Ella Mironescu — A Year in Japan

Our speaker On July 28th was Ella Mironescu, 19, a recent graduate of Waterloo Collegiate Institute who spent just over 10 months on a Rotary Youth Exchange in Hakusan, Ishikawa Prefecture — a small city in rural Japan, roughly in the middle of the country, surrounded by rice fields and known as the rainiest prefecture in Japan. She has been back for about a year and is heading to the University of Guelph this fall to study biomedical sciences, with her sights set on becoming a veterinarian.

Ella was quick to point out that Japan was not her first choice destination. In fact, she didn’t particularly want to go. She is now one of the program’s most enthusiastic advocates and recommends it to everyone she meets.

 

Hakusan has a population of around 110,000 on paper, but is really a collection of small towns and villages grouped together — Ella’s actual neighbourhood had only a couple of thousand people. She biked 20 minutes through rice fields to school each morning, navigating a stream of middle schoolers who, she noted, had no concept of moving out of the way. She veered into the rice field twice. She considers that a reasonable outcome.

The city sits in a prefecture that rarely sees temperatures below minus five in winter but compensates with near-constant rain and thunderstorms. “For living in Kitchener-Waterloo, this felt pretty countryside to me,” she told the group.

 

The Rotary Youth Exchange places students with four different host families throughout the year, rotating every two to three months. Ella describes this as one of the program’s greatest strengths: each family offered a completely different window into Japanese culture and daily life.

Her first family was large and lively — six people in the house, chaotic mornings, and exactly the kind of energetic welcome she needed to shake off the shock of arrival. Her second family was quieter and more traditional: sliding wooden doors throughout, a slower pace, and a host mother who worked at a daycare and therefore spoke to Ella like a five-year-old. This turned out to be exactly the Japanese instruction Ella needed. “I really got to learn the basics — I was five and growing up,” she said.

Her third family included an elderly host grandmother whose memory issues meant she asked Ella the same five questions at every single dinner for two and a half months: What’s your name? How old are you? What school do you go to? What do your parents do? Ella never did figure out how to explain water treatment and financial planning in Japanese. She still can’t.

Her fourth and final family had the deepest impact. Ella and her host mother connected so genuinely that the host mother flew to Canada just two weeks before this meeting to visit. They spent much of their time together on road trips around Japan — a natural fit, since the host mother had previously road-tripped across the entire United States.

 

Ella’s school, Matto High School, ranked near the bottom of its prefecture academically — a fact a Japanese friend discovered on a school ranking website and communicated with visible alarm. Ella’s takeaway was different: a school that doesn’t care about marks is a school that cares about fun.

She learned makeup techniques. She perfected her bangs. More meaningfully, she joined the archery club and learned Kyudo, traditional Japanese archery — a discipline with a much larger bow than Western archery and a form Ella describes as requiring muscles she did not initially have. She took weekly traditional drumming sessions from an instructor who had performed around the world. She made pottery at a town renowned for ceramics. She participated in school sports days as the tall foreigner everyone assumed was good at basketball and volleyball. She was not, but she accepted the flattery graciously.

On her first day, a group of girls pointed at her and told her to sit with them. She has been friends with them ever since.

 

Ella attended Rotary meetings every Thursday evening for the entire year — mandatory attendance, no exceptions. She understood almost nothing that was discussed, except once when someone mentioned the Beatles, and she caught the song they played. This did not diminish her appreciation for the club.

Her Japanese Rotary Club operated very differently from ours. Members were prominent business and community leaders who preferred writing cheques to giving time — a function, Ella observed, of Japan’s demanding work culture. But their influence in the city was significant. Through the club, Ella met the mayor, appeared on television, was featured in the newspaper, and was invited to speak on local radio.

The club also organized an all-Japan tour for exchange students, which included a visit to Hiroshima and the Peace Memorial. And when Ella missed the school archery competition, her Rotary club organized a separate competition just for her. She competed. Her team still lost. She considers it one of the highlights of the year.

 

Ella entered a Japanese language speaking competition open to exchange students across Japan. She placed first in her district, first across her group of districts, and fourth in all of Japan. She also passed the conversational Japanese certification exam — with a score of 51, one point above the passing mark of 50. The certificate is on her LinkedIn. She requests that no one look too closely at the number.

 

Ella returned to Canada a different person than the one who left — quieter and more reserved before the exchange, more confident and open now. She credits Japan with teaching her how to form genuine connections, how to let things unfold without overthinking them, and how to be comfortable in unfamiliar situations. Friends from the exchange have already visited her in Kitchener; she has visited them in return. The friendships have outlasted the year.

She is heading to Guelph this fall. She took the exchange knowing it would cost her a year of school, and she does not regret it for a moment.

 

Thank you to Ella for a genuinely wonderful morning, and to the Rotary Youth Exchange program for making experiences like hers possible. If you know a young person who might be interested in the program, this is the story to share with them.