On a Monday afternoon in mid-December, students taking Japanese at Eaglecrest High School in the Cherry Creek School District took a class period to decorate cards with reindeer, snowflakes and rats too cute to kill.
They were sharing a bit of their own culture, with a nod to their pen pals, who would be preparing to ring in the Year of the Rat, the next zodiac sign coming up in Japan’s 12-year cycle.
Every year, the students in Laura Williams’ classes exchange three cards or letters with their peers in Toshishige Yamasaki’s English classes at Itoshimka High School in Fukuoka, a city on the southernmost of Japan’s main islands. Students write in English and Japanese, so both classes can practice the language they’re learning.
The students at the Centennial high school can do the pen-pal program for three years, if they complete the full sequence of Japanese courses, Williams said. Typically, they get a different pen pal every year, because Japanese students are too busy preparing for high-stakes university exams in their last year of high school to put much time into side projects, she said.
The letters make learning a new language more interesting for the students, Williams said. The class sends pictures from homecoming, and their pen pals then send back photos from their annual sports day and from their class trip, which took them to Singapore this year, she said.
“A huge part of learning a language is knowing the culture and understanding the lifestyle in that country,” she said.
Maggie Moreno, a junior, said she and her pen pal have talked about their school routines, music and the clubs they participate in. It was surprising to hear about the variety of activities Japanese students do, like a tea ceremony club and kendo, a martial art that uses bamboo swords, she said.
“I feel like we get to learn a lot about each individual person,” she said.
Joey McGuire, a senior, said he was writing about his winter break plans. He said he found some common ground with two of his pen pals, including running track and playing in a band.
“Even though they’re 2,000 miles across the ocean, they have similar interests,” he said.
Yamasaki said via email that 109 of his students write to partners in Colorado, while the other 211 are paired with students in other American states. Colorado was a natural match, both because Denver has had prominent citizens of Japanese descent and because then-Colorado Gov. Ralph Carr defended Japanese-Americans who were placed in internment camps during World War II, he said.
Yamasaki said writing letters by hand and waiting for a reply provides a refreshing change of pace for his students, and gives them a chance to share some of their talents, like drawing and origami. It also lets them try out what they’re learning about sentence structure in English, which is substantially different from Japanese grammar, he said.
“They start wondering how people can carry on a short conversation in such an upside-down word order. Thatap when they receive the bilingual letter from my students. They can see with their own eyes that people actually write sentences in Subject + Object + Verb order,” he said.
Williams said she and Yamasaki found each other on a website to connect people seeking pen pals. They started having their students message each other online, but handwritten letters turned out to be easier because most Japanese classrooms don’t have computers, she said.
Hassane Dansoko, a junior, said he stays in contact with one of his former pen pals on social media, and started listening to Japanese and Korean pop music she suggested.
“I feel like I got a friend out of it,” he said.
