McKenzie Walker has started her junior year in high school, but her most educational experience may have been the six weeks she spent by herself in Japan ? next door to a bathhouse.
Walker, 16, of Sweet Home, spent July 13-Aug. 24 with the family of Saku Shimada, whom she met when Shimada was a Josai exchange student at Sweet Home High School in 2003-04.
Shimada, now 19, lived a few houses away from the Walkers with Jimmy and Charlotte Harper and McKenzie, then a freshman, got to know Shimada in a Learning Experiences for Children class “where you do activities for little kids.” Walker said.
“She got put at my table and I started talking to her ? no one else would because she didn’t speak English very well,” Walker said, adding, jokingly: “Neither do I, so I understood.”
The two started hanging out, she said, and eventually Shimada invited Walker to visit her in Japan.
“I didn’t think I was going to be able to go until I was a senior,” she said, but my parents told me my passport was going to expire soon. So right after she left, they told me to start saving my money and if I collected enough spending money, they would pay for my ticket.”
Walker said she babysat, held garage sales ? “everything I could from the end of my freshman year to the end of my sophomore year. I couldn’t spend any money. It was horrible.”
She stayed in touch with Shimada mainly through e-mail during that year.
“We were calling each other but we realized how much it cost after I got a $200 phone bill,” Walker said. “She would call me sometimes (after that). Her family didn’t mind the cost.”
The hardest part of the actual trip was getting through Narita International Airport in Tokyo, since the Shimada family had to wait outside customs, she said.
“I kind of got lost. Some guy from Virginia helped me,” Walker said.
During her stay with the Shimadas, who own and operate a public bathhouse connected to their house ? a popular establishment in the neighborhood, Walker said.
“They had 600 customers a day,” she said. “I used it, like, every day. It was so fun. The customers were so nice to me.”
She visited some temples and shrines and other tourist attractions, including a two-day stay at a rebuilt samurai village in Nikko, where she watched ninja shows, a traditional Japanese parade, and stayed at a hotel where the owner had 20 dogs.
“You can bring your own dog,” Walker said. “(The hotel owner’s) dad owns the place next door, which is full of Beatles stuff. It’s a really famous bakery ? they make bread with peace signs on it and stuff. I got a picture of him in my camera.”
She visited Disneyland and Tokyo Disney Sea, the Japanese version of California Adventure ? “but really big,” she said.
They also shopped at least once a week at the Tokyo Disney store, she said. “I probably spent half my money there. Saku loves Disney.”
Walker learned to remember to take off her shoes whenever she entered a home, how to dodge cars on the crowded streets, tried octopus pizza (“Really good ? I’d eat it again), and went for a rickshaw ride outside one of the temples opearated by a “guy named Sora.
“He was hilarious,” she said. “I loved the guy.”
She also got to know Saku’s grandma, “who always talked to me in Japanese. She’d go on and on,” recalled Walker, who noted that her own Japanese is extremely limited.
“I’ll just remember how crowded it is,” she said. “All the bikes, all the houses ? and the houses are so small. Nothing is, like, one story high. Everything was like two or more. Saku’s house was three stories.
“It was fun staying with her family. I really liked them all ? even Grandma. I think she liked me a lot. I think she understood everything I was saying.”