The Very Prince of Badger Tea-Kettles

The story I read today, about a Tanuki that takes the form of a tea-kettle and befriends a poor merchant, is really one of the best stories out there. It's whimsical and funny and magical and comes with a neat little moral about treating people with respect and dignity (at least that's how I see it). I didn't really find a definitive version to match mine, but it seems to be a pretty well-known story, so look up bunbuku-chagama on your preferred search engine and you should come up with lots of nice things.

At first, when I read it, I thought it was pretty frivolous, but the more I thought about the message I was taking from it, the more I realized that this kind of thing is exactly what teachers at Lemberg spend so much time trying to teach young children. Treat everyone you meet with respect and kindness, and not only will they feel a lot better about it, but you will reap quite tangible rewards! I can't tell you how many screaming matches between three-year-olds are solved when I say something like "now, instead of grabbing the shovel, why don't you try asking for it?" So often people of all ages approach situations with hostility, greed, or fear, when a simple humility and openness would work wonders.

Another interesting social phenomenon that comes into play in this story is assumption. The silly old monks assumed that any weird badger living in their tea kettle was something evil, but the poor merchant made no assumptions and asked the tanuki what he wanted. Discarding assumptions often helps a lot with kids, as they do things all the time that appear to have a certain disagreeable intent behind them, but are often quite innocent or harmless behaviors for the children, who don't understand the appearance of actions modeled for them by adults, older siblings, and media sources. My favorite example of this is when I saw a two-year old boy making gun shapes with his hand and saying "bang bang bang!" or something to that effect. Lord knows where he got that from, but I went ahead and asked him what they were. He said they were shooters. I asked him what they shot. He seemed at a loss at that point (obviously - two-year-olds don't know from bullets) so I volunteered a whimsical answer - marshmallows? He agreed, and we played a game where he shot pretend marshmallows from his fingers and I caught them in my mouth.

The wonderful thing about this is that sometimes older children will even recognize the faults of assumptions! One time at Lemberg, a group of three-year-olds wrote and illustrated a book together. Of course they were guided by teachers, but it was my understanding that they invented the plot all by themselves. In the story, a pair of friends named Bober and Fan went to the playground to play, but they were interrupted by a robot named Zober who would only let one person at a time into the playground. Bober and Fan thought about their options for a while, and eventually decided to ask Zober if he wanted to play with them instead of stopping people from getting into the playground. Zober agreed, and the three played together in harmony, proving that strangers really are just friends you haven't met yet. So please, the next time one of your household appliances becomes a talking badger, ask him if he'd like to join you for lunch. You will surely be pleasantly surprised.