The hubby came home safely from LA this evening — a couple hours earlier than expected — and he brought back a surprise: Japanese children’s books!

Japanese children's books

Whenever I go down to Southern California, I love stopping by BookOff, where they sell used Japanese books — you can get books and magazines so much cheaper than at regular retail price, and they’re usually in pretty good condition! 🙂

We don’t have a BookOff up here in Northern California, and we had looked at some of the children’s books at Kinokuniya the other weekend, but they are all so expensive because they’re imported from Japan and are brand new. I had asked Dan if he could stop by BookOff this weekend and check out their selection of children’s books if he had the chance, but he had told me they likely wouldn’t be able to this time, since they would be in Pasadena and the BookOff locations are almost an hour south, in Gardena and Torrance. So I decided not to get my hopes up and told myself there’d be other opportunities in the future.

It turns out he actually did have some time to stop by this morning before they made the 7-hour drive back up, and he got a whole bunch of baby/children’s books in Japanese. Dan can’t really read Japanese (except for hiragana), so he had to guess and pick which ones seemed good. Apparently he spent forty minutes at the store, carefully mulling over which ones to buy and bring home, while his brother and friend had to wait for him to make up his mind. haha* I’d say that he did a great job and picked up a pretty good selection — there’s a few classics in there that I remember from my own childhood!

I’m so excited that we have so many books to read to the baby, both in English (Thanks again, Celia!) and in Japanese. We have a couple hand-me-down Japanese books from my cousin Yuko that she gave us in Arizona, too. She is doing a really amazing job of raising bilingual children, and she’s given me a lot of tips and coaching on how to do so successfully, so I’m inspired and determined to follow her example. Raising kids to be bilingual can be a really big challenge, but being raised bilingual myself, I really understand and value how much of an asset it can be later on in a child’s life. Thankfully, we live in a region where there is a strong Japanese influence, and there are preschools that incorporate Japanese language and culture into their curriculum. Preschool and Japanese Saturday School are things we won’t have to worry about for a few more years, but these books will get us off to a good start! 🙂