrants or English speakers at your school? I highly recommend the Facebook group Parents with Kids in Japanese Schools. Parents there can help answer tricky logistical questions, as well as offer general support. 5. Don’t be afraid of the PTA (probably) The PTAs of Japanese schools once enjoyed a fearsome reputation, and I was concerned we’d be drafted for a lot of duties we didn’t have the time, or Japanese, to perform. Instead, the head of the Hachioji elementary school’s PTA found me on the first day, introduced herself, connected with me on LINE, and asked me to contact her if I ever needed help or had any concerns. Other than the aforementioned foreign family events, and some schoolwide votes on PTA measures, we weren’t asked to do much. We did try to volunteer for those tasks that don’t require fluent Japanese, such as setting up tents for sports day. The PTA at our current school is equally undemanding. We do participate in traffic duty twice a year, which consists of putting on an orange vest and supervising a single intersection during the students’ morning walk to school. Actually, I enjoy getting my chance to wave at the kids. These easygoing PTA are apparently becoming more the norm, when they’re not being dissolved outright. Originally these organizations were designed for, and also staffed by, stay-at-home mothers. Since households in Japan are increasingly dual-income, it’s not possible for working mothers to participate in the same way as before. Accommodations and support for non-Japanese speakers My husband and I couldn’t really predict how the local schools would react to our children being enrolled, and we were pleasantly surprised by the consistent patience, effort, and dedication of our children’s teachers. Their support has always exceeded our expectations and we do not take it for granted. We’re not as familiar with other forms of accommodation offered by public schools, but Kerri King has shared her own experience with inclusive education in Japan. Multicultural city school vs rural school The international student situation was very different at our school in Hachioji, as opposed to our current school in Nara. In Hachioji, we were far from the only immigrant family attending that school. The school also had children from China, the Philippines, and the Congo, so we didn’t even all have a second language in common. Special meet-up events were held for international families, and the staff was being trained in “Easy Japanese” to help with communication. The downside was that there were enough foreign and returnee children in our area to ensure that my kids could always find an English-speaking friend. That was wonderful for them socially, but not ideal for language acquisition. By contrast, at our current school there are a total of three children who need assistance learning Japanese: one new student whose mother is Japanese but who has spent most of his life abroad, and my children, who are now in grades three and five. There is also one other international family, who originally came from Sri Lanka, but their whole family already speaks both Japanese and English. Their son and my daughter are best friends, but communicate primarily in Japanese, which I think has helped speed my daughter’s learning. Very importantly, being friends with them also means I get to try lots of delicious Sri Lankan food. Japanese language learning support for international children Despite these differences, the specific accommodations offered by both schools have proven remarkably similar. They include: Weekly sessions with an English-speaking assistant, who helps them with their homework and Japanese studies Private Japanese lessons with other teachers and the principal throughout the course of the week Homework assignments and tests tailored to their current Japanese levels Permission to use school tablets and computers for translation in class That last one is a mixed blessing, as I do believe my son’s reliance on using digital translation in the classroom and for his homework has slowed his Japanese acquisition. It helps him study and comprehend school subjects better, so that his math and science scores remain decent, but he cannot read or write in Japanese at his grade level. If I could go back in time to when my son entered the second grade, I would insist he use digital translation as little as possible while doing writing assignments. Instead, I would encourage him to use the kana and Japanese words he knew, even if the result was more like “baby talk” than age-appropriate Japanese. I think that would have served as a better foundation for literacy than translating sentences from English and copying down kanji he didn’t understand. Most of these accommodations, however, have been enormously helpful. In particular, the English-speaking assistant in Nara has become a kind of “school grandmother” for my children. I think she provides important emotional support for them in addition to language assistance. Japanese language learning support in the community Despite the schools’ best efforts, my children’s kanji skills continue to lag. This is particularly concerning for my son as he prepares to enter the local junior high. Based on my experiences, I believe immigrant parents must take primary responsibility for their children’s Japanese acquisition. Some young children do pick it up naturally at school, but parents should be prepared to supplement their education, especially when another language is spoken at home. A few years ago we arranged for my son to receive private Japanese lessons online. The teacher was wonderful, but 30 minutes twice a week wasn’t enough, and he struggled to study (rather than socialize) during the calls. So earlier this year we began searching for local, in-person resources instead. Our current town features an amazingly supportive and close-knit community. I told one friend that we were looking for a Japanese tutor to help my son with kanji, and within less than an hour I received a message from her friend, offering to teach my son for free. (We did suggest paying her, but she refused.) That woman runs her own English school, but still makes the time to tutor my son on kanji once a week. More formal Japanese language schools and classes for international residents are surprisingly abundant even in the countryside. Last year the kids’ school published a list that included 15–20 in the surrounding region. On that list, we spotted a class in a nearby town that meets on Sunday mornings and is only 500 yen a month per participant. The other students are primarily young workers from other countries, but the teachers are kind and fully prepared to help both children and adults. How to help your children with homework in Japanese A typical day’s homework involves several pages of math problems, kanji practice, reading-aloud practice, and possibly a short essay. All of this can usually be finished in an hour or two, if we don’t run into language difficulties. Throughout the years, we’ve tackled our children’s homework using a combination of many of the strategies I’ve already described. You can use your phone to translate instructions—but don’t be surprised if math homework word problems start to look more like word soup. If you’re truly stuck on some indecipherable directions, you can try taking a photo of the paragraph and messaging another parent for help. Sometimes, if we have an after-school playdate planned, our children take their homework with them and do it with their friends. They also do some homework with their Japanese tutors, both inside and outside the school. We don’t send our kids to after-school care (学童保育, gakudou hoiku), but my understanding is that children are expected to work on their homework during that time, and there are teachers and assistants available to help. I will say that we were initially more hands-on in helping our kids with homework. However, a teacher at our current school pointed out that if we are always assisting our children, she has a hard time getting an accurate picture of their real abilities. Her approach made sense, so we now mostly follow up with our children to make sure homework is completed, rather than worrying about it all being correct. Holiday homework Something that caught us off guard is the amount of homework assigned during winter and summer vacations. This past summer, our children were given a 90-page homework packet to complete, plus new music to learn, a research project, an essay, typing practice, and a summer craft project. In my experience, most of this homework is not graded by the teachers. Instead, students are given the answer sheets so they can correct the workbook pages themselves. I have seen other international parents state online that their families are refusing holiday homework for mental health reasons, or because they have travel plans. That might be better for the child, but outright noncompliance could affect your relationship with the teacher. The situation is so dependent on your particular child and school that I don’t have a firm recommendation on how anyone should approach this. For us personally, we do ask our children to complete all the homework, mostly as an exercise in avoiding procrastination. After several painful summers, our son has now learned to get most of it done early. This year our daughter completed hers the day before school started. She regretted waiting so long, but has hopefully learned her lesson! Our education situation now While there was more Japanese-learning support available at the municipal level in Hachioji, I would say that relocating to Nara has been good for our family’s Japanese skills. The move certainly accelerated my own Japanese acquisition: my neighbors and friends here speak Japanese almost exclusively, so I get much more speaking practice as well as daily incentive to study. My daughter, who came to Japan at prime language-learning age and speaks Japanese better than any of us, has now fully absorbed the regional dialect. Friends jokingly call her a “daughter of Kansai” as she wields local slang with natural ease. My son has also become more conversational in Japanese, at least partially because the smaller class sizes give him more opportunity to speak. Now my chief concern is that, if my children can’t successfully learn enough kanji to succeed at the local junior high, then we’ll need to find an international or English-friendly school for them. That may mean relocating to Osaka. Since we’re happy in our current town, we’re hoping to avoid this, but in the end we’ll have to do what is best for their ongoing education. Conclusion Sending your children to Japanese schools can be a daunting prospect, but there is more support available than you might expect. The education system is changing to be more accommodating to foreign families and Japanese learners. Just how supportive the school system is may depend on where you live. But as our experience demonstrates, even a small rural school can make the situation work, especially if parents are willing to meet them halfway.
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