Feeling our place in history and the future

Konichiwa and hello from Sapporo!

The weather in this alabaster city has been chilling due to fierce winds, but our reception here has been anything but. Reunited after our separate adventures with host families (which included trips to a ski jump, a historical village, a multi-story video arcade, a sushi restaurant where your fish came out carried on remote controlled cars, and feasts of fried octopus), we were all welcomed by representatives of the Sapporo government to the Sapporo Clock Tower. The tower is not only an iconic landmark of Sapporo, but a symbol of US/Japanese cooperation: designed by none other than Concordian William Wheeler and constructed with mechanical parts built in Waltham, the Clock Tower is a little piece of old-timey Massachusetts in a downtown Japanese metropolis.

Within the Clock Tower lay my favorite spot to bring students in all of Japan: a glass case containing a small child’s doll, one of the few surviving remnants of a doll-exchange program started by American Dr. Sydney Gulick in the 1920s. Under Gulick’s program, a forerunner of our own from a time when taking actual kids to Japan was next to impossible, students in both nations would exchange “friendship dolls” reflecting the culture and tradition of their own country. During the Pacific War, the Japanese military government banned the dolls and destroyed most of them, not wishing for their people to see Americans as human beings. Despite such orders, many Japanese risked their own safety to preserve these dolls, for the same reason. This particular doll was sheltered by a school principal, who put his own family at risk to safeguard the symbol of friendship between our peoples. Our students, on this trip, are the inheritors of this legacy.

As such, it was with great pride that we went before the Hokkaido Prefectural Assembly, to be addressed by Representative Tomihara, who had himself traveled to Concord 20 years ago. Representative Tomihara gave us an official welcome, and pledged his support for the continuation and expansion of our sister-state, sister-city and sister-school relations. Here was where we really felt our “ambassador” status most keenly!

All of that diplomacy builds up an appetite! After a trip up the 90 meter Eiffel Tower-replica known as the “TV Tower,” we took a stroll through Sapporo’s sprawling underground mall, and enjoyed some ramen and sushi at the various food courts within.

We then concluded our day with a long march through farmland on the city’s outskirts to a “gengiskhan” restaurant, where the students and their host families self-cooked up a carnivorous feast on tabletop hibachi grills, and laughed and talked well into the night beneath the meat-smoky haze.