In 2019, I was approached by the Office of International Education at the university where I teach and asked to design a course that would culminate in a trip abroad for the students. Given my interest in play and imagination, I decided to design a course exploring cultural similarities and differences in play and to take college students abroad to observe children at play firsthand. My first instinct was to travel to Asia, given an extensive body of research that finds differences in play between children of Asian descent and children of Euro-American descent.

Due to the travel restrictions that came along with COVID, my dream of taking a class to Japan did not come to fruition until this past spring semester (2024). We had some preconceived notions of what we might find based on previous research, some of which I will describe below. But we also learned a great deal about play among Japanese children while we were there, not all of which aligned with our expectations.

Previous research suggests that play looks different among children from Asian ethnic backgrounds. For example, Farver and Lee Shin (1997) found that Korean-American 4- and 5-year-olds engaged in less pretend play than Anglo-Americans. Similarly, Farver et al. (1995) found more parallel and less pretend........

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