(A group of 15 junior high school students and their chaperones from Kawakami, Japan pose with their Watsonville buddy students and others Thursday in front of a mammoth dump truck at Graniterock’s A.R. Wilson Quarry during a tour. Photo by Tarmo Hannula/Pajaronian)
WATSONVILLE — Every year, groups of Japanese middle school students visit Watsonville, meeting their American counterparts and kicking off a weeklong exchange program that often turns into a lifelong friendship.
Now in its 28th year, the trip is part of Watsonville’s Sister City exchange program with Kawakami, Japan. It includes students from seven schools around Pajaro Valley Unified School District.
Many of the arriving Japanese kids had hosted students from Pajaro Valley earlier this year. Now, it was the Americans’ turn to play host.
The 15 Japanese students arrived in Los Angeles on Monday, where they visited Universal Studios and went sightseeing in Beverly Hills. They arrived by bus on Tuesday.
The Watsonville visit includes a beach picnic, time in PVUSD classrooms and a visit to Monterey Bay Aquarium.
They also visit a Driscoll’s berry company nursery and the Agricultural History Project
at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the exchange program is the homestay, where the visitors get a crash course in American culture with new food, customs and traditions.
But the American students went through the same thing during their visit to Japan.
There, for example, hosts expect omiyage, which are gifts traditionally brought by guests to their hosts’ homes. In addition, nearly everyone in that country knows to remove their shoes before entering a home.
New this year was a trip to Graniterock’s A.R. Wilson Quarry in Aromas, where the students and their hosts got a tour of the sprawling facility, a place off-limits to most people.
There, workers astride gargantuan earth-moving machines move mountains of rock and gravel, as a fleet of equally giant trucks hauls loads of excavated earth.
In the quarry, the students started their tour in the bottom of a large excavated pit.
“Right now, you are 120 feet below sea level,” quarry manager Peter Lemon said. “And you are standing on the San Andreas Fault.”
The visit was a way to interject a slice of Watsonville history and culture into the exchange program, said Graniterock Human Resources Director Bill Miller.
Miller’s son is currently hosting two of the Japanese boys.
Students traveling to Kawakami stay with their host family for six days. They go to school with their Japanese peers, and go on several sightseeing trips.
Hundreds of students have made the trip, many of them leaving home for the first time.
