GILROY
– A group of 10 Japanese students scheduled to visit Gilroy High
School this week were kept home by parents who worried the U.S.-led
invasion of Iraq would jeopardize their children’s safety.
GILROY – A group of 10 Japanese students scheduled to visit Gilroy High School this week were kept home by parents who worried the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq would jeopardize their children’s safety.
The group’s chaperones, who made the visit anyway, spent Monday afternoon assuring Principal Bob Bravo that they had every intention of keeping the 14-year-old exchange program alive, despite the recent setback. Instead of making the March 20-26 excursion, the students, who are from the small town of Asakura in southwestern Japan, will take their trip in July.
“It was like splitting my heart open. I got sick to my stomach when we canceled their trip,” Kazuo Ide said, speaking through an interpreter.
Ide is part of the Moralogy Association, a values and ethics group with American-Japanese ties. The group’s Gilroy link is Ted Uchida, a first-generation Japanese immigrant who, in addition to the exchange program, has overseen garlic town’s sister city relationship with Takomachi in central Japan.
Ide, and three other adults who went through with the regularly scheduled trip, told Bravo they hoped their exchange program could expand in the years to come.
Roughly every other year, a group of students from Japan will stay with Gilroy families and take part in high school activities. In subsequent years, Gilroy students take a trip to Japan. Interested Gilroy families are being asked to volunteer as host families for the July trip.
Since the program’s inception, music teacher Phil Robb’s chamber singers have been the group to take the trip across the Pacific.
Anyone interested in being a host family should call
Ted Uchida at 847-1667.
