Cultural Exchange : 29 Japanese Students Are Getting a Taste of Life at Patrick Henry High School

Michael Jackel wanted to cut through the cultural barrier as quickly as he could Thursday when he met Noriko Nanbu from Maebashi, Japan.

So the Patrick Henry High School junior asked whether Noriko and her classmates knew Michael Jackson and other music idols of today’s teen-agers. They did.

For her part, Noriko took out a 10,000-yen bill (about $66) and held it up to the light to show Jackel and friends the note’s hidden watermark portrait of a 19th-Century Japanese statesman. Yuko Tsukada displayed a Japanese telephone credit card decorated with the Disneyland castle, drawing quizzical stares from American students uncertain why Disneyland would rate such attention from Japanese big business.

The daylong exchange found students from the two nations eagerly sounding each other out about their respective schools, friends, homework loads, and other things that form a part of high school years everywhere.

In learning the basics about each other, the students added to their own understanding of the ongoing debate about the nature of the Japanese educational challenge to America, a debate that finds expression on the national level almost daily these days, in both Japan and the United States.

“We started by asking about if they have boyfriends,” Michelle Miller said. “And when we looked up the word in the dictionary, we found it’s the same in Japanese!”

The language barrier, while at times formidable and frustrating Thursday, was ameliorated somewhat by the fact that the 29 Japanese female students, all from Maebashi Ikuei High School, north of Tokyo, have studied English for at least three years.

The academic pressures that result from such intense studies were impressed on the Patrick Henry students.

“They told of all the homework,” Ann Marie Teschner said. Many of the Japanese students expressed surprise when they visited several classrooms and saw no instruction going on but instead students were doing individual study or simply walking around the room.

“They were sort of taken aback at the fact students just seemed to be so relaxed,” Gina Gubitosi said.

Gina Peck said, “We tend to look at them so differently because they study so hard, but really we find that they are just like normal people, some so shy, some not so shy.”

Evie Ahrendt noted how the Japanese girls paired off naturally with their American peers based on similar personalities. “The outgoing ones went with our own wild ones and the quieter ones went off with (our) quieter ones,” she said.

For their part, the Japanese girls found the Patrick Henry students more outgoing than Japanese of similar age, especially in the ease with which Americans quickly strike up a conversation with strangers. They also encountered for the first time the ethnic diversity so common in America and rare--indeed, almost non-existent--in Japan.

“Yes, I think it’s good,” Kaori Ebisawa replied politely to Dean Torres when he asked her what she thought about the assorted white, Asian, black and Hispanic faces that populate the Patrick Henry campus. But the tentativeness of her answer indicated uncertainty as to whether the Japanese fully appreciated the potentials and problems that result from the nation’s ethnic mix.

“It must be difficult the first time you come from a different country,” Torres offered. “In one way, they laugh and talk about the same things we do. But in another way, they kind of show that they maybe are more serious (about education) than we are.”

Not all the conversation involved such weighty concerns. P.J. Scillo gave the four Japanese girls in his escort group prints of his senior-class picture, for which he received some good-natured ribbing from his schoolmates.

Keri King asked Yoko Ichikura why the Maebashi students seemed so short compared to American teen-agers, then stood up and laughingly revealed that she was no taller. Several of the Japanese students gave out handmade paper cranes to wide-eyed Patrick Henry students amazed at how delicately they are crafted.

“There are a lot of differences and a lot of similarities, both,” said Scillo, an award winner at Patrick Henry for leadership and enterprise whose family has been host to Japanese students each summer for six years.

“I’ve learned quite a bit.”