Written this past summer after a reporting trip to Hawaii.
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The I-Lion Hawaii School in Honolulu doesn’t look like most American high schools.
A gray office on the 12th floor of Honolulu’s Pacific Guardian Tower, I-Lion has an appearance more akin to a dentist’s waiting room and, when standing in the reception area, the space’s partitioned sections resemble over-sized cubicles more than classrooms. But students are taught here.
Always exchange students from I-Lion’s Japanese sister school, Sendai Ikuei Gakuen High School, they study English as a second language and Social Studies. In the afternoons they typically learn about Hawaii’s culture, how to hula or make leis. It’s not a large school, but I-Lion’s principal, Earl Okawa, said that’s because they usually only expect around 12 students every term. That was before the most recent class, though.
That was before March 11, when an 8.9 magnitude earthquake, a massive Tsunami and a nuclear disaster devastated the region, washing away farms, towns and tens of thousands of lives. Living and going to school there, the 24 students that make up this new class—all high school girls—were in the area closest to March’s overwhelming disaster.
One of Ikuei Gakuen’s campuses was destroyed, Okawa said, as were two of the girls’ houses.
“Homes were lost, the nuclear threat was only 100 kilometers away,” Okawa said. “Parents were happy that their kids could get away.”
Ikuei Gakuen sends its students to 60 sister schools all around world, but I-Lion, because it is located in Hawaii, has quickly become an important member of that family, Okawa said. 16.7 percent of Hawaii’s population is Japanese, the largest in the United States. Comparatively, California trails behind in second place, with only .9 percent.
Hawaii remains a place with powerful ties to Japan, historically, geographically and culturally.
“Everyone here saw what happened in Japan,” Okawa said. “If you were not touched, then there is something wrong with you, but Hawaii in particular has a close connection to Japan. People here have strong feelings for the country and the people there.”
It’s these feelings, Okowa said, as well as Hawaii’s “aloha spirit” that enabled the school to find host families for the girls even after the disaster considerably changed the way the students were placed. Usually the families are paid to take the students in, Okawa said, and the arrangement only lasts two to four weeks. This time, not only would the families have to be volunteers and host the students for three months, they would also have to participate in a special course designed to teach them how to recognize and understand post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“We are trying to help them mentally first,” Okawa said. “English classes, social studies, have all become secondary to the needs of the girls.”
Over the past 11 years, host mother Kelly Tomioka estimates that she has welcomed more than 150 exchange students from all over the world into her green, plantation-style home outside Honolulu. Taking classes on PTSD prior to meeting her two newest visitors, however, was a first, she said.
But, if the preparation was intimidating, it never gave her second thoughts.
“The bible talks about ‘with the comfort we have received, now we can comfort others,” Tomioka said. “And we thought hosting these students would be such a great opportunity to encourage them, and send them back home with new hope and refreshed spirit. So we could send some of that ‘aloha’ back home with them.”
Two weeks before the girls’ arrival, the host families and the staff of I-Lion all participated in a course designed and led by Hawaii Red Cross volunteer Ken Lee.
“They knew they were going to be living with these kids and they were worried,” Lee said. “There was a lot of anxiety about what they should anticipate with these 16 year old girls coming out, and they wanted to be prepared.”
He taught the families about the powerful and lasting impact that disasters can leave on its victims and told them to watch for specific signs and triggers of the disorder; things like insomnia, nightmares and lack of appetite.
“If you don’t know that you are responding in a normal, predictable way to an abnormal event, you frequently think you are going crazy or that what you are experiencing now—the distressing symptoms—is going to last forever,” Lee said.
Lee also said the families face additional hardships: a language barrier due to the girls still learning English and, more dramatically, a cultural barrier.
Japanese typically display emotion in a different way than most Westerners, Lee said, through a cultural ethos called gaman. The concept was employed often by the media in the weeks after the disaster to describe the sense of stoic calm shown by many Japanese who were affected by the Tsunami.
“You accept what fate deals you and you accept it in silence,” Lee explained. “You keep your game face on and you don’t tell anybody. To do so would be to lose face, lose your dignity.”
Recently, the girls have also begun learning about PTSD themselves when I-Lion began working with Project Kealahou, a Hawaii State Department of Health program that works with teenage girls experiencing trauma.
Through events and activities like hiking and art projects, the program provides the girls with what the division calls psycho-education. Not specifically addressing issues apparent in any single girl, the project is more about teaching them what PTSD is and what the triggers are.
Emi Koga, Practice Development Specialist with Project Kealahou, said she grew up in Japan and understands the cultural differences the families and staff are dealing with.
“I know that psychology and mental health aren’t really talked about in Japan,” Koga said. “So the psycho-education piece might have been the first time for a lot of them to hear about it.”
The wife of a Japanese businessman, Tomioka said her family speaks Japanese and has a unique understanding of the culture. Even though they can more easily communicate with the girls than some of the other families, Tomioka said they still do not press the girls to share the complex emotions they are experiencing.
“They don’t complain and they don’t really let you know when they are suffering inside, but I can see it in their eyes,” she said.
When helping her girls feel safe and at home, it’s more about what the family doesn’t do then what they do, she said.
“We don’t take them to the ocean,” Tomioka said. “We don’t talk about it. We don’t expose them to news stories or anything that could be a trigger or reminder. We try to put more seeds of joy in their life.”
Surrounded by green mountains, the sounds of the Pacific Ocean are far away from the Tomiokas’ home. There is plenty of noise for the girls to take in around the house, though.
Families of chickens roam the side garden and front yard, the rooster patriarchs crowing no matter the time of day. A large, colorful parrot named Picasso climbs along the yard’s chain link fence, rattling it as he makes his way to the front porch to snack on peanuts and grapes. Behind the house, taro farmers tend to their crop, harvesting the leaves and roots for some of Hawaii’s most popular local dishes.
Some afternoons, the sound of banana pineapple mango smoothies being loudly blended together sings through the walls and onto the back porch, as does the voice of Tomioka’s 4-year-old daughter.
Every school morning, the smell of a fresh breakfast floats about the house, the scents of a comfortable routine which has developed over the past few weeks. Each night, before the girls go to sleep, Tomioka’s 14-year-old son Matt takes the girls’ orders in Japanese. The next morning, while they are getting up and starting their day, he cooks the requests so that the food is waiting on the table as the girls come downstairs.
But, soon, the girls’ time here will come to an end. On July 7, they will leave Hawaii and fly back to Japan. They will return to their families and what’s left of their home.
Tomioka said knowing what the girls are returning to is the hardest thing about being their host mother. She said she wishes the girls were going home to something that was whole and complete. For all that the host families, Red Cross, Project Kealahou and I-Lion has done, they can’t do much about Japan’s recovery.
The region changed very little in the short time the girls have been away.
“I wish I could take that away because they’re going to have to face that,” Tomioka said. “I wish that we could take back what’s been done but we can’t. But we can join together and help one another through it.”
