Bitten by the travel bug: GC’s Emma Scholler takes exchange trip to Japan

By Cara L. Dempski

GLENWOOD CITY — There are not many teenagers in the United States who can accurately describe the finer points of a Japanese tea ceremony.

In fact, Glenwood City’s Emma Scholler might be one of the few people around who could, quite literally, walk someone through the ritual. The high school senior not only attended a learning session about the ceremony this summer, she participated in one.

Scholler spent six weeks in Machida-shi, Japan, near the city of Tokyo as part of a student exchange through Youth for Understanding (YFU), Kikkoman foods, and the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA). She earned a full scholarship for the trip earlier this year after learning about the program through FCCLA.

“I’ve always wanted to go to another country, and wanted to figure out a way to do it without having to pay for the whole thing myself,” Scholler said. “I heard a girl who had been on the trip previously talk about it at the FCCLA conference, and I was like, ‘that sounds cool.’”

The Hilltopper senior applied for the scholarship last fall, and attended an interview in Milwaukee this spring before learning she was selected as a scholarship winner.

Scholler left June 15, and returned at the end of July, but is already planning to go back and see friends and her host family.

Accepted

Before Scholler could do anything else, she had to fill out an 11-page application document of questions like “what is your favorite hobby?” or “what is it like where you live?” She also had to write a series of essays about actions she would take if her host family was asking her to do something she wasn’t comfortable with, what she does to help her friends and family when she is at home, and why she should be chosen as one of the scholarship winners.

She applied for five scholarships through YFU, and was accepted for two of them. The organization first notified her she had been accepted for a half scholarship, before she received a second letter telling her she was accepted as one of the recipients for the full $11,000 cost of the trip.

There was just one catch: she had to make it through an in-person interview first.

Scholler traveled to Milwaukee, where she was interviewed by YFU volunteers. It served as a somewhat nerve-wracking experience for her.

“I would give a really good answer and think ‘that was really good, what I just said,’ and then the interviewer would only write down two words,” Scholler said, laughing.

The volunteers must have liked what they heard, though, since Scholler was officially accepted as a scholarship recipient for the program. She said once she was accepted, she printed out all of her emails regarding orientation, filled out all her paperwork, and created a binder to organize every email from YFU, files on her travel information, orientation information, and where her host family lived.

While YFU told her she did not need to study the country or culture too much prior to orientation, she picked up a few books on the culture before going because she had never looked at the culture prior to applying for the exchange trip, and wanted to have a basic understanding of Japan before she went.

Despite a hiccup with her plane schedule getting to orientation, Scholler’s trip got underway without a hitch.

She attended a three-day orientation session in San Francisco before her flight to Japan, and explained the learning period as something of a “beat down.” The orientation was run by program alumni, who taught language classes, “culture shock” classes, and ran kumis (groups) to talk about solving problems.

The classes were useful in many respects, but were somewhat more intense than what she experienced upon her arrival in Japan.

“It wasn’t the same, how they explained it at orientation,” she said. “I think they made it sound worse, so when we got there (Japan), we were just ‘oh, this is cool.’”

While cultural differences such as appropriate public attire (women must have shoulders covered and cannot wear shorts – only long pants or skirts) and waving “good bye” to someone by using the wave used to signify “come here” in the United States startled her at first, she learned families in Japan are not so different from those here.

Machida-shi

Scholler left San Francisco June 17 for Los Angeles before hopping on a plane to Tokyo. She was not a fan of the 12-hour flight, especially since she was stuck in a center seat and exhausted because she was up until midnight the previous evening finishing paperwork. The Glenwood City student whiled away much of her time in the air watching the plane’s progress over land on the map projected on movie and seat-back screens.

“Why did we go over land?” she asked afterward. “If we flew in a straight line, we could have cut off three hours.”

The Hilltopper stepped away from many of her fellow American exchange students after going through customs at the Tokyo airport and picking up her luggage. She and some of her fellow students got on a bus for a one-hour ride to meet their host families on the outskirts of the metropolitan area. One of the first things she noticed was how quiet everyone was.

On most bus rides in America, people seem to converse freely and aloud. In Japan, Scholler was surprised by the soft-voiced conversations happening all over the bus, and even noticed the driver did not need to raise his voice to announce stops.

She met her host family there, the Yamaguchis. Hiroko Yamaguchi, her host mother, works at a university and has a part-time job at a museum, and Yoshinori Yamaguchi is employed as an engineer. She also had a host sister and brother, Tomoka and Sona.

The family exposed her to traditional festival foods (it was festival season while Scholler was in Japan), Korean dishes, religious temples, parks, the Sky Tree, and Harajuku.

She was fascinated by the Japanese desire to own clothing, makeup, food, and cultural items from Korea, but wondered where those in the city bought all their clothes.

Scholler was excited to visit the Harajuku shopping district – which she described as disco combined with Polly Pocket – to learn the differences in what was sold in clothing stores there since, as previously noted, women did not wear certain items.

She was surprised to find the clothes sold in American retail shops there were exactly what she would find in the United States: shorts, tank tops or cut-outs at the shoulders, and short clothing. It was something of a shock to someone who had gotten accustomed to seeing the typical Japanese work attire of white shirts, black pants or blouses, and dress shoes.

Scholler also seemed impressed with how clean, polite, and friendly people were in general. Not only would people stop pedestrians to hand back something dropped unintentionally or apologize profusely for standing in someone’s way or bumping into another person, but it is regular practice for Japanese people to leave purses or satchels unattended in public places without fear of being stolen.

Tomoka, Scholler’s host sister, is scheduled for a trip to France this fall, and her mother has been working with the young Japanese woman to not leave things unattended, as they may not be there when she returns to them.

The young Hilltopper said the practice surprised her at first, but she got used to it, especially at school. Many of her daily courses were in the same classroom and required instructors to move to different rooms according to the schedule.

School days

The main festival Scholler participated in during her time in Japan was one that involved tying ribbons with wishes written on them to tree branches that had died and been removed from the main tree. One the final day of the festival, all the branches and ribbons were burned, signifying the wishes were about to come true.

“Most of mine were about getting good grades,” Scholler admitted.

Going to school in a different country can be intimidating, but is likely even more so when you do not speak the language.

Scholler recalled her homeroom teacher, who did not speak much English, setting a box on her desk the first day of school and having the English conversation instructor nearby to assist with translation.

The box contained a DVD player, and her teacher’s essential message was “watch these.” So, Scholler’s first few days at school in Japan consisted of watching six children’s movies on the country’s history and culture.

Emma attended English classes, history, math and other courses while she was in school, and was always happy to work with her Japanese peers on their conversation skills and grammar.

“Going to school there, you have to take English,” Scholler explained. “It’s their number one language. Kind of like how we take Spanish, but that’s more of an option for us.”

She found herself in the position of teacher often, helping her classmates with homework by guiding them toward correct answers, and providing plenty of conversation practice. Even Scholler’s homeroom teacher had learned more English by the time she returned to the United States.

“It was like she was going home and learning new phrases after school every day. She would say something new to me every day, and I would think to myself, ‘you didn’t know how to say that to me yesterday,’” Scholler laughed.

All the extra work in her native language did not bother Scholler, since most of the conversations she had with peers were slow enough for them to understand. By helping them slowly pick up more English, Scholler was gradually learning more Japanese.

Not only could she pronounce sounds from Hiragana and Katakana scripts before she left, but she had delved into learning Kanji as well.

One of the things that impressed Scholler about her school experience in Japan was how clean everything was. Japanese schools do not typically employ janitorial staff, and rely instead on students to clean classroom spaces and take out the trash at the end of each day.

She acknowledged she enjoyed school, because she had already studied some of the subjects presented in the school she attended, but also said the entire trip was a truly amazing experience.

“At first, I thought I was going to Mars or something,” Scholler said. “But then I got there and learned these are people just like the rest of us, with homes and families.”

While she was glad to get back home at the end of July, Scholler said she misses her friends and host family, and was glad to have had such a good experience. She has spoken with the Yamaguchi family several times since her return, and plans to go back to Japan some day for a visit.

She is even considering taking a backpacking trip in Europe next summer to celebrate finishing high school and heading off to college next fall. A friend of hers is headed for a similar trip, and Scholler admitted she has an itch to travel more now.

Has the travel bug bitten?

“Oh yeah, for sure,” Scholler said, laughing.