Students from Fukuchiyama High School teach Japanese calligraphy to students visiting from Australia, in Fukuchiyama, Kyoto Prefecture, on Oct. 4, 2024. (Mainichi/Manabu Niwata)
FUKUCHIYAMA, Kyoto — Twenty-one high school students from Australia got a taste of Japanese culture at a school in western Japan’s Kyoto Prefecture during a recent visit, learning about Japan’s tea ceremony and trying their hand at calligraphy.
The students from Heathfield High School in the suburbs of Adelaide visited Fukuchiyama High School on Oct. 4 as part of a two-week visit to Japan also including trips to Tokyo and Hiroshima. At the Japanese school in the city of Fukuchiyama, they learned about the tea ceremony and Japanese calligraphy from 78 second-year students there.
All of the students from Australia had taken Japanese lessons, and 16-year-old student Nick Kummerow gave a greeting in Japanese on behalf of the visiting students, saying, “We’re looking forward to learning about Japanese culture and school life.”
Students from Heathfield High School, near Adelaide, experience the Japanese tea ceremony during their visit to Fukuchiyama High School in Kyoto Prefecture on Oct. 4, 2024. (Mainichi/Manabu Niwata)
Students from Fukuchiyama High School’s tea ceremony club performed a tea ceremony, and Heathfield High School students smiled and commented in Japanese that the tea was delicious. The Japanese students also instructed their Australian counterparts on how to write Japanese calligraphy, and Vala Koral, whose first name sounds like the Japanese word for rose (bara), beautifully wrote the extremely difficult kanji characters for the flower, surprising the Japanese students. She commented that her hand was shaking but that she had fun learning the brushstrokes.
Ryoya Kojima, a 17-year-old student from Fukuchiyama High School, reflected, “It was a precious experience to have exchanges with Australian students in Fukuchiyama. It was an opportunity for us, too, to get a renewed sense of the good qualities of Japanese culture.”
(Japanese original by Manabu Niwata, Fukuchiyama Local Bureau)
AloJapan.com