Yokoso!  Welcome.

For ten years now, our town in Oregon and a small town in the mountains of Japan have been sending each other students, teachers, delegations, letters, recipes, cherry trees and, every December, a truly enormous number of Christmas cards and New Year's cards. This is the home page of the people who keep all of that going.

I am Pat Mejorado, and I have been president of the association since 1996. I taught English at Riverton High School for thirty-one years. Before that, from 1963 to 1965, I taught English conversation at a girls' high school in Japan, where I learned to bow, to leave my shoes at the door, and to eat whatever was set in front of me with gratitude. When Riverton began talking about a sister city, I raised my hand, and I have not managed to put it down since.

In October of 1987, a busload of farmers from Hoshimizu came through the Willamette Valley on a tour of orchards and berry farms. Their bus broke down on the highway just outside Riverton. While it was being fixed, somebody called somebody, and the ladies at the Grange hall put together a potluck supper for twenty-two visitors on two hours' notice. I was called in to help with the talking, and I found that I still had about half of my Japanese.

It turned out that one of the farmers had a daughter who taught English at Hoshimizu's junior high school, and one of the potluck cooks had a son on our city council. Letters went back and forth for a year and a half. In May of 1989, our mayor and six of us flew to Japan and signed the sister city agreement in Hoshimizu's town hall, and that October, Hoshimizu's mayor came here to sign our copy. Both copies are framed. Ours hangs in the hallway at City Hall, just outside the water department, if you would like to see it.

Hoshimizu is a town of about nine thousand people in a river valley, about three hours from Tokyo by train. They grow rice and apples, and in the winter they get a great deal more snow than we do. Riverton is about eleven thousand people, and we grow berries, filberts and grass seed, and we get a great deal more rain. We have more in common than you would think.

Every summer, eight Riverton High School students spend three weeks in Hoshimizu, and eight Hoshimizu students spend three weeks with us. Students apply in the fall, write an essay, and meet with the exchange committee in January. The association gives two scholarships of $500 each year, so that money is never the reason a good student stays home.

Riverton to Hoshimizu. Our eight students left Portland on Saturday, June 19, with their chaperones, Richard Lipman and Jacqueline Huckins, and came home on Saturday, July 10. The school year in Japan runs into late July, so our students went to real classes with their host brothers and sisters. They wore the school uniform. They helped clean their classrooms at the end of every day, which Japanese students do themselves, and at least two of our students' mothers have asked me since whether the habit can be made to last. They came home with suitcases full of gifts and, I am told, a great fondness for convenience-store rice balls.

Hoshimizu to Riverton. Hoshimizu's eight students arrived on Saturday, July 24, with their English teacher (who stayed with me), and flew home on Saturday, August 14. Our host families this year:

They picked blueberries, went to the county fair, stood in the spray at Multnomah Falls, put their feet in the Pacific (once, briefly, and with a great deal of screaming), and ate more pizza than I would have thought possible.

The evening I will remember is Saturday, August 7. Back home, the obon season was about to begin, when families gather, light lanterns and welcome the spirits of their ancestors home for a few days, and every town holds a bon odori, a dance in a great circle around a tall wooden stage with a drum on top. Our students missed theirs this year, so they brought it to us. They taught the steps on the lawn by the bandstand in Riverton Park, in their summer cotton kimono, with a borrowed drum and a tape player, and by dark there were about a hundred and fifty of us going around in a circle, clapping on the right beat about half the time. Stan Carmack, who hosted one of the boys, has asked whether we can do it every year. We can.

For our tenth anniversary, Hoshimizu sent its official delegation from Thursday, August 19, through Monday, August 23: the mayor, four members of the town council, the principal of Hoshimizu High School, and five members of their own friendship association, eleven in all. Most of them stayed in Riverton homes. Two of them had stayed with the same families in 1989.

On Saturday evening, August 21, about two hundred and twenty of us filled the high school cafeteria for the anniversary dinner. There were speeches in two languages (I translated, and I kept mine short), a slide show of ten years of exchange students, and an exchange of gifts. In Japan a visitor never arrives empty-handed, and gifts are wrapped beautifully and given and received with both hands. We have learned to wrap better. Hoshimizu brought a hand-painted scroll for City Hall and a box of their apple sweets for every host family. We gave them a quilt made by the Riverton quilters, with Hoshimizu's mountains on one half and our river on the other.

On Sunday morning Hoshimizu's mayor and ours dedicated Hoshimizu's tenth-anniversary gift to the friendship garden: a granite lantern, about four feet tall, which came across the Pacific by ship in July and took six men and a borrowed tractor to set in place. You can read about it below.

We meet on the second Monday of the month at 7:00 p.m. in the community room of the Riverton Public Library, September through June. (In July and August we are too busy hosting.) Everyone is welcome. You don't need to speak Japanese, have been to Japan, or host a student.

Dues are $10 a year for one person, $15 for a family, and $2 for students. They pay for the newsletter, the garden and the scholarship fund. Send your check to our treasurer, Rosemarie Rhoden, or bring it to any meeting.

Officers for 1999: Pat Mejorado, president ● Lamar McCulley, vice president ● Jacqueline Huckins, secretary ● Rosemarie Rhoden, treasurer ● Richard Lipman, student exchange chairman (and Riverton High's Japanese teacher, a class that exists because of this association).