Japan Fair Will Collect Donations for Relief Efforts

Bauer Drive Community Center will host on Sunday presented by more than 100 Japanese high school students who are visiting Rockville this week.

The 10th-grade students, from Yokohama Hayato Senior High School in Yokohama, Japan, arrived on Sunday, just two days after a 8.9-magnitude earthquake shook the island nation, creating a tsunami that flooded coastal towns along Japan's east coast. 

Their trip is sponsored by Sakura Educational Exchange USA, a Rockville-based nonprofit, and is an opportunity for the students to learn about American culture and practice English, said Stephanie Libonati, a program manager for the nonprofit exchange program.

The students will collect donations for the Japanese Red Cross at Sunday's fair, which will go from 1 to 5 p.m. and will feature Japanese arts, games and customs, including an informal Japanese tea ceremony, martial arts demonstration, dancing and a Japanese play. Attendees will have the opportunity to create origami and calligraphy, play Japanese games and see anime and manga.

On Wednesday, the Japanese students previewed the fair for an assembly of students at Rockville High School, with performances of popular and traditional dances and a skit about how trade and diplomatic relations between Japan and the world have changed through the centuries.

Students were not made available to the media. Libonati cited privacy concerns, saying that the trip was an opportunity for the students, but also a distraction from the news from home.

"It's good for the kids to be focused on this," she said. "They're learning about something new."

Libonati, who lived in Japan for a time, was emotional when talking about the crisis, saying a friend who lives there had not yet found her mother. She urged people to "take a moment of silence and think about Japan and what's happening there."

Edward Kirk, a 16-year-old junior at Rockville High, had one of the Japanese students shadow him throughout the day on Wednesday. The two boys talked about their shared love of video games.

"We really connected cultures and got to know each other," said Kirk, who joined students from both schools on Wednesday afternoon at the Rockville Civic Center for a community service project. Students picked up trash from around the park and planted perennials and a cherry blossom tree on the grounds of the Glenview Mansion.

The group later planted a tree on the grounds of Rockville High as a symbol of friendship between the two schools.

Rockville staff gave students a short briefing about the situation in Japan before the exchange students arrived, but the crisis did not come up in conversation, Kirk said. 

"We did want to keep this trip apart from what's happening in Japan," said John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe, an English teacher and National Honor Society adviser at Rockville High. "So we did push those two issues apart. The students who are here should have a great trip. That's what we're focusing on."

While Rockville is a very multicultural school, the crisis provided students a unique glimpse of the cultural character of Japan, which shined through in the Yokohama Hayato students, O'Keefe said.

"I think that it is a real part of Japanese culture that in the midst of a crisis, you just move ahead in life," he said. "And I think that a lot of American kids are crybabies. And the Japanese kids are not. So I hope [the Rockville students] did take notice of that.

"I don't want to put these two things together, the string of catastrophes in Japan and this visit. Nonetheless, there they are. The Japanese kids were just moving ahead with life. It was so beautiful to see."