World Terakoya Program, based in Tokyo, was founded by Stanford post-graduate student Masaki Nakamura in 2022. This year’s exchange was the second one they have organized. 

Japanese teacher Matt Hall invited all students in his Japanese classes to host exchange students at their homes, but prioritized his Japanese 3 and AP Japanese classes due to students’ higher proficiency with Japanese and the time commitment of hosting. In the end, 10 Gunn families who volunteered to be hosts were connected with exchange students’ families in Japan.

 “It’s a tough ask,” Hall said. “You’re asking for a week of the family’s time and all of this week at school. (They have to) bring a Japanese homestay with them to everywhere, every class. And if they’ve got a sports team meeting after school practice, they’ve got to bring them to that. So it’s a lot of work because everybody’s busy.” 

Many of the Japanese exchange students came to the U.S. to research one topic of their choice through creating various surveys and questionnaires. For example, junior Mitsuki Hamasaki, who attends Osaka Business Frontier High School, was most interested in entrepreneurship. Beyond gauging Gunn students’ interest in business and learning more about the U.S. economy, Hamaski also wanted to use this opportunity to improve his English.

“When they’re teaching English in Japan, they mainly teach reading and writing, but they don’t really teach speaking and listening that much,” Hamasaki said in a conversation translated from Japanese by his host, senior Yahya Mirza. “So (I) can do perfectly well on an English test, but when it comes to an actual conversation, it’s a lot more difficult.”

Hall shares this goal of mutual language integration for his students. 

“My goals were twofold: one certainly was for my students to help the Japanese guests,” Hall said. “It’s up to us to be good ambassadors of our culture, and anthropologists of their culture. The secondary goal is of course for my students to also get some practice with our Japanese. There really is a back-and-forth and give-and-take because my kids are learning a lot from them too.”

Host junior Nikki DeVincentis finds it rewarding to both help his exchange student learn more about Japanese culture, as well as practice Japanese in a more casual context.

“I’d say my favorite experience so far is probably just learning the colloquial language,” he said. “I can always learn more grammar patterns and learn more vocab, but (what I’ve learned from this experience) isn’t exactly something that can be taught, like all the slang and casual language. It’s just been really exciting to be able to converse with them in a natural tone, different from the Japanese that I’ve been taught in class.”

Exchange student sophomore Minori Ohishi, who is interested in studying animal welfare, expresses gratitude for her host’s — and Gunn’s — welcoming attitude. 

“I can’t speak English well and I am only here for a week, but everyone accepted me warmly, talked and ate with me as a member of their family or their friend,” Ohishi said. “I (just) want to say thank you.”

Ohishi found the Palo Alto community’s inclusivity pleasantly surprising.

“I’m surprised the most at the warmth of people,” she said. “People from many different countries live here, and everyone accepts each other without denying everyone else. I think this is a wonderful thing.”

 Those involved in the exchange — students and staff alike — have appreciated the Gunn community’s flexibility and openness. According to Hall, teachers from every department have been cooperative with the extra students and Japanese staff members coming in to observe their classes.

“People talk a lot about teachers being very solo or very, ‘I just want to teach my classes and nobody bother me,’ but that’s certainly not been the case,” Hall said. “I’ve received tremendous support from the overall staff and their willingness to show what they’re all about. And these Japanese staff members, they’ve never seen Americans teach, (but) they’re seeing the best of the best here at Gunn.”

Exchange students are seeking survey responses from Gunn students. Below are surveys created by junior Mitsuki Hamasaki and sophomore Minori Ohishi.

Mitsuki Hamasaki: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1W0DjObGJsEmSDGJkLCIbEpvdJLJNTgEL3CRqNlvGlHk/viewform?edit_requested=true 

Minori Ohishi: https://docs.google.com/forms/u/0/d/e/1FAIpQLSfnCOzAS8Fef0u2DX2xE27ZJ-lkyI-Lef9WL9Y_zGL1dlE4_Q/formResponse

Gallery • 22 Photos

Chinyoung Shao

Work hard, play harder: The juggling community embodied this saying during their fifth annual Game of Throws Festival last weekend. From Jan. 19-21, jugglers from all over the world learned, competed and above all else, had fun. 

Run by Gunn’s Juggling Club, the Game of Throws involved workshops and open-gym juggling sessions all weekend, a battle event Friday night, a gala show Saturday night and final games on Sunday. Events were free for jugglers and non-jugglers alike, except a $10 admission to the gala show, which had around 650 audience members. 

Friday night, attendees were welcomed to compete in a juggling battle — juggling and impromptu performing fused with the flair of a rap or breakdance battle. According to Juggling Club President junior Nikki DeVincentis, competitors performed 30-second on-the-spot acts.

“It’s so amazing, not only because you get to see some of the people who will perform at the gala show, but you also just get to see local talents join in,” they said. “People who nobody knows, or that nobody here knows, just come in and blow everybody away. It’s just so amazing to see the community come together.”

Juggling Club Advisor Matt Hall opened Saturday night’s gala show with his diabolo act. Over the course of the evening, ten performers displayed their skill with balls, clubs, diabolos, rings, hula hoops, unicycles and countless other juggling props, in a combination of both long-perfected and brand-new acts.

For the first time in his years hosting the festival, Hall joined the audience for the rest of the gala show with his wife, Gunn Student Activities Director Lisa Hall. 

“I hear people going, ‘Oh my god,’ ‘Whoa, how do you do that?’ ‘Whoa, that’s crazy,’ ‘That’s awesome,’ and I’m just loving it because this is what I want,” he said. “I want to introduce juggling and circus arts to the Palo Alto community and to Gunn High School.” 

At one point during the show, mulleted and mustachioed performer Mark Wilder pedaled onstage atop his unicycle in a bright blue suit with “PARTY” stitched on the back. Mesmerizing audience members,  he first jump-roped, then juggled clubs with a ball bouncing on a platform on a pole on his head, all while riding his unicycle to the tune of 80s hits. As his grand finale, he lowered himself to the ground and raised himself back up while balancing a ball atop a pole on his forehead. Wilder attended the Game of Throws last year as well, but this was his first year in the gala show. 

“The Game of Throws is the best juggling festival in the world right now,” Wilder said. “It attracts quality jugglers, world-class talent — not just the hobbyists but the performers from all over the country. People fly in from Chicago, Boulder, Texas. We had people from the Czech Republic, from Mexico, from New Zealand.”

According to Wilder, juggling transcends national boundaries. 

“Juggling is a language all jugglers speak, so you can go anywhere in the world and juggle with someone else,” he said. “Without knowing their language, you can still juggle together and have fun.”

The Game of Throws concluded on Sunday with more workshops, Olympic-style games and time for the jugglers to share their last tricks of the weekend. For Rhys Thomas, a gala-show performer, festivals like the Game of Throws are a defining aspect of the juggling community, offering opportunities for engagement and fun.

“What I find most uniquely wonderful about the juggling world is nowhere else will you find a room full of adults, like full of adults, just playing,” he said. “They’re not competing: There’s some competition, but for the most part, it’s a whole lot of people just playing.”

The Gunn Juggling Club, responsible for hosting the event, continues to meet on Wednesdays at lunch to draw more students into the enthralling activity they have come to love. 

“It is just like a sport, in my opinion, where you practice so much to get to move your body and (find) the most perfect way to accomplish this task,” DeVincentis said. “And I think that the end result of being able to perform something is really real. It’s just so dynamic watching all these things move through the air, getting a technique perfect.”

Watching the club meet on Jan. 24, the Wednesday after the festival, was one of the most rewarding outcomes of the festival  for Hall.

“Ultimately, it’s their festival,” he said. “They worked on the systems with me. They worked the (registration) desk. They taught workshops. It gets them stoked. They’re gonna walk away going ‘I’m never going to forget those three days at Gunn High School.’”

Such were the thoughts of ten Japanese students as they boarded a plane for America on March 25. Meanwhile, ten Gunn students cleared an extra room in each of their homes in preparation for Gunn’s first Japanese homestay program. The program, organized by Japanese teacher Matthew Hall in conjunction with Masaki Nakamura from the Terakoya Program, sought to provide students from various Japanese high schools with the opportunity to follow Gunn students through school and their daily life for three days, as well as attend tours of Google, Apple and Stanford campuses. 

Although Advanced Placement Japanese students were given priority, Hall opened participation in the program to all levels of students in Gunn’s Japanese program as a chance to learn more about the language and culture they had been studying. “It’s one thing to learn in the classroom, (and) it’s another thing to learn from the person sitting right next to you,” he said. “It’s always good when people from another country break bread together. There’s a phrase that says, ‘It’s harder to hate somebody when you know their story.’ We need to learn their stories and they need to learn our stories.”

To teach her exchange student, Moka Higashihira, more about American culture, junior Emma Cao brought her to a variety of places and provided her with foods unique to the area. “Yesterday night, we went downtown, and she said it reminded her of a place in Japan,” Cao said. “Tonight we plan on going to Santana Row, so she can do some shopping. It’s been nice to reflect on being grateful for the place we live in and also explain its history.” 

Since neither are fluent in the other’s language, however, Cao explained that certain challenges arose in communication. “I do wish I could speak to her in Japanese more fluently, so we can get on that level,” she said. “When you’re not speaking in your native language, you’re not really the same person, so that’s kind of a barrier in our personalities.” Cao also noted that these challenges extended to nonverbal communication. “When Japanese exchange students come, they tend to be very polite about things,” she said. “Even if they don’t like something, they’ll do it and won’t tell you that they don’t like it. It’s been hard to try and tell what they actually want (and) how to read the cues and body language.” 

Nevertheless, Cao learned to overcome communication barriers with English-to-Japanese translation tools such as Jisho and Google Translate. She was also able to improve her speaking abilities through conversing with Higashihira. “I’m really grateful for this opportunity because I get to learn a lot of slang and casual phrases,” she said. “Like ‘traffic’ in Japanese is ‘kotsu,’ but they don’t say ‘kotsu ga warui’ (the traffic is bad). Instead, they use the phrase ‘michi ga konde iru’ (the roads are crowded).”

Similarly, the program served as a learning experience for both the Japanese and Gunn students to examine the differences between Japanese and American culture. For instance, senior Talise Baker-Matsuoka’s exchange student, Sawako Akasaka, noticed that Gunn’s school environment differed from that of her school in Japan. “American classes have much freedom,” she said. “I can eat snacks and drinks, (which is) different from (in) Japan. Also, in (Japanese schools) we have one big building, and that’s it. In America, you have many buildings and students move around between them and it takes time to do so.”

Baker-Matsuoka realized differences regarding food and eating habits as well. “Americans are often like, ‘Here’s the fridge, go eat all the food,’ but Japanese people won’t just go eat your food if you don’t give it to them,” she said. “Also, one thing you do in Japan is you have to clear your plate completely, but in the U.S., you don’t have to do that. We’re used to piling food on top and then having leftovers, but in Japan, you eat everything.” 

Overall, learning new things about American culture through the homestay program was an exciting experience for junior Maya Nieman’s Japanese student, Iwata Sae. Her favorite part in particular was eating American fast food. “There’s a lot of fast-food eating,” she said. “In Japan, we have McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken, but we’ll maybe eat it once every two weeks. I like the food very much here.”