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Not many American students get the chance to visit a foreign country for a school trip. Even fewer travel as far away as Japan. So, when I took 15 of my students from Mililani Middle School on a two-week trip to Japan last spring, I reminded them that not only were they fortunate to be selected for the trip, but they would be serving as young ambassadors of sorts from Hawaii and the United States. They really embraced that role, and it’s something they will remember and understand the impact of throughout their lives.

Mililani Middle School students with Japanese students in front of Hiroshima Castle. PHOTOS COURTESY OF JEFFREY HORSTMAN

Before COVID, our school had led some student trips to Japan, but this was the first one since the pandemic, and my first as an administrator. I admit I was nervous about bringing a group of 13- and 14-year-old students to a foreign country, but it went really well. Part of the reason is that we work with a group called the Hawaii Global Education Foundation, which does a great job of handling most of the trip logistics. Two of our teachers also came along as part of the group.

Before our students traveled to Japan, we hosted a group of Japanese students for a day who were touring Hawaii. They brought 40 students and planned their trip to coincide with our annual STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) night. They spent the whole day on campus, attending classes and engaging in activities with our students. The day culminated with them attending the STEAM event, where they hosted one of the booths and discussed what kind of teaching and learning happens at their school in terms of science and technology.

An Interest in Japanese Culture

Our school offers more than 30 after-school programs for students, which we call HIP (high interest programs). One of them is a Japanese Culture Club. It started with several students who were interested in things like manga (Japanese comics and graphic novels) and Japanese culture more broadly. Eventually it morphed into the exchange program and our partnership with the Hawaii Global Education Foundation.

Language is one of our biggest challenges. Most of the Japanese students who come to visit us take English classes in school, so they speak and understand English pretty well. But our students are only learning Japanese in our after-school program, so their ability to communicate in Japanese is more limited. A few are fluent because their parents speak Japanese at home but that’s rare.

During their trip, students visited Minami Junior High School and got a lesson in playing the koto, a Japanese musical instrument.

Nevertheless, our students prepared a cultural piece about life in Hawaii, and when we went to Japan, they presented it in Japanese. The Japanese students do something similar in English when they visit us.

During their trip, our students visited two schools: Minami Junior High School in Nagaoka and Tezukayama Junior High School in Hiroshima. They also visited many popular tourist spots in Japan, such as Tokyo, Kyoto, and Niijima Island. But we saw so much more than a typical tourist would. At both schools we visited, our students stayed with a local family. There’s nothing like students attending schools in another country to understand what the education system is like, and then being in a local home at night to experience daily life and a different culture. Our students tried new foods, participated in Japanese tea ceremonies, and learned about making traditional Japanese meals. They rode public transportation just like the Japanese students because there are no school buses. It was an excellent opportunity for our students, many of whom were traveling overseas for the first time, to go on a trip without their parents.

Promoting Friendship

Jeffrey Horstman, front, and teacher Daren Anzai, far right, with students at a Shinkansen (bullet train) station.

One primary goal of the program is to promote friendship and peace between Japan and Hawaii, which have a complicated historical relationship, especially during and since World War II. In fact, we called our trip the Milani Middle School Friendship Tour. For example, one of the cities we visited was Nagaoka. One of the museums we toured explained how Nagaoka and other cities in Japan were leveled by U.S. bombs containing napalm; most people only know about the bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.

We also visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. I had been there many years before, but they have redone the exhibits, so the focus is now on telling the story through the eyes of students, many of them middle school age. When the bomb was dropped, many of these students were out in the morning doing their daily school routines. As you walk through the museum, you hear stories from students and their families about the impact of the bomb and its aftermath. When you read about it in textbooks, there’s often only a paragraph or a section that’s dedicated to the atomic bomb, but you don’t really hear about the personal impact that it had on families and children. That was really powerful for our students.

Many visitors to the Hiroshima memorial fold paper cranes as a symbol of peace. Our students did that together and hung them at the memorial. I think that was another special highlight; it helped connect them to that time and space as well as the desire for peace. For their part, the Japanese students who visit Hawaii always include Pearl Harbor on their itinerary.

All in all, this trip was such a great opportunity for our students. I’m looking forward to hosting more Japanese students and taking more of our students to Japan in the future because this is such a powerful program. We’re already planning the next trip, which will be this fall.

Jeffrey Horstman is the assistant principal of Mililani Middle School in Mililani, HI, and a 2024 National Assistant Principal of the Year finalist.