Two representatives of Josai High School in Japan paid a spur-of-the-moment visit to Sweet Home last week in an effort to boost the 35-year exchange relationship between Josai and Sweet Home High School.
Josai Principal Terutaka Kato and English teacher Takashi Takahashi, popularly known as “Taka Taka,” met with current and former leaders of the Sweet Home program, which began in 1982.
Takahashi, who speaks fluent English, said their mission was to “reinvigorate and restore” the relationship between the schools.
Josai is a private, college-prep co-ed high school that is part of an educational organization that includes a medical school, a university, a boys school and a middle school, all in the Tokyo area.
Josai High School has, nearly annually, sent two or more of its students for an entire school year at Sweet Home and, over the years, some students from Sweet Home High School have spent a year in Tokyo at Josai.
Also, the schools host biennial summer short-term exchanges, Sweet Home students traveling to Japan in even-numbered years and Josai students visiting Sweet Home in odd-numbered years.
Last summer, six students from Sweet Home spent two weeks in Tokyo and this summer 15 students are coming from Josai to spend two weeks here, working on their English and taking field trips to various points of interest.
Allan Buzzard, a teacher at Sweet Home Junior High, has been one of those working to preserve the program after turnover at SHHS thinned the leadership ranks for Josai.
High school teacher Suzette Andersen, who has coordinated the program for the last three years, is stepping down and Buzzard said a new coordinator, who must be a district staff member, is being sought. The coordinator generally accompanies Sweet Home students on short-term trips to Japan and makes arrangements for host families and other details on the U.S. side of the exchanges. Recent past coordinators have included Andersen, who was preceded by Deborah Handman, Cynde Burford, Steve Hummer and Rob Younger.
After Sweet Home administrators failed to complete necessary Homeland Security paperwork, no Josai students were able to attend Sweet Home High School during the 2012-13 school year – the first interruption in a 30-year stream of exchange students. The program resumed in 2013-14 and this year two students, Ria Chiba and Marika Chiba, are attending the high school.
Takahashi said he and the principal, who were on spring break in Japan, were asked by Josai President Norio Shinto to make the three-day visit to connect with teachers and administrators in Sweet Home and to look for ways to increase the number of students from Sweet Home who spend a full school year in Tokyo.
“This is kind of a business trip,” Takahashi said. “Recently, every year Josai students come to Sweet Home as long-time exchange students. But recently, no Sweet Home students have come to Josai.”
Buzzard said the visitors were also interested in reaching out to other area high schools in hopes of establishing exchange programs with other schools. In recent years, Josai students have attended schools in Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Korea, China and Taiwan.
Buzzard said he was able to connect Kato and Takahashi with former Sweet Home teacher and coach Steve Hummer, now at South Albany High School, and with faculty at Central Linn during their brief visit. He said they will make efforts to connect with other schools, including Lebanon High School and Scio High School, where Josai students attended a few years ago.
“I really believe that this visit, as spur-of-the-moment as it was, on such short notice during spring break, is going to meet both mission targets,” Buzzard said.
The Josai program was a brainstorm of Sweet Home alum Harold Merzenich, who had attended Waseda University, one of the top universities in Japan, and founded a tutoring center with a Japanese partner in Tokyo.
“They put the whole plan together,” Buzzard said. “They wanted one boy and one girl to come from Sweet Home High School. “
The initial exchange students from Sweet Home were Buzzard and Dawn Barringer.
Buzzard said the experience was a major influence for a young teen who had never been beyond the West Coast.
“To leave the United States and go across the water to an entirely different continent, not just for a vacation but for a year, it was complete immersion and it still colors my perspective as a person,” he said. “I’m not fluent in Japanese but I’m fluent in culture. That’s important in a day and age when globalization is everywhere.”
He said he saw some of those realizations in the faces of the six local students Buzzard and his wife led on last summer’s Josai trip to Tokyo.
“There’s no way a story or photo or album or a Powerpoint can convey what it means to leave home and go abroad,” he said. “It still rings true, that experience I had as a 17- or 18-year-old kid. The benefits to be reaped are enormous but they are sometimes not easily seen. Sometimes they’re seen a decade or two decades later.”
Takahashi said that Buzzard’s and Barringer’s year-long stay in Japan helped sell the idea at Josai.
“The teachers became enthusiastic about the idea,” he said.
The fact that Josai will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2018 is an incentive to strengthen ties in its Sweet Home exchange program, he said.
“With the 100-year anniversary, we want to tighten the relationship with Sweet Home and Josai.”