Yes, I’m lucky. The situation was similar to yours in Nagoya — well over a million yen per year, and many of the children didn’t even achieve real fluency in English.

Some of the teachers at my son’s school are radical in their religious beliefs, but it’s a very good school otherwise.

You are extremely lucky to have access to such a reasonably priced international school. In Kansai they all cost 120 to 180man per child.

Mine are still 2 and 3 years old, so it remains to be seen whether we will be able to get their English to a suitable level while putting them through the regular Japanese school system.

I’ve always only spoken English to my son. My wife speaks mostly Japanese with him, but they both mix when speaking to each other. His Japanese grandmother and aunt live nearby, and they speak only Japanese. He also has both Japanese and English-speaking friends.

We also send our son to an English-speaking school. This has been the single most important factor in raising him bilingually in Japan.

He’s now 10 and in 5th grade, and I’d say he’s a fairly balanced bilingual (although his English is stronger). One problem is that his Japanese reading and writing is lagging behind; this year, we put him into Gakken twice a week to get that ability up, and it seems to be working. My measure of this is Yugioh: the English translations lag a bit behind the Japanese versions, and my son now reads them in Japanese first (but still reads them again in English when the translation comes out).

I read a book that recommended for each parent to use native language 100% of the time – we have been doing that for 6 months and it seems to be working but I often wonder how my kids English now stacks up to similar aged kids in the UK.