Kaori Fukushima doesn’t speak or understand a whole lot of English, but ask the 17-year-old Japanese student about the best parts of her first trip to the U.S. and she communicates just fine.
“Hot dogs!” she says, her mouth instantly widening into a smile. Asked about another favorite, she gives a similarly brief but equally clear response: “Hay ride.” Why? “First time.”
Kaori and nine other girls from Kyushu Jogakuin (Kyushu Women’s School) in Kumamoto, Japan, are doing and seeing a lot of things for the first time.
The students arrived March 20 to spend 17 days in the U.S. Though two teachers traveling with them have visited the states before, none of the students has.
Local families are hosting the girls and their chaperones, who are on a cross-cultural study tour here while some of their classmates, between academic years in Japan, travel to other parts of the world.
The Lutheran Church sponsors the private school the girls attend, and three local Lutheran congregations — Kimball Memorial, Concordia and Mount Moriah — have extended a welcome here.
“This is really an eye opener, I think, for these kids,” the Rev. Charles Macmurphy said. Interim pastor at Mount
Moriah, MacMurphy and his wife, Phyllis, are former missionaries to Japan, where they taught in the Kumamoto schools.
The group leaves Saturday for Washington, where they’ll spend three days before traveling to New York City for two days and then returning to Japan.
Their local hosts are trying to show them what America is really like before they take a whirlwind tour through the Big Apple and big government led by Japanese tour guides, Phyllis Macmurphy said.
“We want them to get as much culture here as they can, because they will be seeing highlights elsewhere,” she said.
And they’re busily doing that. The girls have visited attractions like Discovery Place and Concord Mills Mall, taken a boat ride on Lake Norman, and enjoyed that hay ride and wienie roast here in Rowan.
They visited South Rowan High School, where Macmurphy said they were impressed that American students are allowed to have jobs while in school and to start driving at 16 years old.
Utae Yamada, 16, who is fairly adept at speaking English — a required course in Japan — thinks the driving aspect is a “good thing.” She’d like her license now, but most teens in Japan must wait until they’re 18 years old.
Other differences the students notice are in the size of things. While local residents bemoan the lack of lanes on Interstate 85, the highway at its narrowest has twice as many lanes as Japanese highways.
And Americans drive those big roads to “big houses,” Utae said, waving her arms far apart to illustrate.
Today, the group’s schedule calls for visiting with senior citizens, and they’ll perform a program that displays some of their Japanese culture. Tonight, they’ll attend a Lenten service. Thursday, they tour Lowe’s Motor Speedway.
One student hasn’t gotten to participate much. Seventeen-year-old Tomoko Yoshikawa traveled thousands of miles to get the flu. She’s been in bed since a few hours after getting off the airplane.
“She’s doing really well,” Phyllis Macmurphy said. The two of them joined the group Monday at the Lazy 5 Ranch — an exotic animal refuge on N.C. 150 — though Tomoko stayed in the car while the other girls rode a wagon.
And none of the girls got to try their hand at cow milking. They were scheduled to visit a dairy farm in southwestern Rowan Monday afternoon, but the farm owners canceled because of foot-and-mouth disease concerns.
But they’re making the most of their visit here, and they didn’t seem to mind the open spot in their schedule when they were feeding an ostrich and a giraffe at the Lazy 5.
For Utae Yamada, that may have been another “good thing,” because she wanted to spend more time with her host family and their daughter, who is around her age and to whom she has grown close in the short time she’s been here.
Or, maybe she’ll just hang out and marvel some more at what she called her favorite part of the trip and something locals take for granted, but her populous island home doesn’t seem to have a lot of room for.
She thumbs through her Japanese-to-English dictionary searching for the word — nature.
“In Japan, we have lots of buildings and many cars,”she said.“We have no nature.”
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