By Deren Kudeki
Gargoyle staff reporter
Posted Monday, Nov. 20, 2006, The OG, features

MO KUDEKI AND her friend Kanae walk into a restroom at a Japanese train station, where they change out of their Konan Girls High School uniforms so they can go see “Miami Vice” without being caught by a teacher. Konan students are discouraged from going to the movies because it reflects badly on the school.

Mo quickly changes into her street clothes, but Kanae spends the next hour changing, putting on makeup, and curling her hair. After sitting in a dark, empty theater for an hour and a half, Kanae returns to the restroom to change back into her school uniform, put her hair up to hide the curls, and remove her makeup before going home. Her parents think she has been at a cram session at school instead of a movie.

My sister, Melisa "Mo" Kudeki, who graduated in June, was selected last year by Japanese teacher Hiroko Ito to be Uni's 2006-07 exchange student at Konan Girls High School, located in Kobe, Japan.

Uni and Konan, which also has a boys high school, have been sending each other exchange students nearly every year since 2002. This year's student from Konan is Naho Maeda. (For links to recent Gargoyle stories related to Konan, including a profile of Naho, see the list of articles at the bottom of this page.)

On Aug. 16, Mo arrived in Tokyo after a 16-hour flight from Chicago's O'Hare Airport. She spent several days with her dad and grandfather in Tokyo, and then traveled to Kobe. After a day touring the city, Mo was dropped off at the house of Sayako Kanazumi, one of the two Konan exchange students who attended Uni last year. Mo will be staying with Sayako until December or January.

Mo spent the next week and a half getting used to life in Japan and getting ready for school. She needed to be fitted for the school uniform, buy school supplies, and buy shoes for the uniform. She spent time hanging out with Sayako and her friends, and shortly before school started, they took a trip to Kyoto.

On Sept. 3, Mo had her first day at Konan, which was just resuming after its summer break. She describes the first day as “really just an opening festival with the whole school, then a class meeting, and then homeroom meetings.”

Mo found that there were three other exchange students at Konan: an American named Hannah from California who had been in Japan since March, and two students from Germany.

The main focus for the next few weeks of school was practicing for the sports festival, an activity that is held at all Japanese schools. For the festival, students are split up into different teams to compete with one another. Mo was put on the green team: “Apparently midori, my [team], sucks. Midori (which means green by the way), hasn't won in anyone's recent memory.”

There was extensive preparation for the festival, with some days completely devoted to practice, and others with four hours of practice before, during, and after school. Sayako asked Mo why American schools don't have sports festivals, to which she responded, “Why do Japanese schools have them?”

Mo has become something of an expert on Japanese TV shows, especially “doramas” (Japanese dramas). She says her classmates are surprised to find that she knows about Japanese shows but always seem to quickly change the subject away from TV.

“Everyone watches all the same shows, but no one will talk about it with me,” says Mo. “They're just like, ‘Oh, you saw it too?? Did you like it?' And I'm like, ‘Yeah, it was really funny,' or something, and then they change the topic of conversation. It's like, wait, I want to talk about it!”

It seems that the life of most Japanese teens revolves entirely around school. Mo and other students spend most of the day at Konan, often arriving around 7:30 a.m. and not leaving until around 6:30 p.m.

But that's not all. Mo says that weekends do not really exist in Japan.

“Although there is no school on Saturday, there are a lot of club activities, and so a lot of kids end up going to school on Saturdays, despite the fact that there are no classes,” she says.

In fact, most Japanese students devote many hours both on weekends and during the week to club activities, which include orchestra (which Mo is taking) and sports teams.

Even Sundays are taken up by school-related activities.

“I called Masa [Masahiro Imamura, the other Konan exchange student at Uni last year] to hang out, and he said he can't anytime in the near future AT ALL because he is busy with tennis club from morning till evening every day including weekends,” Mo says. “And I asked my friend Eriko what she did over the weekend, and she said all day both days was archery practice. Wow.”

In September, just before he left Konan for a trip to the United States, the principal of the girls school, Shigeyuki Oenoki, ran into Mo and told her that he was going to visit Uni.

“He sounded rather enthusiastic,” she says.

In fact, many students like to remind Mo of Illinois: “Yesterday a clock appeared in the first-floor toilet room … and someone stuck a sticker on it that says, ‘Illinois: -15 hours.' WHY??? Also, it's -14 hours to Illinois.”

Related articles and photo essays:

Sayako Kanazumi: Farewell interview

Konan principal visits Uni

Meet, greet, and play: Konan visitors have busy first day

Photos: Konan hoopsters visit Uni, Day 1

Photos: Konan hoopsters visit Uni, Day 2

Photos: Konan hoopsters visit Uni, Day 3

Profile: Naho Maeda, exchange student extraordinaire

A whole new world: One student's journey to Japan