Gilroy – For five days, the high school will be an embassy and
its students, parents and faculty ambassadors as 17 Japanese
visitors arrived in Gilroy Thursday.
Gilroy – For five days, the high school will be an embassy and its students, parents and faculty ambassadors as 17 Japanese visitors arrived in Gilroy Thursday.
The group of students, parents and teachers from a village formerly known as Asakura – now incorporated into a larger city, Imabari – are here as part of an ongoing exchange that has seen Japanese villagers coming to California since 1992 and students from the Gilroy High School choir travel to Takko, a town in northern Japan.
The Japanese group – part of the Asakura International Exchange Club – spent Thursday touring San Francisco while fighting off jetlag from their overnight flight.
The highlight of the day was navigating the “really steep” and “crooked streets,” said Michie Yanagihara, who is traveling with her fifth-grade daughter, Kakoto.
The Yanagiharas came to the United States last year with the club on a similar trip to San Jose. Michie also has visited America on eight other occasions, having been sent multiple times to recruit English teachers in Seattle back when she worked for Geos, a multinational corporation that offers language tutoring.
The club spent Friday taking in the sights of Gilroy, shopping at Garlic World and the malls, taking tours of Gilroy Gardens Family Theme Park and Goldsmith’s Seeds and enjoying a hearty, America-sized portion of barbecue.
Today and Sunday will be spent with host families, many of which have members that will be traveling to Japan with the choir in early April. The families will take their Japanese guests to various activities and host them at a performance of the high school’s senior play, ‘Damn Yankees.’
The club will spend much of Monday morning at the high school, sitting in on classes and meeting with various groups. Later in the day, the group will do some more shopping and attend a farewell party before heading back to Japan the next morning.
The trip is another opportunity to see a country he very much admires, said Yoshida Tada Aki, a high school chemistry teacher at Imabari Technical High School.
Asakura and Gilroy are “not so different,” he said, pointing to similar agrarian roots. “They very much resemble each other.”
