Writing Assignment 4: Event Story

Cultural Exchange Unites Bunkyo & Memphis For A Night

By Jamie Markham

Students at the University of Memphis found themselves on Zoom calls with Japanese middle schoolers from Bunkyo City apart of a series of international cultural exchanges to help establish long-term relationships between the two cities.

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Bunkyo City, a special ward of Tokyo, has been in talks with Memphis to become “sister cities.”  In an attempt to strengthen their bond, the two cities hosted a cultural exchange between their respective schools.  

Despite several leadership changes, the exchange went off without a hitch but has received mixed reactions from students at Memphis.

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“The Japanese Program was not supposed to lead this event originally, but the Japanese Outreach Initiative,” said Hironori Nishi, who served as the event’s co-coordinator.

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The Bunkyo City-Memphis exchange was originally led by Maika Yamaoka, who was dispatched by the Japan Outreach Initiative, to serve as an ambassador and coordinator for Japanese cultural events in Memphis. “Maika [Yamaoka] set up a series of exchanges between the Bunkyo and Memphis,” said Hironori Nishi.

Yamaoka facilitated the first exchange between the two cities last November when Bunkyo City’s Consul-General Yoichi Matsumoto, alongside other representatives, visited the University of Memphis.

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In July of 2023, Yamaoka’s contract was not renewed by the Initiative, so the already-planned Bunkyo City exchange was unknowingly left in the hands of the professors of the Japanese program. “It wasn’t until early September that the Consulate-General of Japan [in Nashville] asked about our progress that we discovered it would happen,” said Hironori Nishi.

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After a day of internal decision-making, Shinobu Watanabe, was selected to take up the mantle of leadership.

While students throughout the Japanese program were invited to join, most participants came from Watanabe’s classes, with 11 of the 21 groups comprising of her students. Watanabe offered exchange participants in her class the chance to skip their final project and receive a perfect grade on it.

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Students who participated in the event were instructed to create PowerPoint presentations that would be showed to a group of Japanese middle schoolers. In addition, Memphis students were expected to design questions to ask the children.

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However, as time passed, the presentation’s requirements began to drop. Initially, each student would present three slides and spend two minutes talking to a group of students. By the time of the exchange, each student only showed one slide and was allotted less than a minute.

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“It felt weird because we couldn’t speak freely,” said Taylor Coleman, a Psychology major at the University of Memphis.

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Even though students designed their questions and answers, the day before the event, they were replaced with a list of pre-arranged questions. “There was a fear that Japanese students might not have understood the questions,” said Watanabe.  

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The new list of questions was presented by facilitators, made up of alumni or seniors of the Japanese Program, during the exchange.

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“We didn’t have the privilege to free range talk because everything was on paper,” said Stephanie Salcedo, who helps lead the Japanese Language Table. “It made the exchange feel artificial.”

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Despite criticism regarding the nature of the exchange, many students enjoyed speaking with native Japanese speakers.

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“It was nerve-wracking at first, but it felt really good to talk with someone who speaks the language,” said Adrian Lugo, another student who joined the event.