This Nishimachi thing How two alumni have drawn on Nishimachi’s multicultural and multilingual ethos to become the humanitarians they are today. (The Internationalist Spring 2022 Vol 68)

Michael S. Strickland
(The Internationalist Spring 2022 Vol 68)

“I think it’s this Nishimachi thing where you only speak three languages,” laughs Sayaka Sato ’97, regional partnerships officer for the Asia and Pacific regional bureau of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) in Bangkok, Thailand, when discussing the advantages she gained from Nishimachi’s multicultural and multilingual ethos. “Nishimachi really helps you think that way—that you’re not special just because you speak English, and Japanese, and some other language”—in Sayaka’s case, French.

“I took French in seventh and eighth grade at Nishimachi,” Sayaka explains. “My sister Mizuki [Nishimachi class of ’91] said I should take it. I said to her, ‘Come on, it’s optional, it’s more homework, I don’t want to take it.’ But she said, ‘You should, you really should.’ And she convinced me to take it, even though it would be extra work—English was already hard enough for someone from a Japanese-Japanese family like ours!” 

Sayaka explains that one of the requirements for working in a United Nations agency like WFP is the ability to speak, read, and write at least two of the six official UN languages—English, French, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Spanish. Those two years of middle-school French at Nishimachi, plus the native fluency in English anyone who attends Nishimachi K–8 acquires, gave her the base she built on later to ace the language requirements of the UN’s Junior Professional Officer program in December 2009 and start her career with WFP. 

Although English and Japanese sufficed for the first three postings of that career—consultant at the WFP Japan Relations Office in Tokyo; program officer, first, at WFP’s Yemen country office in Sanaa (November 2010–May 2011), then at WFP’s regional bureau in Cairo, Egypt (June 2011–October 2011)—French was de rigueur for the four years (November 2012–December 2016) Sayaka spent at WFP’s country office in Bangui, Central African Republic. “You have to be fluent,” she explains. “It’s not like, ‘Bonjour, je m’appelle so-and-so’—you have to be able to do meetings and such. So my work in the Central African Republic was done almost entirely in French. I spoke French so much that I forgot English. Even my interviews with the media were in French.”

Opening doors 

“I also took French from sixth to  eighth grade at Nishimachi,” adds Fumitsugu Tosu ’94, Head of Program at WFP’s country office in Vientiane, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, “and then later in high school at the American School in Japan. I studied French a total of six years, but somehow it didn’t stick. But Chinese I learned later on in college—it just came more naturally to me. So my second UN language is Chinese.”

Fumi also comments on how the multilingual and multicultural atmosphere of Nishimachi, which he attended from first through eighth grade, laid the groundwork for his future career in WFP. “It’s sort of unfair,” he says, “but English is so important in these international organizations. Going to Nishimachi really opened the doors, both in terms of language and also these multicultural aspects.”

With students and teachers bringing the sociocultural wealth of at least four continents spanning both hemispheres of the world into the familial warmth of its cozy campus, “Nishimachi’s diverse environment,” Fumi adds, “is actually sort of a unique environment”—a diverse, unique place imbuing students with the confidence to feel competent enough to communicate sans contrainte.

Fumi further explains that his father, a professor of linguistics and anthropology with a specialty in bilingualism, went to graduate school in the US when Fumi was four years old. “When we went to the US,” he says, “we started having two languages in our life. We were there for two years and when we came back to Japan when I was six, my father was convinced that we should try to maintain our English and that the American-style of education was preferable to the Japanese system at the time. That’s why I ended up enrolling in first grade at Nishimachi.”

These multicultural aspects 

“The linguistic aspect brings us back to the multicultural aspect,” Sayaka comments. It’s not uncommonly the case that people who’ve received a less multicultural education find it harder to interact readily with people perceived as too different from themselves. But because Nishimachi is so diverse, one gets used to speaking to and interacting with people from different backgrounds and cultures from an early age. Such familiarity with difference that one acquires at Nishimachi breeds a sort of fearlessness, or “so-what mindset,” as Sayaka calls it, that makes engaging with a diversity of people almost effortless. “Because I was used to speaking to classmates from different countries—Pakistan, Singapore, China, wherever—I was not scared!” 

She further points out that, while some linguists insist that a major hurdle when learning other languages involves something called “linguistic distance”—the distance deemed further, the hurdle deemed higher, between, say, Japanese and English than between English and French—the inclusive, multicultural, anxiety-free environment cultivated by the students, teachers, staff, and parents at Nishimachi ensures that such “linguistic distance” need not be a barrier to language-learning at all. Even new students hailing from places as diverse, for instance, as Turkey, Ukraine, and Finland, quickly become, thanks to Nishimachi’s nurturing pool of cross-cultural teachers, as swimmingly at ease in both of the school’s social and instructional languages as they are in those they speak at home. 

Pin the label on the country

In addition to this “so-what mindset” deriving from the casual internationalism of Nishimachi’s “special environment,” Sayaka also points out that many of her classmates’ parents were diplomats. “I had one specific parent who inspired me,” she says. “This was during one of the bike trips that our science teacher Mr. Green used to host for the kids and their parents. I went on this bike trip and one day we played a board game where we had an unlabeled map of the world and a set of labels and you had to pick out at random the name of a country and pin it to where you thought the country was on the map. I forget which country I picked, but it was a very obscure one, and I just happened to know it, and my classmate’s father who was a diplomat was so impressed that I knew it. He said, ‘Good job!’ That really boosted my self-esteem.”

And it so happens that, owing to one of kismet’s myriad whims, just across the hall from WFP’s Washington, D.C., office where Sayaka worked as a government partnerships officer from July 2017 to March 2022, there was a think tank—and this same confidence-boosting father of one of her Nishimachi classmates was serving there as its director. “He was really high up in the State Department,” she says.

Humanitarian, wife, mother

“It’s not just school, but family also,” Sayaka adds. She explains that her parents owned a women’s apparel fashion brand and that her mother worked full-time as a fashion designer. “My mom was both working and cooking lunch for me and my sister Mizuki everyday,” she says. “It was not as normal back then as it is now to have a working mom, but she showed me that it’s possible to have a full-fledged career and be a mother at the same time.” 

Sayaka was following her mother’s example when she moved with husband Yoshiaki and daughter Yurika to Bangui, Central African Republic. “I first went with my family,” Sayaka explains, “because we thought that it was a nice place and it was categorized as a family duty station.” Even though “one of the principles of being a humanitarian worker,” according to Sayaka, “is that you don’t choose where you’ll be assigned” every few years, WFP workers are allowed to choose between a “non-family duty station”—such as Sayaka’s earlier posting to Sanaa—and a “family duty station”—such as Bangui was at the time. “Since I’m a humanitarian and a wife,” Sayaka clarifies, “whenever I apply to a new posting, I only apply if my husband says, ‘Okay, I’ll be okay if I go to that country.’”

“But when a coup d’état happens, it happens,” Sayaka emphasizes, “just like that.” What had been a family duty station when she and her family arrived in November 2012, suddenly turned, three weeks later, into a non-family duty station. “The rebels arrived the first week of December. It was around Christmas when we got on the UN plane.” While her husband and daughter were evacuated to Tokyo, Sayaka went to live in the neighboring country of Cameroon. There, on July 15, 2013, she recorded a video of herself celebrating, alone, her daughter Yurika’s first birthday. “Then I went back to Bangui,” Sayaka says, “but not with family. I went back to our apartment and literally everything was looted. It was as if I was moving in for the first time.”

Sayaka stayed on in the Central African Republic until the end of 2016. “Every six weeks I would go back to Tokyo from Africa, which takes three days, just to stay with them for three days, and then get back on the plane for another three days to go back to Africa.” Sayaka stayed on in CAR even after she became pregnant with her second child. “In a non-family duty station, you’re allowed to bring your family,” she jokes, “as long as that family isn’t born yet. I would hear explosions and shootings, and meanwhile my son was kicking me and my boss was saying, ‘You’re so brave…” Sayaka stayed on in CAR up to week 35 of her pregnancy—“The last week,” she explains, “you’re allowed to get on the plane to go home.” Sayaka’s first son, Eiichi, was born in Tokyo on December 14, 2016. 

The business of helping people 

“I come from a more traditional family,” Fumi counters, “my dad works, my mom doesn’t.” Still, he explains, there’s something about the nurturing multicultural environment he thrived in from first to eighth grade—characterized, on the one hand, by Nishimachi founder Tané Matsukata’s phrase, “Our ultimate goal is that every Nishimachi student learn to live harmoniously in, and contribute to, world society,” and, on the other, by a philosophy neatly summarized by Sayaka as “No stereotypes!”— which links up with his and Sayaka’s work both within WFP itself as well as in the international environments where they work. 

“Looking at my friends who’ve gone to Nishimachi,” Fumi elaborates, “we’re now in very different fields, but I feel that a disproportionate number of them are in the business of helping people, whether it’s UN-type work or other careers. So I think there’s definitely something about Nishimachi that helped guide us in this direction.” In Fumi’s own case, that “something” instilled by Nishimachi proved especially pivotal when he decided to switch careers from the business of seeking profit to that of helping people. 

My boss and his boss and his boss

Majoring in both Chinese and Economics at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, Fumi spent his first half dozen years after graduation as an economic consultant. “We would develop models, for example, to estimate financial damages to shareholders in lawsuits,” Fumi explains. “It was quite stimulating intellectually and I liked my colleagues. But there was one meeting, when I was about to turn thirty, where I had a kind of revelation—I saw my boss and his boss and his boss, and I could see where my life would go if I stayed in this job. That’s when I realized I had to make a change, that this was not a life-long career for me.”

“So I quit and over the summer of 2009 did a volunteer program in Kajiado, Kenya, a small town a couple hours south of Nairobi, near the border with Tanzania, where I was placed in a school and taught English and helped out where I could, and then I went back to graduate school as a way to change careers.”

Fumi applied to a program offered by Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs in New York that was new at the time, the Master of Public Administration in Development Practice. “What attracted me to this program,” he says, “was that it was more of a generalist program for practitioners who want to work in the field. We had courses in nutrition, agriculture, food systems, management, public health, and more.”

In October 2009, while still in graduate school, Fumi co-founded the US office of TABLE FOR TWO, a Japanese NGO that seeks, with its “meal sharing” scheme, to mitigate both obesity in overnourished parts of the world and hunger in undernourished parts. He continued to co-lead the operations of TABLE FOR TWO for two years after earning his master’s degree, until November 2013.

“Part of the work I did for that organization was to raise funds from the private sector for school feeding in East Africa,” Fumi says, “and one of the recipients for our funds was WFP. That’s how I started working with WFP, and eventually decided to work for WFP.” From November 2013 to February 2014, Fumi worked as a consultant in the nutrition unit of the WFP headquarters in Rome. “Then I switched over to the JPO program,” he says.

JPO

“Fumi and I are both alumni of this program,” Sayaka explains. The Junior Professional Officer program, utilized by a wide range of United Nations agencies, is a system of training young professionals for potential careers in the UN. Candidates typically have graduate degrees, at least two years work experience, and are sponsored by UN donor countries—Belgium, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Republic of Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. 

The time Sayaka and Fumi spent at Nishimachi helped them readily pass a hindrance that keeps all but 10% of those with the above qualifications from being accepted. Applying to the JPO program sponsored by Gaimu-shō (外務省), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Sayaka explains, “I stood out because my TOEFL score was perfect or almost perfect. And you can’t get perfect TOEFL scores unless you’re essentially a native speaker—TOEFL stands for ‘Test of English as a Foreign Language’ and it wasn’t a foreign language for me! You have to start English early enough so that you stand out.”

Once accepted to the program, Sayaka explains, “Gaimu-shō paid three years of my salary, hoping that I would get converted to full-time proper WFP staff. And I did. My first posting was to Yemen, November 2010, as a JPO.”

WFP and WFP and WFP

“But my initial encounter with WFP was actually in 2004,” Sayaka continues, explaining that, a week before graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Theology from Sophia University, Tokyo, in March of that year, she received an acceptance letter from her first-choice graduate school, Fletcher School at Tufts. “They said that, being a professional school, they’d like me to obtain some professional experience before going there.” Having already started a twelve-month internship in WFP’s Japan Relations office in January 2004, Sayaka reserved a spot in graduate school for the following year. She furthered her pre-graduate school professional experience with an internship in the legal unit of UNHCR Japan from February to July 2005.

Unlike Fumi, who worked for several years in the private sector, the focal point of Sayaka’s life outside of academia has been humanitarian work in either of two UN organizations, UNHCR and, mainly, WFP. “I’m like WFP and WFP and WFP only. I don’t know the outside world,” she says. 

However, Sayaka’s interest in the United Nations began even before she heard about WFP. “I learned the term United Nations in fifth grade,” she says. “We had a Model UN project at Nishimachi as part of social studies where every student was allotted a country. I remember it so well because it was not just a one-day event. Each of us did research on her allotted country, wrote to the respective embassies to collect more information, prepared talking points, came up with proposals and pledges, and practiced writing draft resolutions. I represented Venezuela. On the day of the Model UN General Assembly, when it was my turn to make a speech, I proposed to all member states to conserve water consumption by 10% to Save the Earth. It’s amazing how we were trained to do all this in just fifth grade. I still remember the skirt and sweater I wore, because I was so excited to be the delegate of Venezuela!”

Muchos años después—that is, many years later, Sayaka would almost get a chance to finally visit the country she had so proudly researched and represented when she was ten years old. In 2019, while she was based in WFP’s Washington, D.C., office, Sayaka went to Cúcuta, Colombia, on the border with Venezuela, as part of the USAID-funded operation serving hot meals to displaced Venezuelan children. “As the partnerships officer,” she comments, “I’m the person connecting the WFP office in Colombia with the donor, USAID.” At the time, the Venezuelan border was closed and WFP did not have an office inside the country. “Today, though, WFP does provide food assistance inside Venezuela through a school meals programme” she explains.

Saving lives

Sayaka explains how WFP’s slogan—Saving lives, changing lives—“Really depicts the nature of the work we do. First, saving lives. This is the emergency humanitarian work that WFP is best known for: providing food assistance to people in conflict zones, people affected by natural disasters, people displaced by disasters and conflict.”

For instance, much of the work Fumi was involved in during his time (March 2016–July 2019) in Myanmar before moving to Vientiane in August 2019 entailed providing emergency food assistance to people in Rakhine State during the Rohingya crisis beginning in 2016, and then again in Yangon and environs after the military coup d’état of 2021. “Last summer I went back to Myanmar,” he says, “to help out with our emergency response after the coup and I felt something really similar to what I felt in Rakhine State, where this terrible tragedy had happened—where the situation was quite sad, because I had been there during some good times in Myanmar. And now everything was being reversed—and yet people were trying to make the best of the situation and move forward.” 

Fumi further explains that, during his first posting as a program policy officer, from March 2014 to February 2016 in WFP’s country office in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, “The largest program we had there was to support the refugee camp in the northwest part of the country that was hosting refugees primarily from the Democratic Republic of Congo.” 

Changing lives

“The other part of our work,” Sayaka continues, “is changing lives—helping people who already have some sort of livelihood and work, but not enough yet to let them develop their lives in the way they want to and can really flourish. This objective takes more time, it’s not immediate in the way that emergency assistance is.” Sayaka explains that WFP is not as well known for this sort of resilience work as it is for the emergency operations for which it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. 

“One standard program that we have in WFP,” adds Fumi, “is called ‘Food Assistance for Assets.’ That’s a program where we provide food or cash in exchange for labor. With that labor we ask communities to build an asset that provides a long-term benefit. It could involve, for instance, building a rainwater collection tank, or clearing a path to the fields or to a market. The idea here is that by working on both of these aspects, you address the short-term impact of food insecurity through the provision of food or cash, but then there’s also an asset that provides longer-term benefits that contribute to long-term resilience to future shocks. So if there were to be a drought or flood, for instance, the community would be better able to deal with that situation long-term.”

Another aspect of this resilience work revolves around school feeding and gender equality. “Just take Laos as an example,” says Fumi. “One of the key objectives of our school feeding program is to ensure that, girls come to school—and the meals act as an incentive—and so, if girls come to school, they not only receive better nutrition in the short term, but they are also more educated, more productive, and marry later, all of which contributes to their long-term empowerment as well as long-term food security for the entire community, since they have the means to make a living and provide for their families.”

Let it begin with me

Both Fumi and Sayaka recall singing the school song, and how it links up with what they do now. But for Sayaka, the song had a more personal impact on her decision to join WFP.

“I attended Nishimachi from kindergarten to eighth grade,” Sayaka specifies, “so for nine years I sang the school song, ‘Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.’” She explains that what particularly struck her then, and has stuck with her throughout her career, making the goal of world peace and the organizations working towards that goal much more immediate and real, was the “Let it begin with me” part. 

“Because when you talk about world peace,” Sayaka says, “you feel like you can’t really make a difference, because it’s so macro, and you think that you as an individual can’t make an impact. But by repeatedly singing, ‘Let it begin with me,’ it becomes part of you. And so it wasn’t a difficult choice to make at all—it was so natural that I chose to work for WFP. I mean, if you want to find a workplace like Nishimachi—go to WFP!” Sayaka laughs.

“Nishimachi is a very special place, and if you join WFP, it’s just like Nishimachi,” Sayaka concludes—a special place where people from a variety of countries and diversity of backgrounds, cultures, and languages are all working together in different ways for a single priceless goal: world peace.