From the Desk of Consul General Osumi

   From September 16-19, the U.S.-Japan Sister Cities Summit will be held in Izumisano City, in Osaka Prefecture. This event is held every year or two by Sister Cities International, and this time it will be held in Japan to coincide with the Expo 2025.
   The history of sister city relationships began when President Eisenhower proposed a “people-to-people” citizen diplomacy initiative in 1956, while the scars of WWII were still healing. Today, there are approximately 460 sister city relationships between Japan and the United States, and California alone is home to about 110 of those. I have attended several sister city related events, and they are quite impressive. Allow me to share some of them with you.
 

• Sunnyvale is the sister city of Iizuka City in Fukuoka Prefecture, and at the end of March last year, 20 middle and high school students from Iizuka visited during their spring break. On the day of the visit, the arrival of the bus carrying the group at SFO was broadcast live to the welcoming ceremony venue every minute, and upon the group’s arrival, they were welcomed by all the locals gathered there, including the mayor of the city. According to Mr. Mark Kato, a key organizer of the sister city relationship, the Iizuka students, who were a little nervous upon arrival, had made such strong friendships that were in tears when they said goodbye a week later.


• The sister city relationship between Santa Cruz and Shingu City in Wakayama Prefecture began in 1974, when three students from the University of California, Santa Cruz spent a year studying aikido at Kumano Juku in Shingu. Last year, Shingu Mayor Michitoshi Taoka and a delegation of 15 people visited Santa Cruz to attend the 50th anniversary reception of the two cities’ sister city relationship. When the welcoming committee members from Santa Cruz performed Shingu’s local folk song “Kumano-bushi” at the reception, Mayor Taoka chanted along with them, which was a heartwarming scene.


• Concord has a sister city relationship with Kitakami City in Iwate Prefecture. Last year, a 38-member delegation from Kitakami led by Mayor Hirofumi Yaegashi visited the city to celebrate their 50th anniversary, and Mayor Yaegashi himself did a homestay. Kitakami is also the hometown of Rintaro Sasaki, the star first baseman on the Stanford University baseball team.


• The city of Sebastopol celebrated the 40th anniversary of its sister city relationship with Takeo City in Saga Prefecture this year. Last spring, middle school students from Takeo came to Sebastopol for homestay, and one of the chaperones, who was a parent of one of the students, told us that he had visited Sebastopol 28 years ago under the same program. At the anniversary reception, he joyfully reunited with someone who had visited Takeo a year after he had visited Sebastopol. They both laughed as they noticed how their hair had thinned over the years. The students also learned about the history of Japanese American incarceration from a Japanese American community leader at Sonmanji Temple in the city.


• Cupertino has a sister city relationship with Toyokawa City in Aichi Prefecture. Sabrina, one of our staff at the Consulate, also visited Toyokawa through a sister city exchange program when she was a student at Monte Vista High School. The experience led her to pursue further studies in Japanese and work at the Consulate. The sister city association in Cupertino holds an annual bell-ringing ceremony to memorialize the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the air raid on Toyokawa. Japanese high school students who visited Cupertino last summer attended the ceremony wearing the kimono that had been donated to the association.

• The latest sister city relationship in Northern California is between Daly City and Izumisano City in Osaka Prefecture, the host of this year’s U.S.-Japan Sister City Summit in September. Mayor Hiroyasu Chiyomatsu of Izumisano visited Daly City last July and signed a sister city agreement. Mayor Chiyomatsu had lived in Daly City when he was a student, and the elderly proprietors of Tani's Kitchen, a diner where he rented a room at the time, were also invited to the ceremony.


• In California, the California-Japan Sister Cities Network (CJSCN) is working to strengthen collaboration between sister cities located in California. The Consulates General in San Francisco and Los Angeles are working with CJSCN to achieve this goal. Last December, we held a CJSCN Fall Workshop & Reception at my residence, where JET Program alumni and high school students studying Japanese were also invited to deepen their understanding of sister city exchange. Juslyn Manalo, then mayor of Daly City, attended the reception as well.

   This February, I visited Crescent City, which became the sister city of Rikuzentakata in Iwate Prefecture after the training boat Kamome, from Takata High School, drifted across the Pacific following the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, and washed ashore there in April 2013.

   When first discovered, the vessel was covered in barnacles and barely recognizable as a boat. However, a Del Norte County Sheriff’s Deputy who first discovered the boat told his son, “The registration tags say ‘Takata High School,’ and it seems to be a Japanese training craft. Why don’t you gather volunteers from Del Norte High School and clean it up?” This was the beginning of the story. The high schoolers, with no expectation of any reward, spent time restoring the boat and reaching out to Japan to see whether they could return the boat. Eventually, Rikuzentakata was able to get in touch with the students, and in the end, these same students visited Rikuzentakata and Takata High School, where they received a warm welcome.

   These young people, who had grown up in a rural American town—likely without passports—traveled to Tokyo, where they met U.S. Ambassador Kennedy, and to Rikuzentakata City, where they were welcomed by the entire city. Japanese media outlets covered the delegation extensively. This led to the official sister city agreement in 2018. Crescent City, a port town located six hours by car from San Francisco and amid dense redwood forests, indeed bears a resemblance to the Sanriku coastline around Rikuzentakata, making the two cities a fitting match.

   In a seaside park, there is a mural commemorating the sister city relationship with Rikuzentakata City, along with a sign marking the distance of 4,684 miles to Rikuzentakata. At the local visitor center, I found a children's book titled Kamome: A Tsunami Boat Comes Home, with the message, “Let’s always be friends.”

   In January of this year, about ten students from Takata High School made a short visit to Crescent City. According to one of our consuls who accompanied them, the local high school community warmly welcomed the group, demonstrating how deeply rooted the sister city relationship has become. The organizers supporting this exchange include influential local figures such as the superintendent of education and a former sheriff, highlighting the strong base of support.

   The visiting students participated in classes with their host students, paired up as buddies. They also experienced a wide range of local culture, including attending a basketball tournament and concert at Del Norte High School, trekking in the forests, and learning about local Native American culture. Over time, they gradually opened up—first to their host students, then to others, expanding their circle of interaction. The students expressed their desire to keep in touch after returning to Japan.

   What most impressed me during my visit was how the people involved are planning for the future. Sister city relationships often face challenges in sustaining enthusiasm as generations pass the torch, but these groups recognize that fostering the next generation is crucial beyond just student exchanges. They are working on establishing a Japanese language program at Del Norte High School by welcoming a Japanese teacher from Rikuzentakata City, paired with an English teacher sent to Rikuzentakata in return. In California, the challenge for Japanese language classes is usually the maintenance of existing programs, so it is remarkable to see the community seriously considering the establishment of a new program, especially as there are hardly any people of Japanese descent in Crescent City.

   These connections extend beyond the cultural: Chris Howard, a Del Norte County Supervisor, is actively involved in running a local dairy farm full-time. Leveraging his expertise as a biologist, he has helped develop the farm into one of the top organic dairy brands in the nation. With his strong business mindset, he is considering strengthening economic ties to ensure the sustainability of the sister city relationship. He is also looking into bolstering tourism for Rikuzentakata City, which is often perceived as lacking in tourism resources. His unique vision, which could be seen as a new model for sister city relations, is truly noteworthy.

   I feel that sister city exchanges are an important pillar of grassroots exchange, alonside JET, Japanese language education, and the Japanese American community, all supporting each other. Youth exchange is extremely important: It provides the first exposure to this type of cross-cultural interaction at the critical time of middle and high school. Visits like the trip to Crescent City also have the potential to profoundly influence the future of our communities. We at the Consulate General will continue to do what we can to support this work.