Celebrating the 20th year of Josai High School’s exchange program with Sweet Home High School, 12 students, two teachers and the principal spent the last week in Sweet Home.
The students arrived on Tuesday last week and will return home on July 31.
Tuesday, the first Sweet Home High School students, Dawn Waldrop and Allen Buzzard, to travel to Josai as well as former adviser John Young spent the evening with the Japanese students. Among their activities, the students are planning to see Ichiro, a Japanese baseball player with the Seattle Mariners. They also will spend a couple of days in Keneta.
The program was started in 1981 by George Wenzel. Since then, Mr. Schollmeyer, Mr. Younger, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Young and now Steve Hummer have served as advisers and taken groups to Josai in Tokyo, Japan. Next year, Bob and Cynde Burford will take over that role.
The school is now planning to rotate among its teachers, Hummer said. That is aimed at making the program stronger and continuing to draw widespread support.
“It is the longest that we know of with sister schools exchanging students,” Hummer said Wednesday at Frank McCubbins farm.
The students were visiting the farm’s camel, deer and gibbon apes.
Since the program started, some 400 students have participated in the exchange.
Each year, the schools exchange two students and send larger groups across the Pacific, alternating every other year.
“Allen Buzzard is fluent in Japanese,” Hummer said of the value of the program. “Calvin Brown (an exchange student two years ago) is fluent in Japanese.”
Wenzel found that Sweet Home had a sort of mono-culture, Hummer said. He developed the exchange as a way to bring exposure to external cultures into Sweet Home. The Japanese in Tokyo had the same problem.
“First of all, they are exposed to English-speaking surroundings,” Josai English teacher Takeshi Kiyomi said. Additionally, Tokyo is an extremely large city, so the students also get a taste of rural life visiting Sweet Home.
American students go from Sweet Home, a town of 8,000, and visit Tokyo, a city of millions, Hummer said. That’s big cultural shift for them. They are also immersed in Japanese culture and language.
“People who haven’t been to Asia don’t understand how different Asia is,” Hummer said. The exchange opens their eyes, and the students tend to fall in love with it.
Kiyomi has taught at Josai the length of the program and has visited Sweet Home six times.
“It was really exciting to have Mr. Kiyomi recognize (former Sweet Home exchange students),” Hummer said of last week’s Tuesday night meeting with former exchange students. The Japanese delegation and the former students shared pictures with each other.
Over the years, teachers get to know each other and talk off and on throughout the school year, Kiyomi said.
Email has made communications between the schools even easier in recent years, Hummer said.
“It’s been a successful thing,” Hummer said. “Hopefully, it’ll go on for a long, long time.”