Japanese Exchange Student 11th Grade

(retrospection)

One of my first encounters with Japanese culture was our family hosting a Japanese exchange student.
Our high school had an exchange program with a school in Japan, somewhere in Shiga Prefecture (the sister prefecture to Michigan). If I remember right a group of Japanese students came over to our school every year, and we sent a group over to Japan once every two years for a couple weeks during our summer vacation.

I was initially interested in going to Japan with our high school exchange program. I had never been to Asia at that point, and the idea of travelling to Japan seemed exotic and adventurous(...like it does for all people who've never been to Asia I guess).
But for reasons I don't really remember I soon gave up on it. I think I decided it was just too much of a hassle to attend all the meetings they had before leaving. It was like a 2 year process getting ready for a 2 week trip, and my usual laziness won out again.

Now that I've spent most of my 20s here in Japan, I often regret that I didn't go on that high school exchange trip. It might have given me a running start on learning the language and the culture. (On the other hand, depending on how you look at it, I've more than put in my time in this country, and there's no reason to regret the fact that I missed the opportunity to spend 2 weeks here when I was in high school).

Anyway, instead of going to Japan, I ended up hosting a Japanese student for the week. (Actually it was my mom who volunteered our family, but I was all for it as well).
His name was Hiro. I've long forgotten what his last name was. He was roughly the same age as me. (He might have been one year older, I don't remember).

He was a really nice guy, although his poor English certainly limited how much we could talk to each other. (Although looking at it now, after some experience teaching in this country I recognize that his English must have been pretty advanced for an average Japanese high school student.)

But we communicated where we could. It turned out we were both video game fans, and playing video games together didn't require a lot of communication.
The weather was still a little cold to spend a lot of time outside, but we did get a good game of catch/ monkey in the middle going in the basement, which was abruptly ended when the dog decided to take a crap on the floor. I then had to spend the next 20 minutes first disciplining the dog, and then cleaning up the mess. (Although he was normally at least tolerable housebroken, the dog had the embarrassing habit of always forgetting his training when we had company over. Several times when I had friends over from Calvin there were also incidents).
Afterwards I apologized to Hiro, but he responded, "That's OK. My dog is sometimes bad dog too."

But when we were at school, or in the car, or somewhere were we couldn't cover up the for the lack of conversation with some sort of activity, it was always a struggle. With his limited English and my poor conversation skills, we spent a lot of time just starring at each other in silence. During morning break at school I would buy him a donut, and then we would stand in the school hallway trying to find something to talk about.
At one point when I ran out of things to talk about I mentioned Godzilla as my only knowledge of Japanese culture. (I was a big fan in my youth). He didn't know what I was talking about first, (Godzilla has a completely different name in Japanese, another thing I wouldn't find out until years later), but after some gestures and sound effects on my part he was able to guess what I was talking about. Later I dug out some of my Godzilla paraphernalia, and we were able to talk about the different monsters. It was pretty much the most in depth conversation we ever had. It certainly went a lot better than when I asked him what he thought about the atomic bombings. I felt I would get a nice cultural exchange out of the conversation, but he just responded with an embarrassed silence.

During the week he was in Michigan he would accompany to my classes in the morning, and then he and his classmates would go off and do their own thing in the afternoon. He invariably slept soundly through all the classes I took him to. He didn't even appear to put up much of a fight against the sleepiness either. He sat through the first 10 minutes or so of my Latin class, decided this was not something that interested him, and was contentedly sleeping through the next 40 minutes.
(A few years ago, when I was leading my own expedition of Japanese high school students on a one day exchange at Calvin Christian High School, who should I run into but my old Latin teacher. "Sorry about this," I told him. "Hopefully these students will be a bit more attentive than the last Japanese student I brought into your class.")

In fact Hiro showed a surprising ability to sleep through everything. Not only my school classes, but also church services, and the play we took him too. Fair enough he was fighting Jet Lag and a completely different time schedule. But this is also yet another thing I understand better after having been to Japan, and seeing Japanese teachers and Board of Education officials feel perfectly content to sleep through faculty meetings whenever the topic was unrelated to them.

One of the unused school rooms had been designated as a hang out room for the Japanese students, where some of them just passed the morning talking and playing ping pong rather than attend classes. After a couple days of Hiro sleeping through all my classes, I gave him the option of staying in the hang out room and just chatting with his friends instead of going to Latin. He chose to hang out. Well who can blame him?

After one week a good-bye party was held for the Japanese students in some church or middle school gym or something. (Apparently our own high school must have been unavailable that night). Where ever it was, it was somewhere I had never been. I got directions from my mom which were almost perfect, but left out one turn, and as a result I spent over an hour driving up and down the streets of Grand Rapids before finally stopping at someone's house to ask for directions. Hopefully Hiro appreciated seeing a bit of the city.

At the party the Japanese students had some silly presentation lined up for us in which, among other things, they taught us how to make sushi. This was before sushi shops had really taken off in the midwest, and was my first experience with the food. Back then the idea of eating seaweed and raw fish was still a shock to midwesterners, but the Japanese students assured us it was all safe.

The next day I got to miss half of science class to see Hiro off at the school entrance as he and his classmates loaded up onto the bus. I remember feeling suddenly very sad that he was leaving, which was surprising because he had only been there a week and our ability to communicate had been so little. He seemed a little bit sad as well, and told me, "We'll be friends forever."

After he went back to Japan I exchanged a couple letters with him, and then, as these things almost always go, we soon lost touch. I have no idea how I would get in touch with him these days, and to be honest don't even remember what his full name is.

Which is a pity because it might have been fun to look him up while I am in Japan. Especially since I spent almost 2 years in Gifu prefecture, right next to his home in Shiga.

One last remembrance. He and his friends came to America around the same time as infamous Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo Subway. Worried that he might not be up to speed on events in his own country, I showed him the cover of Time magazine (which had the picture of Asahara Shoko on it). In his limited English he was able to reply. "I know. In Japan, we think he very bad man."

In a way this foreshadowed my own entry to Japan, and the September 11th incident that occurred just one month after, forcing me to answer several questions about terrorism and America with a limited vocabulary.
I also still use this incident as an example whenever my students talk about how safe Japan is and how dangerous America is. "Well you never know," I said. "I remember when I was hosting a Japanese exchange student back in high school, and what do you think was headline news at that time..."

Link of the Day(s)
Continuing to remember the 5 year anniversary of the invasion
What Do We Owe Iraq? and Five Years of War in Iraq and A Million Iraqi Dead? The U.S. press buries the evidence and The Global Warming Costs of the Iraq War and Iraqi American Reflects on Five Years of War and Why Are Winter Soldiers Not News?