‘My family, my friends are all safe.’

FALLS VILLAGE — Shiho Tamaki, a Japanese exchange student attending Housatonic Valley Regional High School this year, had some anxious moments last month when the first massive earthquake and tsunami hit Japan.The 17-year-old senior hails from Kamagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo and part of the greater Tokyo area.She said she couldn’t get through by telephone for a couple of days, “but my family, my friends, are all safe.”As the news broke, she watched on television and felt a strange sense of unreality.“I couldn’t understand what was happening. Is this a movie?”Natural disasters aside, Shiho has had a good stay in the United States, although she said she had some initial difficulties adapting when she arrived in Connecticut — she is staying with Elizabeth Jakupciak and John Sutterlin of Kent — and started school in September.“I had trouble with American names,” she said in accented but perfectly coherent English. “‘How’s it going?’ ‘What’s up?’ I didn’t understand these.”In Japan, she explained, English language students study grammar and vocabulary, but don’t practice much conversation.Plus, in the United States, “everybody speaks fast.”She has another year of secondary school ahead of her in Japan, and then she plans to first go to college and then become a teacher of Japanese language, culture and history.Asked how school at home compares to school here, she said that Japanese kids study harder than their American counterparts. And she is somewhat bemused by American tests.“Here they ask for opinion,” on tests, while in Japan the emphasis is on learning — and memorizing — facts.In Japan, for example, students know the significant dates of World War II — particularly those of the two atomic bombings and Japan’s surrender in August 1945.“In August there are a lot of TV shows about the war. I was surprised not to see something here.”She enjoys art and chorus, and is intrigued by metal technology (i.e. shop).“I can’t learn that in Japan.”Perhaps the biggest difference in daily life is the transportation problem. In urban Kamagawa, “I can go everywhere myself, on the bus, the train or walking. Here you need a car.”She returns home after the Housy graduation ceremony in June.“I’m excited to go back,” she said. “And a little sad too.”She plans to keep in touch, by email if nothing else. “It’s a 13-hour difference,” she said. “Hard to phone, hard to Skype.”

Latest News

South Kent School’s unofficial March reunion

Elmarko Jackson was named a 2023 McDonald’s All American in his senior year at South Kent School. He helped lead the Cardinals to a New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) AAA title victory and was recruited to play at the University of Kansas. This March he will play point guard for the Jayhawks when they enter the tournament as a No. 4 seed against (13) Samford University.

Riley Klein

SOUTH KENT — March Madness will feature seven former South Kent Cardinals who now play on Division 1 NCAA teams.

The top-tier high school basketball program will be well represented with graduates from each of the past three years heading to “The Big Dance.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hotchkiss grads dancing with Yale

Nick Townsend helped Yale win the Ivy League.

Screenshot from ESPN+ Broadcast

LAKEVILLE — Yale University advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a buzzer-beater win over Brown University in the Ivy League championship game Sunday, March 17.

On Yale’s roster this year are two graduates of The Hotchkiss School: Nick Townsend, class of ‘22, and Jack Molloy, class of ‘21. Townsend wears No. 42 and Molloy wears No. 33.

Keep ReadingShow less
Handbells of St. Andrew’s to ring out Easter morning

Anne Everett and Bonnie Rosborough wait their turn to sound notes as bell ringers practicing to take part in the Easter morning service at St. Andrew’s Church.

Kathryn Boughton

KENT—There will be a joyful noise in St. Andrew’s Church Easter morning when a set of handbells donated to the church some 40 years ago are used for the first time by a choir currently rehearsing with music director Susan Guse.

Guse said that the church got the valuable three-octave set when Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center closed in the late 1980s and the bells were donated to the church. “The center used the bells for music therapy for younger patients. Our priest then was chaplain there and when the center closed, he brought the bells here,” she explained.

Keep ReadingShow less
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Penguin Random House

‘Picasso’s War” by Foreign Affairs senior editor Hugh Eakin, who has written about the art world for publications like The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is not about Pablo Picasso’s time in Nazi-occupied Paris and being harassed by the Gestapo, nor about his 1937 oil painting “Guernica,” in response to the aerial bombing of civilians in the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, the Penguin Random House book’s subtitle makes a clearer statement of intent: “How Modern Art Came To America.” This war was not between military forces but a cultural war combating America’s distaste for the emerging modernism that had flourished in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.

Keep ReadingShow less