Addie Broyles, right, hosted a 13-year-old Japanese exchange student named Rio, left, as part of the Austin-Oita sister cities exchange. It was a week full of discoveries, Broyles writes.
Handout photo
My family recently hosted a 13-year-old student from Japan through an exchange program run by the Austin-Oita Sister City Committee.
Oita has been a sister city with Austin for 35 years, and the ties remain strong thanks to the committee that plans events like the Oita Festival, held in Austin each September, and the student exchange program.
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Join the exchange
The Austin-Oita Sister City Committee is accepting applications for Austin students who want to travel to Oita this summer. Six students will be chosen, and it’s open to 9th through 12th graders, including graduating seniors. No need to know Japanese, but it’s a plus. Applications are due March 23. (There is also a business internship program open for applications through September.) Visit austinoita.org.
For this January exchange, six Japanese middle schoolers were picked from more than 70 applicants. We were assigned a 13-year-old named Rio, whose description as having an unflappably positive attitude proved true. We met at the airport and bonded over pizza and ice cream on the first night, and by the next day she was helping my husband make dinner and showing us how to play Nine Tiles, a Japanese pattern-matching game she loves.
It was a week full of discoveries. She came bearing omiyage, or small gifts to share with friends: matcha Kit Kats, apple cider gummies that fizz in your mouth, small cakes wrapped in beautiful paper, and furoshiki, the traditional Japanese wrapping cloth. All week, we snacked on the treats and played with the papercraft and origami she’d packed in a roller suitcase nearly as big as she was.
We tried to give her a taste of American life: a fountain Coke from P. Terry’s, a night playing pickleball with friends. We gawked at the produce section of Central Market and the steamy fajitas at Chuy’s. She overcame her fears and climbed the indoor rock climbing wall at Crux. We crafted, cooked and stocked up on omiyage for her to share back home. (She was particularly excited about bringing home a bottle of Dr Pepper for her parents.)
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During the school day, the students took English classes in the morning at the Texas International Education Consortium, an Austin-based organization that works with programs like these. They spent the afternoons exploring Austin, visiting the Bullock Texas State History Museum, Terry Black’s Barbecue and The Mosaic Workshop, an East Austin mosaic studio where the students sang songs and made mementos.
In Oita, they have Austin Day, where teachers take kids out in the forest and go camping, said Kristie Bryant, volunteer chair of Austin Sister Cities International. “I consider it to be diplomacy on a people-to-people level,” she told me.
The idea of sister cities dates back to President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration. In the wake of both World Wars, Bryant said, “Eisenhower knew that if you know your neighbor, you won’t go to war with your neighbor. He wanted people around the world to know how similar we are.”
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Austin has had sister cities since connecting with Saltillo, Mexico, in 1968, and now the city has partnerships with 14 sister cities and two friendship cities. Not all sister city programs have student exchanges, but Oita and Austin have been sending students between the cities since 2023.
We were honored to have Rio as a guest, but it didn’t take long to realize she was also an ambassador for her country. I loved hearing about her life in Japan, her family, her hobbies, her love of the band Mrs. Green Apple. She never tired of answering my questions about how things worked where she lived and the differences she was noticing between our respective corners of the planet.
All in all, she stayed with my family for a week, plus a few extra days due to a cold snap that delayed the flight home. Rio said one of her favorite parts of the week was a trip to Buc-ee’s, but mine was when she proudly showed off maps and information about Oita’s famous hot springs, a park known for monkeys and kabosu — the citrus (and namesake of the dog that launched a thousand “doge” memes) that this part of Japan is known for.
Thanks to the sister city relationship, Austin athletes have participated in the world’s largest wheelchair marathon in Oita, Oita artists have shown their work in Austin, and Austin musicians have played festivals there. Of course, we fell in love with the idea of visiting Oita ourselves. But tourism isn’t the only goal of these exchanges.
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We met other host parents and participants who believe cultural exchange is an important part of our global society. We gained a new appreciation for Austin and for what it takes — especially for a young person — to travel to the other side of the world.
Addie Broyles, a former food writer for the Statesman, now produces The Invisible Thread newsletter on Substack. She is the coauthor of “How to Study Abroad: (And Why You Should, Even in This Economy).”