Nishimachi Kanji Monogatari (Nishimachi Report/The Internationalist Fall 2006 Vol. 38)

By David Green Former math, PE, and science teacher, 1977–2005
(Nishimachi Report/The Internationalist Fall 2006 Vol. 38)

Any student who studied at Nishimachi within the last twenty-five years is probably aware of the unique composition of the Chinese characters representing the school name, "nishi" plus "machi," that appear all over the school, on walls, on clothing, on printed material, on just about everything you can think of. You may even have wondered who penned the fluid calligraphy. Well, the history of how it all came about is about to be unveiled.

Let's go back a bit. At the start of the 1981–1982 school year, members of the Nishimachi boys' and girls' basketball teams and their coaches met to discuss our spring basketball trip to Kobe. This had been an annual event since 1977–1978 and was one of the highlights of the school year. It was a chance to play basketball with some of the international schools and Japanese schools in the Kansai area. It was also a chance to meet new people and see new parts of Japan. We always visited Himeji Castle so the students could see firsthand what they had been studying in their Japanese social studies classes.

One understanding shared by all was that the bulk of the money to be used for transportation to and from Kobe would be raised by the students, working together, before, during, and after school throughout the year. The class of 1982, that year's "senior" class, came up with an idea. They wanted to design a "Nishimachi" T-shirt to sell to students, parents, and friends of NIS and use the profits to help pay for their trip.

Miss Matsukata approved of the idea and suggested that the design and lettering should be simple and include kanji as well as Roman letters and that it should appeal to all. The business office agreed to lend us the money for the initial purchase of shirts, and we were ready to go.

Sasayama-sensei had arrived at Nishimachi to teach Japanese and shuji a year earlier and was an enormously popular Japanese teacher, not to mention an accomplished calligraphy artist. Basketball team members approached her and asked her to "write" the kanji to be used on "their" shirt. Although she felt her work would not be nearly good enough, she agreed to help. Those two simple kanji enlarged on the back of T-shirts in blue and in white that we know so well today were the work of Sasayama-sensei.

Thanks to the efforts of Sasayama-sensei and the members of the basketball teams and the cheerleaders, the printed T-shirts were immensely successful. Shirts were sold at the food fair in the fall and throughout the year. The profits that were realized from sales that year of shirts, as well as of hot dogs and "Vikingburgers," paid for our shinkansen tickets to Kobe.

The exchange with schools in the Kansai area continued through the 1986–1987 school year and then was discontinued. However, the efforts of that group of students with Sasayama-sensei, back in 1981–1982, lived on and on.

Sasayama's kanji eventually went beyond T-shirts. The Development Office got her permission to use them on stationery, and today we see that same symbol on letterhead and envelopes, on the website, and so on. Since August 2006, thanks to the generosity of our parent organization, Tomo no Kai, we also see those same kanji on the floor of the Ushiba Memorial Gymnasium, which is a fitting tribute to the ingenuity of the basketball teams twenty-five years ago and a source of pride for our sports teams, students, parents, and community today.