East-West Zest

A few dozen teens from Thousand Oaks High School are working feverishly to give their young Japanese visitors the ultimate American experience: junk food and bowling, shopping for vintage clothing and rooting at a homecoming game.

And in exchange, the teenage students from Osaka have shared part of their culture by bringing gifts of porcelain masks to the Thousand Oaks families they are living with this week and teaching their new American schoolmates how to fold colorful squares of paper into origami swans and cranes.

Since Friday, about 30 students from the Osaka Sangyo University High School have participated in this cross-cultural exchange as part of a program the two schools operate. This visit will last through Friday.

“It’s East meets West,” said Lois Conrad, advisor to Thousand Oaks High’s International Club. “The Japanese kids get an opportunity to see how an American family lives . . . and for the kids in Thousand Oaks, this is the first time they have been exposed to such a large Asian group like this in school . . . It’s wonderful.”

The teens from Osaka are studying for two months at a branch of their high school that is based in Studio City. As part of their U.S. visit, they are required to live with an American family for a week, leaving their regular studies behind and concentrating on a few American history classes.

A third of the 45 Japanese students chose to live with families in Los Angeles County. But the rest are staying in Thousand Oaks, mainly because of a student-exchange relationship across the Pacific Ocean that began five years ago, Conrad said.

She added that just by living with each other, all types of cultural stereotypes can be stripped away.

“Japanese kids are seeing that Americans aren’t lazy,” Conrad said. Some of the Osaka students are living with Mormon families, whose children get up at dawn to attend seminary at 6 a.m. before going to school, Conrad said.

“Plus, they see American kids doing athletic events after school and all their other extracurricular activities,” she said.

And the Ventura County students get to witness the practices of the Japanese, including self-imposed groupings. Conrad said that these Japanese teens walk everywhere in twos, boys with boys and girls with girls, with the males leading the way.

Another cultural first occurred Wednesday, when about a dozen Osaka teens showed a Thousand Oaks High special education class how to fold and crease origami paper designs.

“I’ve been told that in Japan, retarded kids are hidden away,” said teacher Joyce Silberberger. “So this is probably a new experience for them.”

Despite a potential to feel uncomfortable with strangers, the Japanese students patiently used hand gestures and their limited English to show their partners how to create delicate paper birds and flowers. One Japanese teen even showed his new American buddy how to make an airplane, which they zinged at a table of girls at the front of the classroom.

Aside from this display of good-natured rowdiness, Thousand Oaks High junior Chris Jansen said the quality that most stands out about his 16-year-old house guest, Natsuko Nishi, is his manners.

“He is so-o-o-o-o polite,” Jansen said.

Natsuko even kept his composure when the husky Chris and his athlete friends took him to play football--for the first time--last weekend. Not only did Natsuko remain smiling the entire time, but Chris said he also wasn’t a bad ballplayer.

“He’s pretty good,” said Chris, who has studied Japanese for three years at Thousand Oaks High. “He was better than some of the Americans out there.”

While the boys spent the weekend playing with the pigskin, most of the girls took to the malls.

“I like shopping on Melrose,” said 16-year-old Chika Sasahara, who showed off a secondhand soccer jacket and used jeans she bought in the Conejo Valley.

“Yeah, we took them to the Salvation Army and dollar stores,” said Nicole Hackbarth, student body vice president at Thousand Oaks High. “They loved it.”

The Thousand Oaks students serving as hosts arranged a whirlwind of baseball-and-apple-pie-type extracurricular events for their guests: a fireworks show that took place Friday after the football game, Nordstrom’s on Saturday, church and a late-night party on Sunday that involved Macarena lessons and a dip in a Jacuzzi, and bowling in Simi Valley on Veterans Day.

From now on, though, the delegation will spend most of its time in school.

“It’s been great,” Nicole said. “But it’s really hard entertaining all the time. . . . And since we don’t speak the same language, we both have been speaking so slow.

“Yeah, it’s been tiring,” she added. “I’ve just realized that communication is everything.”