Take a look at this!

I think this is a wonderful idea. As a child I loved going to children's museums where I could do fun activities in a "hands on" setting. So, if they can create a museum that engages children and it helps them figure out what their interests are, it would be a great help in a society that is becoming increasingly directionless.

Taken from the Wall Street Journal:

Playing at Professions
Jobs Theme Park for Children
Is Huge Success in Japan
By MIHO INADA
February 9, 2007; Page B1

TOKYO -- On a recent afternoon, Misaki Ando lined up behind a long row of children at an indoor theme park here. But the nine-year-old girl wasn't waiting to play videogames or ride bumper cars. She wanted to test her skills at pumping gas at a make-believe gas station.

"I wiped the cars clean and filled them up with gas," Misaki said afterward, excitedly recounting her experience. "I enjoyed this job the most."


Child's play: Youngsters visiting Kidzania can try out jobs including gas station attendant, reporter, pilot and courier.
Misaki was spending the day at Kidzania, a 1.5-acre theme park dedicated to offering children a fun taste of what working life is like. The park is packed with 50 company-sponsored pavilions that offer a chance to try a dizzying range of jobs, including pilot, dentist, electrical engineer and package-delivery messenger. While trying out dentistry, for example, children pretend to be dentists in training, learning about how cavities form, then inserting a filling in the tooth of a doll representing a patient.

A theme park that focuses on some 70 careers may not sound like fun and games, but the park, which can accommodate 3,000 children a day, has been a huge success since it opened in October. Advance tickets for weekends are already sold out through the end of April. Weekdays are packed with students on excursions from all over Japan. Some parents are so eager to get their children into the park that they line up early in the morning to snare the 50 to 200 non-reserved tickets available each day.

Behind the park's popularity is the nagging worry in Japan that many young people lack the diligent work ethic of which Japan has been so proud. More young Japanese are dropping out of jobs, and some can't even be bothered to look for their first one. About 640,000 single Japanese between the ages of 15 and 34 are neither at work nor at school, compared with about 400,000 in 2001, according to the government.


Some education specialists say the slacker trend is happening in part because young Japanese are so focused on studying that they have little opportunity to interact with society and no idea what they want to do when they grow up. Few Japanese companies organize events like Take Your Daughter to Work Day. Internships are still rare, and summer jobs tend to be limited to working at restaurants and convenience stores.

Worried, Japan's education ministry launched a campaign in 2005 called Career Start Week, which encourages students ages 13 to 15 to gain some kind of job experience. But few companies have participated in the program, with many saying they're too short-staffed or aren't properly set up to accommodate the students.

Kidzania, which is based in Mexico, was brought to Japan two years ago by Einosuke Sumitani, a retired manager of a Japanese restaurant company. The 63-year-old Mr. Sumitani, who was responsible for bringing such American restaurants as Spago and Il Mulino to Japan, first heard about the career theme park from an American friend and thought it was exactly what Japan needed.

"Kidzania has the potential to make up for something that's missing in the current society and education system," says Mr. Sumitani, whose company, Kids City Japan K.K., signed a licensing agreement with the Mexican company, Kidzania de México SA, in 2004. Besides the Tokyo park and parks in Mexico City and Monterrey, Mexico, Kidzania has signed franchise deals to open parks in Jakarta in July and in Lisbon and Dubai next year. Deals in South Korea and China are also likely. There are no immediate plans for a park in the U.S.


Corporate sponsors, eager to increase brand awareness, strive to make the Tokyo park look just like a kid-size version of the real world. After paying the entrance fee, which can be as high as $25 for a five-hour session, the children receive a boarding pass and travelers' checks at an imitation All Nippon Airways check-in counter. They then go to a replica of a Sumitomo Mitsui bank branch to convert the checks into the park's own currency, called kidzos.

The children, who range in age from 2 to 15, can rent real mobile phones at a reproduction of a shop of NTT DoCoMo, Japan's biggest mobile carrier, and perform surgery on dolls at a Johnson & Johnson hospital. For every job experience, which usually takes half an hour, children earn extra kidzos that they can spend on food and drinks in the park.

Kidzania doesn't allow any parents inside pavilions. They can either watch their children through glass windows or wait in the adults-only lounge.

Increasingly, public schools around Japan are making the park a destination for school trips. On a recent day, 89 sixth-graders from Narayama Minami Elementary School in Shizuoka, about 63 miles southwest of Tokyo, visited the park as part of their career-education program. The students did research beforehand, analyzing their personalities to try to figure out which jobs might suit them best. Teacher Minako Hatono stressed the importance of preparation. "Children would, otherwise, tend to choose the easy jobs or jobs in which they can eat," she explained.

Mr. Sumitani says he plans to open Kidzania at six more locations in Japan. He also aims to set up smaller-scale parks in conjunction with local governments across Japan.

"Kidzania's concept is universal," he says. "We could develop it anywhere."

--Ricardo Millan in Mexico contributed to this article