Joyo, Japan, is a small city on the outskirts of Kyoto 5,000 miles from Vancouver. But each spring, Clark College’s Sakura Festival plays a part in making that distance feel smaller.
Dignitaries past and present from the school, the city and Portland’s Japanese embassy descended on the campus Thursday afternoon to pay homage to both the annual blossoming of the Sakura trees on Clark’s campus and a decadeslong relationship Vancouver and Joyo have maintained.
Unrelenting showers prevented the event from being held outdoors among Clark’s collection of cherry blossoms, but festivities remained spirited in the Gaiser Student Center.
“Even though the weather has not cooperated with us today, I hope you’ll be able to dodge the raindrops and take a trip down to the trees and garden on our campus,” said Clark President Karin Edwards.
In Japan, the trees typically carry an association with significant life events like school graduations and represent new life.
“You can see cherry blossoms in different places over two months across Japan,” said Yozo Yoshioka, a representative from the Japanese Embassy in Portland, explaining how species of Sakura blossom first in the south end of the country and slowly creep north.
A symbol of strong connections
On Earth Day in 1990, 100 Shirofugen cherry trees were planted throughout Clark’s campus: a gift from the late John Kageyama, the then-president of Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics, a major semiconductor company that regularly did business at the Port of Vancouver. Kageyama, who died in 2021, declared the gift a symbol of important, long-lasting cultural exchange that the business’s presence in Vancouver had helped establish.
Five years later, in 1995, Vancouver officially established its sister city relationship with Joyo. In the years since, leaders from each city have ventured back and forth to continue learning about one another. In fall of 2022, a local delegation including Edwards, Vancouver Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle and Clark College Foundation CEO Calen Ouellette spent more than a week in Japan.
“This is a really nice representation of that beauty in Kyoto,” Ouellette said. “The history and the gifts of the trees and what we’ve done in this community and this ongoing friendship; it shows that we have a stage and a presence in the world.”
Representatives from Vancouver Rotary also spoke on how the relationship first spawned from an economic exchange is something they hope to continue for decades.
“The first time I went to Japan was in 2015, and I’ve been four or five times since then. I’ve really been taken aback by the culture and it’s something I want to keep learning about; I’ve been trying to learn Japanese, actually,” said Mike Bomar, the Rotary president. “We’ve really been looking for a new generation of people to shepherd this relationship.”
Clark College, being a fixture of secondary education in Clark County, is the perfect place to accomplish that goal and spread a message about Vancouver’s history of connection with Japan, Bomar said.
Also featured in Thursday’s event were a handful of student booths from the school’s Japanese and Korean clubs, study abroad programs and cookies provided by culinary students. Between speeches, students shared examples of traditional Japanese clothing, a chorus performed two Japanese songs, a group of young students from Camas showed off their Kendo skills and more.
“This is just a signal that this is a fresh start for spring,” Edwards said of both the event and the blossoming trees.
