When a 16-year-old Kathi Mendes of Riverdale, Calif., learned her family would be hosting an exchange student from Japan, she was far from excited.
"I was not happy right away," recalled Mendes, whose last name is now Musgrave. "Nobody asked me. I had my own room, and now I was supposed to share my room with someone I didn’t even know."
Her late mother, Tina Mendes, had OK’d the idea when the local Lions Club asked the family for help in hosting an exchange student.
"My dad would have never done it," Musgrave added. "He was just an old Portuguese farmer/dairyman."
She still clearly remembers the day when her family drove from their farm, about 25 miles south of Fresno, to a small airport to pick up 20-year-old college student Takako Tanaka.
It marked the start of an incredibly close friendship between the two women and their families that would endure well beyond those three weeks in the summer of 1974.
This week, the families are celebrating the 40th anniversary of their friendship with a weeklong vacation in Hawaii, a midway point for both and a place for them to let loose and have some "condensed fun," as they like to call it. It will also be a time to look back and reflect on how it all started with a simple student exchange.
A VETERINARIAN, Toshifumi Tanaka wanted one of his three children to someday take over the family business in Kitakyushu, Japan. That dream eventually fell upon his youngest, daughter Takako. But like her siblings, she too took a different path, deciding to study socio-linguistics.
Her late father wasn’t going to give up easily, though. He wanted her to attend the prestigious Japan Women’s University, partly so she could meet and marry a veterinarian, so he offered a trip to California as an enticement. (As it turned out, she married a banker, Satoru Kazaoka. She’s now Takako Kazaoka.)
Her father’s motives were not as simple as matchmaking. The elder Tanaka, a Lions Club member, saw his daughter’s journey as a way to promote friendship and understanding between Japan and the United States.
Once in the U.S., it took some time for Kazaoka to warm up to her American hosts.
"The first few days she was here, she wasn’t comfortable speaking English, so she was real quiet," recalled Musgrave, 55, who still lives on the family farm. "But finally, she said that she just decided, ‘With all these blabbermouths here I better start talking or they’re going to drive me crazy.’ So she did, and about the third day she started talking and she never shut up!
"And I loved that even though she was older than me and way smarter and better educated than I was, she made it very easy for me to understand things she was trying to explain to me."
The Mendeses took Kazaoka to Sacramento, San Francisco, Yosemite National Park and other sites. By the end of their short time together, Kazaoka and her host family had bonded so much that tears were inevitable when it came time to say goodbye.
"I’ll be back," Kazaoka promised. "Don’t worry, I’ll be back."
She would keep her promise, but not before Musgrave persuaded the Lions Club to sponsor the California teen for the same exchange program the following summer.
And just as Kazaoka had, Musgrave found a second ohana in her host family. Along with the sightseeing and new cultural experiences, Musgrave was moved by the elder Tanaka’s firsthand accounts of World War II. Although he was already a practicing veterinarian when the war broke out, he had spent some time as a soldier.
During her Japan stay, Musgrave took a train ride north to Hiroshima with Toshifumi Tanaka for the observance of the 30th anniversary of the atomic bombings.
"It made such an impression on me, what I saw there," she said. "I had no idea how horrible that really was.
"He knew that I was very, very touched. So on the train ride home, he told me, ‘Make me a promise that just as you and Takako, and my wife and I and your parents, have reached across the Pacific to shake hands and to become friends, that you will continue to bring people into this, and we will build a bridge — a bridge of understanding, a bridge of acceptance and a bridge of love and friendship so that we never, ever have to see that kind of thing again.’
"I’ll never forget how important that was to me. We have lived that, Takako and I, for sure."
As with many pen pals, it would have been easy for the two women to eventually lose touch. After all, this was long before Facebook and Skype made it so much easier to communicate over distances. But over four decades, they continued to exchange letters and, later, emails, sharing life’s many joys and challenges — college, dating, marriage, children, illness, divorce and death.
The bond of friendship even extended to Musgrave’s sons, Andy and Steve Gulley, and Kazaoka’s daughter, Yukako.
"If you see them together, you will understand," Musgrave said. "They’re like siblings. … They FaceTime and Skype all the time."
When Yukako went abroad to attend the California State University, San Francisco, she "went home" to Riverdale on weekends.
There were also many visits. The Tanakas visited Riverdale and Musgrave took her family to Japan twice. Kazaoka, now 60, also makes annual trips to the U.S. for her job as an exchange program associate at California State University, a position she still holds.
The two friends were together in Seattle, along with Musgrave’s husband, Wayne, during the devastating Japan earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. They spent hours trying to contact Yukako in Japan, eventually getting in touch with her through Facebook.
"It was hard to have my best friend live far away when bad things were happening. … But then she would get here, or I would get there, and it would be like all is good," Musgrave said. "Like, ‘OK, I just went through some really crappy stuff. But now that I’m with you, it feels like you’ve been with me all along, and everything’s OK.’ We’ve got four days or we’ve got eight days or 16 days, whatever time we have, we always say, ‘Let’s just have fun.’ We call it ‘condensed fun.’"
THE TWO families, including Kazaoka’s siblings and Musgrave’s son Steve and his family, began arriving for their weeklong Hawaii reunion on Friday. On Sunday, they visited the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and Pearl Harbor, a reminder of the deep connection between Japan and the U.S. that brought the two families together.
"I wish Kathi’s mom and my dad were still alive and could be with us for this reunion," Kazaoka said. "I really owe them for this experience.
"My relationship with Kathi and her family is the treasure of my life."
