Word parsing in Japanese Elementary Textbooks
Nobuyuki did some digging on the topic of using white spaces in Japanese elementary textbooks. See his posts here and here.
It all started with a simple question a couple of years ago when I visited RIKEN BSI. We grabbed people at a conference in Kyoto but got conflicting answers. Finally Nobuyuki finds some clues what people did not know the answer — they are not to be blamed. It’s the Government and evil textbook publishers! 
光村図書 has some illustrations of how spaces are used in elementary Japanese textbooks. Apparently they have two ways
- adding a space after every word/phrase
- adding a space every 3 words/phrase (??)
Here are some examples:
From what I can figure out from the web page (based on my Kanji knowledge only) it seems that the 3-phrase method is introduced only after the 3rd semester in 2nd grade (does this make sense?). Before that every phrase is spaced.