A taste of Japan comes to Cranford

By David Jablonski Managing Editor

For some of the students in Cranford middle schools and high school, the world got just a little bit smaller, thanks to the Japanese classes of teachers Kristin Wingate and Catherine Fisco. Wingate’s students have been exchanging letters with Japanese students, culminating with a visit to Cranford at the end of March by 31 students from Japan. For Wingate and Fisco, this has been an exchange many years in the making.

The first part of this scholastic adventure began with Toshishige Yamasaki, a sensei, or teacher, at Shuyukan High School in Japan. Founded in 1784, one of the oldest high schools in Japan would go through relocations, remodeling and renamings, finally being renamed Fukuoka Prefectural Shuyukan Senior High School in 1949. An English teacher in Fukuoka, Japan, Yamasaki decided to reach out to schools in the United States, so students studying Japanese here could exchange bilingual letters with students studying English in Japan. Yamasaki has nine partner schools in the U.S. to correspond with his 400 students. One of the partner schools is Cranford High School. This is the first year for Cranford High School to participate in the project.

“I have a profile on epal.com, which links classrooms together, so you can write letters. You can monitor student emails or exchange letters. Yamasaki sensei reached out to me,” said Wingate, in an interview with LocalSource on Monday, March 13. “We’ve only been able to do it three times, so that’s six exchanges. They are on a different schedule so their school ends this month.

“Japanese schools typically go for 240 days. They have a summer of two or three weeks. Yamaski sensei is the polite way of referring to him.”

In addition to teaching Japanese and serving as the advisor to the Japanese Club/Japanese National Honor Society at

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