Helena High celebrates Japanese sister school with visit from Kumamoto principal

Six years after a partnership between Helena High School and a Japanese high school was born, a Kumamoto principal visited the Queen City on Friday to officially sign a document fortifying the sister-school program between the schools and take in American education.

Masataka Watanabe is the principal of Senshu University Kumamoto Tamana High School, located in Montana’s sister Japanese prefecture — similar to a U.S. state — of Kumamoto.

Kumamoto and Montana have exchanged educational, agricultural and cultural celebrations since 1982, when the relationship was established as an ode to former Montana U.S. senator and US-Japan ambassador Mike Mansfield.

But the sister-school partnership of Tamana High School and Helena High School is far more recent, beginning in 2020 with the efforts of former Helena High Principal Steve Thennis and a celebratory Zoom call during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After Thennis retired in 2024, new Principal Brian Kessler kept the program going, and Helena High School social studies teacher Lauren Gustafson led several waves of students through calls and letters exchanged with Japanese classrooms. She will be expanding the program to Capital High School, where she will be teaching next school year, under one “sister city” program.

Watanabe arrived in Helena on Wednesday and observed multiple classes, chatting with students in and out of the Japanese program.

Japanese and American school systems are very different, but there was plenty the students could learn from each other, Watanabe thought.

While American high schools tend to send students from classroom to classroom, each specialized by subject, Japanese schools have students stay in place while teachers come to them.

It tends to feel much more communal and “familial” in Japan, and teachers often build a deeper relationship with each student, Watanbe said.

But the American style was very individualistic, giving students the “freedom” to make their schooling path, he said.

Beyond the literal structures of school being different, he enjoyed watching the contrast in mannerisms and social etiquette between Japanese and American students. There seemed to be a mutual admiration between each nation’s youth, he said.

“American students like anime and manga, and they are very curious about Japanese pop culture,” Watanabe said. Anime refers to Japanese animated TV shows or movies, and manga is Japanese comic books, both of which have exploded in popularity in the United States since the 1980s.

“At the same time, Japanese teenagers, they love American individualism,” he continued. He added that teenage rebellion is universal across cultures, and the Japanese students can find a lot of excitement in American traditions of self-definition, like dying hair and testing authority.

That initial curiosity makes way for deeper understanding of each other’s ways of life, Gustafson said. Some of the students she’s worked with in the Helena High School Japan Committee, the formal name of the program, have set their sights on studying abroad.

For sophomores Myla Dahlke and Greta Petersen, both 16-year-old students on the committee, the international Zoom calls were some of the coolest exchanges.

“I don’t think I’ll forget that,” Dahlke said. “They were right there.”

Hopefully the next exchange will be in person, as the school is planning a potential December trip to Japan, Gustafson said.

“I’d start this in kindergarten if I could,” Gustafson said. “The world is such a big, big place, and this gives the students a taste of how much out there there is to see.”