'Teen speak' leads to great experience for Ozaki family

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BY MARGARET REIST / Lincoln Journal Star

Last week happened because of a miscommunication between me and my oldest son.

This shouldn’t be too surprising, since my 14-year-old communicates largely in one-word sentences and strange guttural sounds I’m left trying to translate.

Yes. No. Fine. OK. Whatever.

This particular phenomenon of the teen-age child — where finding out what happened during seven hours of school requires every skill I ever honed as a reporter — can be frustrating.

But not this time.

This time it was a wonderful, fortuitous lapse. And not one I can really blame on one-word responses, because we’d had an actual conversation. One in which I said having two exchange students from Japan stay at our house sounded like fun.

We just never had the second conversation, the one where I said his dad and I had decided we were too busy this summer to be a host family, that I’d thrown away the paper I’d signed saying we’d participate.

And he didn’t mention that even without my signature, he’d told his teachers we’d love to be a host family.

Fine. OK. Thank goodness.

Had that not happened, we would never have found ourselves in the Lux Middle School cafeteria, shaking hands with two youngsters who traveled halfway around the world and into our home.

Their names are Yuji and Yuto.

Both are both third-year students at Senshu Matsudo Junior High School in Chiba, a prestigious private school that focuses on learning English, where one of the biggest draws is a trip the third-year students take to Lincoln, Nebraska.

They’ve been taking English for two years, but imagine trying to maneuver your way around a language that has virtually nothing in common with yours.

Teachers at Senshu want students to hone their speaking skills here. Classrooms are good places to learn to read and write a different language, but a home on a cul-de-sac with a big dog and three boys is a good place to learn to actually speak it.

So Yuji and Yuto got the bunk beds, my younger boys camped on cots in the basement and we began to get to know each other.

I had a leg up, given that I’ve been translating the one-word grunts of a 14-year-old American boy for some time now.

Granted, communicating with 14- and 15-year-old Japanese boys was different. There was no grunting. Still, there were lots of one-word responses.

They smiled and nodded and looked confused. We smiled and nodded and gestured wildly. And we made connections.

Pets. Shopping. Swimming. Brothers.

Our own family history helped. My husband is of Japanese descent, although his Japanese language skills pretty much stop at “eat all your vegetables.” Don’t ask. I don’t know why he knows that.

Our kids’ grandparents are Nisei, second-generation Japanese who were born in Hawaii and moved to Lincoln in the 1960s when my father-in-law got a position at the University of Nebraska.

They speak some Japanese, although it’s been many years since it was the primary language in their homes.

But bits of the language, the food, the culture help define our family.

I know bocha, obachan, azuki. Abunaie.

So when Yuji said they didn’t have football in Japan because it was abunaie, I knew he meant dangerous.

When Yuto said he needed to buy a present for obachan, I knew he meant his grandmother.

In the three days we spent together, we learned Yuji is the oldest of three boys, like his pen-pal, who is my oldest. We discovered he has a little dog with short hair, that he’s easy-going and helpful and that he likes to swim.

We know that Yuto is an only child, has eight hamsters and is quite comfortable with a punk in one hand and a smoke bomb in the other. We found out he wanted to make us dessert, with ingredients he’d brought in his suitcase. Everything, that is, but the vanilla ice cream.

And we learned that sometimes, communicating doesn’t require words.

If you’re 14, a basketball and hoop do just fine. And a Playstation controller is universal.

I wanted to take the boys to see things unique to Nebraska. The SAC museum, maybe Morrill Hall, the state Capitol. Then my husband reminded me our guests were teenage boys.

We did visit the Capitol. Then we went swimming at Mahoney State Park. We ate ice cream at the East Campus dairy store and Runzas from our Nebraska-grown fast-food restaurant. We shot each other with light rays at Laser Quest. We drove into the country and rode horses.

And, in the grand tradition of America, we blew things up. We sent showers of sparks into the night sky and ate potato salad and barbeque pork sandwiches.

Then suddenly, it was time to say goodbye.

First we had a picnic. American families and 278 students from Japan ate Valentino’s pizza in the park. Our guests gave speeches, danced and sang for us. We took pictures and put them on buses headed to Colorado, then home.

I wonder what they will tell their parents when they get home about American life.

That all we do is eat, play with fireworks and shoot each other with lasers?

I hope they got something else from their visit. I hope they know now that you can make friends half way around the world, even when you have to nod and point and use one-word sentences.

That would be OK.

Fine.

Wonderful.

Reach Margaret Reist at 473-7226 or mreist@journalstar.com.

Lincoln, Senshu Matsudo schools follow university lead in developing relationship

The relationship between eighth-graders at Lux Middle School and third-year students at Senshu Matsudo Junior Senior High started five years ago.

For years, the University of Nebraska has had a relationship with Senshu University, which is affiliated with the junior and senior high school.

Then, five years ago, Ruth Lionberger, an American teacher at the Japanese school, started a pen pal program.

She was from Southeast Nebraska and had a sister who worked at Gallup, which was a VIP partner with Lux, said Kathi Mercure, one of two teachers who coordinates the pen pal and exchange programs.

The teacher’s sister suggested Lux, where Mercure and fellow teacher Dru Sypal took on the project.

The first year, Lux students had 69 pen pals from Japan and those 69 students came to visit.

There were no visits the next year because of the SARS scare, but in 2003, 230 students visited.

In 2004, Lux and Senshu officially became sister schools, and last year, 22 students and adults from Lincoln visited Japan for nine days.

This year, 278 students, 20 teachers and six travel agents boarded seven planes and arrived in Omaha on June 24 and 25.

One group stayed at Doane College and took classes there; the other stayed at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and took classes through Bright Lights, Lincoln’s acclaimed summer enrichment program for elementary and middle school children.

They studied everything from chemistry to cooking, drama to robotics.

In the afternoons, they went sightseeing to places such as the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha and the Stuhr Museum in Grand Island.

“This trip is a very important component to their program,” Mercure said. “They feel this opportunity benefits their students to learn not only to read and write English but to communicate verbally.”

The students also spent four days with host families before boarding buses to Colorado to see the Rocky Mountains prior to heading home.

Back in Japan, teachers ask students what they like best about the trip. The most consistent answer: staying with American families.

“That’s the highlight of their trip,” Mercure said.