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Resiliency, including the role women play in rebuilding their community after a disaster, will be the latest chapter in the unfolding story of Rikuzentakata and Del Norte County.

Del Norte will host 35 delegates from its sister community in Japan next month. The visitors include 12-13 principals and teachers from Rikuzentakata and nearby Ichinoseki, Del Norte Unified School District Superintendent Jeff Harris told the Wild Rivers Outpost on Thursday.

Another 12-13 delegates will take part in a series of workshops on women leaders in business, healthcare and government. Five Japanese high school students will also visit Del Norte County to spend time with their American counterparts.

The Japan delegation will arrive at 7 p.m. Dec. 8, said District 2 Supervisor Lori Cowan, who has organized the women’s leadership workshops along with Crescent City Councilor Heidi Kime. Their visit will start with a party starting about 30 minutes before the plane lands in Crescent City, Cowan told the Outpost.

“The more people from the community there the better,” she said.

The visit comes ahead of a feature story NBC Sports is expected to air during the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo on the sister city relationship, and its origins, between Del Norte and Rikuzentakata.
An NBC camera crew will document December’s cultural exchange, said Crescent City Mayor Blake Inscore. The consul general of Japan will also visit Crescent City from San Francisco to address the delegation, Inscore told the Outpost.

“(He’ll) show his appreciation for the continuing partnership between the two communities and between U.S. and Japan on a bigger scale,” Inscore said.

The latest visit of teachers and other officials from Japan to Del Norte County is funded through a $150,000 grant from the U.S. Embassy, Harris said. It builds on a cultural exchange begun in January focusing on working with students who have lived through trauma.

Local educators, such as Del Norte High School teacher Lisa Howard, introduced their Japanese counterparts to such models they use in the classroom such as Multi-tiered Systems of Support and Positive Behavioral Intervention and Support, Harris said. He said it involved exploring what those models look like and feel like with students from other cultures and what are “those universals” one can share with the other.

Harris said that work continued in June when a delegation of Del Norte County educators visited classrooms from preschool through high school.

“We had lots of conversations about how do you deal with children in trauma,” Harris said. “What does it look like? How do you deal with behaviors? One of the conversations was around the fact that you really don’t see overt and explicit behaviors in the vast majority of students because of their educational program and the cultures of their society.”

Multi-tiered Systems of Support is an educational model Del Norte County schools and others in California incorporate to address the social and emotional needs of students. Tier 1 offers support to all students. The second tier focuses on students that need additional social and emotional help while the third tier focuses on intensive social and emotional support.

In Japan, where high school students have to “test in,” many internalize their trauma, Harris said. Del Norte County students also often internalize their trauma, but there are also disciplinary issues that often lead to suspensions, he said.

Though Multi-tiered Systems of Support may be a model that’s new to Japan, Harris said many classrooms already have practices that address their students’ social and emotional issues.

“Things like having community lunches where the kids are preparing the plates for one another and for themselves and they’re cleaning up as a classroom and they’re doing all kinds of things,” he said. “That’s not something we would do here in the states because of laws and contracts, but it really builds a sense of community within the classroom and between the kids, so that’s an example we discussed while we were there, that’s really an MTSS piece.”

During the delegation’s December visit, Harris said he, Howard and other Del Norte educators will discuss what the second and third tiers of MTSS mean and how teachers in Rikuzentakata and Ichinoseki could incorporate those practices.

According to Howard, much of that visit will take place at Margaret Keating Elementary School in Klamath and at Smith River School.

“Those are schools in which, for trauma-informed practices and resiliency and the work that we do, are I would say exemplary sites,” she said. “We chose them because they’re sites where you can see the structures and teams in place and the practices readily available.”

One of the Empowering Resilient Women & Girls workshops, focusing on Del Norte women in business, will take place in Klamath. According to the workshop agenda, speakers will include Yurok business leaders and sisters Susan Masten and Jan Wortman, who own the Steelhead Lodge and Requa Inn respectively, and Alice Lincoln-Cook, a Karuk artist and teacher who lives in Klamath.
Crescent City business owners Kime, Gayle Hartwick, Gail West and Billie Kaye Tygart will also speak during the entrepreneurship workshop. The keynote speaker will be Dr. B. Wilson, of Humboldt State University who will talk about the importance of women in rural economic development.

Other native speakers will include Yurok Tribal Judge Abby Abinanti and Briannon Fraley, self-governance director for the Tolowa Dee-ni’ Nation. The workshops will also feature Del Norte Department of Health and Human Services Director Heather Snow, Dr. Donna Sund, Ellie Popadic, of Sutter Coast Hospital, and Del Norte Emergency Services Manager Kymmie Scott.

One of the speakers during the workshops, Hailey De Armen, was in high school when Kamome, the fishing vessel from Rikuzentakata, washed ashore on South Beach two years after the 2011 tsunami. De Armen, a licensed vocational nurse, and other students cleaned the barnacles off the boat and visited the Japanese community in 2014, planting the seeds of a relationship that has received international attention.

“She’s part of the original story,” Cowan said, “and so we invited her to join us.”

The Rikuzentakata delegation visit in December is part of an ongoing expansion of the relationship between the two communities that will include the NBC Sports feature at the Olympics, Inscore said. He said he reached out to local businesses including Rumiano Cheese and SeaQuake Brewing to increase buy-in from the Del Norte community in hopes that continuing the relationship will eventually be continued by people not affiliated with local government.

This also includes taking advantage of a potential marketing opportunity the NBC Sports feature may bring to Del Norte County, Inscore said. This is why the city, county and harbor has allocated funding toward a $59,000 public relations project headed by the Crescent City-Del Norte County Chamber of Commerce, he said.

“If you’re a business owner and somebody reaches out to you and gives you a reason why you should begin to think about this relationship and how that could benefit your business… I’m hoping that becomes the impetus for this new group of people who are going to take hold of this relationship and take it to the next level,” Inscore told the Outpost.

Though a public relations campaign to market and brand Del Norte County and its relationship with Rikuzentakata ahead of the Olympics seems unusual, cultural exchange programs that have started at a student level have led to business connections before, Roger-Mark De Souza, president and CEO of Sister Cities International told the Outpost. He pointed to a recent decision by Toyota to open a manufacturing plant in San Antonio, Texas, as an example.

“We recently had a major sister city meeting on Japan/Texas sister city relationships and we had representatives from Toyota manufacturing (say) ‘You know what, part of why we decided we wanted to have this plant in San Antonio was there was a strong robust sister city relationship,’” De Souza said. “They got to know the business environment and got to know the people. (Toyota) saw there was a degree of trust and saw they could do business there.”

That manufacturing plant will lead to employment as well as an interest in Japanese culture on the part of San Antonio’s youngest residents, De Souza said.

It also facilitates increased travel between the two communities with people having business interests and students interested in ongoing cultural exchange, De Souza said. This led to a direct flight from San Antonio to Tokyo, he said.

“It is not that far-fetched to see that sort of thing helping with tourism,” De Souza said, adding that the story of Kamome, Del Norte County and Rikuzentakata is a “crazy good story.”

Inscore said he and District 3 Supervisor Chris Howard hope to convince NBC to share their footage with television stations in Japan. Inscore said they have also spoken with Visit California, which has an office in Japan, as well as the u.S. Embassy in Tokyo. He said he and Howard hope Rikuzentakata will get the same kind of exposure Del Norte County receives from the NBC Sports feature.

Meanwhile, Inscore, who visited Los Angeles for the annual U.S.-Japan Council conference last week, said the story about Kamome is becoming known outside Del Norte County and Rikuzentakata.

“When I would start telling a story somebody would say ‘You’re the guy with the boat,’” Inscore said. “They would go get somebody and say ‘Hey, remember the story about the boat that made it across the Pacific?’ And they would say ‘Tell the story again.”

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