Letter from Nanae: Potluck and yosakoi
The town of Nanae recently hosted a nine-person Acton delegation as part of a sister-city program.
The week of the exchange (Nanae folks in Acton or Concordians in Nanae) is a lot like throwing a five-day birthday party. It’s plenty of fun but very busy and more than a little hectic.
The town of Nanae and I recently hosted a nine-person Acton delegation, including town staff, members of the Acton-Nanae Network, and a Acton-Carlisle High School teacher. It was Nanae’s first time hosting a Acton delegation since before Covid. Given this long hiatus, it was many of our guests’ first experience with the sister-city program — as well as my first time bringing a delegation as coordinator of international relations. For others, visiting Nanae meant a chance to see old friends.
Adapting a tradition
Since my own days as an exchange student with the program, every visit to Nanae begins with a potluck, starting with the great pairing off of guests and host families. I still remember in 2016 when a Japanese student and an American student, who’d partnered before, ran into each other’s arms when their names were called.
My boss has told me that there isn’t a potluck tradition in Japan. Rather, Nanae added this element after a prior delegation experienced it in Acton. The enhanced Nanae potluck featured a takoyaki station and concluded with a Japanese taiko drum performance.
There are a lot of new faces. At this point, the Nanae-Acton sister city relationship is older than I am. Late in the evening, I found my Japanese teacher, who has been with the program since its inception, sitting alone and watching the people go by. “It’s strange,” she said cheerfully. “You might be the only person here I recognize.” Some 30-odd years ago, she would have been close friends with everyone in that room.
Beef, ice cream, and apples
It’s not all new faces, though. Toshiro Yamakawa, a local farmer and businessman (described by some Acton delegates as “Nanae’s Steve Verrill”), has been with our program as long as my Japanese teacher, and he still comes to every event and potluck. For lunch Wednesday, he invited the delegation to Nanae Michinoeki, his new road station development. In Japan, road stations are augmented American rest stops, usually featuring a market for local products, goods for tourists, and restaurants carrying local specialties.
For Nanae, that means beef, ice cream, and apples. Hokkaido was the birthplace of Japan’s dairy industry and still reigns No. 1 in production of beef, milk, wheat, corn, and almost any other agricultural good you can think of. One perhaps surprising supermarket offering is beef and potato croquettes. After World War II, with most of Japan’s rice crop destroyed, potatoes made huge inroads. In Japan, this is called yoshoku, which broadly means western food but in particular refers to the version you would eat in Japan. To make the Japanese version of croquettes, top them off with tonkatsu sauce from your local Asian grocery store.
Clacking the naruko
We saw very new faces during the visit to Donguri Nursery School. Before the delegates had a chance to make their self-introductions, we were treated to the 5-year-olds’ version of yosakoi, a traditional festival dance performed with clacking rattles called naruko. It’s sports festival season, when yosakoi features prominently. Some Acton guests watched and cheered for their host families’ kids at a sports festival. The nursery school visit was a new addition, one likely to endure.
All too soon, sayonara
It was a great joy to watch the families get to know their guests. We had a lot of host families with small children this year, and it was sweet to see the Acton delegates taking up parent and grandparent roles, holding hands with their kids and cheering on their English practice.
It’s tremendous fun to bring that together, and it’s an open secret among my family that I don’t want to leave Nanae. But I’ve been here for three years, and though I’ve loved every minute of it, I must soon give the reins to another program alum.
No doubt one day I, too, will sit in the back of a potluck party and not know a single person there. And that will mean growth.
