Listen Here
By Victoria Hansen
hansenv@findlay.edu
The University of Findlay’s (UF) annual Kake Japan Festival brought cultural exchange and music to the greater Findlay community Thursday night. Kake Ambassadors, Japanese international students, and students in UF’s Japanese program worked together for a celebration of Japanese culture before the Kake Ambassadors return to Japan.
“In the U.S., everyone is open and easy to talk to and very friendly,” said Norio Takayama, a Kake Ambassador studying crisis management.
The event opened with Radio Taiso, or radio calisthenics, a stretching routine that is ubiquitous in Japan to the point of being included in the Animal Crossing franchise. After the exercise, visitors went to various stations featuring Japanese games, art activities, and food. After the festival officially ended with a Kendo demonstration, an impromptu game of musical chairs broke out to unofficially end the event.
Kake Ambassadors, like
the students that hosted the Kake Japan Festival, are part of a short-term reciprocal exchange program where the students stay from August to the beginning of September. The second part of the program starts in mid-June when UF sends students to Japan for three weeks as a part of the Kake Bridge Program.
“We learned about Japanese customs and traditions, we learned about the people, the opportunities that they have with the universities there, just by experiencing the foods, the communities, it’s immersive, so you just learn by being there,” said Nicole Diederich, Professor of English and Lead College Credit Plus Faculty Liaison at UF, who traveled with the Kake Bridge Program in 2023. “The one thing that really connected with me as an English professor was seeing puppet theater, which, because I teach some of that, but it was much more general than that.” The Kake Bridge Program is open to students of all majors, with no particular academic emphasis.
“The focus of the program both in the US and Japan is ‘relationship building.’ In addition to a homestay, you interact with local people constantly. People-to-people communication is the focus of the program both in Japan and the US,” said Dr. Hiroaki Kawamura, Associate Professor of Japanese, Director of Modern Language, and the University International Relations Representative and Liaison at UF, in an email.
The University of Findlay is one of five sister schools to the Kake Educational Institute in the United States, sharing the distinction with Wright State in Ohio, the University of Hawaii, Shenandoah University in Virginia, and the University of Guam. The Kake Educational Institute also has sister schools in 18 other countries, including China, Canada, Taiwan, the UK, and Sri Lanka.
The Kake Educational Institute has founded three universities, one senior high school, one junior high school, two vocational schools linked to the Okayama University of Science, and a kindergarten.
