Over the years, you may have noticed visitors from Japan in New Paltz. Perhaps your children saw some Japanese students visiting our schools, or perhaps you saw folks in our shops downtown. Yet, a lot of people still don’t realize that New Paltz has a sister city in Japan. Come October, we will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of our sister city relationship with Niimi, Japan.
The New Paltz International Exchange Association (NPIEA) traces its roots to 1998 when a sister city relationship was created between New Paltz, NY and Osa. Then Mayor Tom Nyquist and his wife Corinne attended a sister city conference in Japan and came home after being guests at the home of Mayor Kasumi Umeda of Osa, a small town in the southwest of the large Japanese island of Honshu. Osa was a perfect choice to be New Paltz’s sister city because the two towns were similar in population and geography, and we shared many common concerns.
As the relationship between the two towns grew, the NPIEA was created to enable the “sister city committee” of New Paltz to act as an official entity. The relationship grew to include yearly visits by adult delegations, alternating between the two towns each year, a yearly visit of students from Osa Junior High to New Paltz Middle School and New Paltz Middle School students visiting Osa, and an exchange between SUNY New Paltz and Niimi College.
In February 2005, Mayor Jason West led a delegation to Osa for the 50th anniversary of Osa as a town. This was the last official visit between Osa and New Paltz. In April 2005, the towns of Osa, Shingo, Tetta, Tesei and Niimi were merged together into one political entity called Niimi City. (For perspective, this can best be compared to merging the Village of New Paltz, the Town of New Paltz, Gardiner and Highland with the City of Poughkeepsie and calling it Poughkeepsie City.)
In 2010, New Paltz Village Mayor Terry Dungan visited Niimi with Dave Caccamo and Maureen and Ed Rogers. An official document was signed by Mayor Dungan of New Paltz and Mayor Masao Ishigaki of Niimi, formalizing our Sister City relationship through Sister Cities International. The Niimi relationship is considered a continuation of the relationship begun with Osa.
Members of the two town’s committees often say, “A friend in need is a friend indeed.” This refers to September 11, 2001. A group of Osa folks had just spent a week in New Paltz and were headed home on the morning of September 11 when the attacks happened. A group from the NPIEA went to Greenwich, CT to pick up the group from where an airport limo had taken them and brought them back to New Paltz. The group actually grew from ten to 14 because four Japanese travelers reached out to Professor Kiyoshi Yamauchi, who is a frequent visitor to New Paltz, because they realized that he spoke English and they did not know what was going on. New Paltz told Professor Yamauchi to invite them to come to New Paltz also. This tragedy brought the two town’s that much closer together. When Craft Magazine asked people to make handmade Christmas ornaments to be given to families who lost a loved one that day, Osa sent over 375 beautiful wooden, ceramic and hand-stitched ornaments made by all different folks in Osa including Mayor Umeda and the recently retired superintendent of schools Katsumi Okada.
Looking towards the future, the NPIEA would like to see more New Paltz folks get involved in the sister city committee. In September 2019, a delegation of adults and college students visited New Paltz. Letters from the mayor and the chairman of their sister city committee invited us to build up our student exchanges again, and they hoped that we would send a student delegation to visit. This writer, and then school principal Dr. Mario Fernandez, hoped to plan a visit by New Paltz High School students, aiming for Spring Break 2021. Then Covid hit and all future plans got put on hold. Hopefully, this will be able to happen in the future as the Covid crisis settled down.
Niimi has invited New Paltz to send an adult delegation to Niimi in October this year to celebrate the 25th anniversary of our sister city relationship. To get planning started, the NPIEA is holding a meeting on Wednesday, May 17, 7 p.m., at Village Hall. We encourage New Paltz residents to join us and get involved. It is important for people around the world to interact with one another. We have more things in common with our friends in Japan than we have differences. We would like to grow the sister city relationship by getting more New Paltz folks involved to keep this relationship sustainable for the future. For information, the NPIEA can be contacted at npieaorg@gmail.com.
Susan Sherburne is the secretary of the New Paltz International Exchange Association.
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