Some Hollister Rotary Club members got a taste of home while
recently visiting Japan for the International Rotary
Convention.
Some Hollister Rotary Club members got a taste of home while recently visiting Japan for the International Rotary Convention.
Mary McCullough and her husband Gerald, who has been a Hollister Rotary Club member since 1980, traveled to Osaka, Japan in May to participate in the international festivities for the 18th year in a row.
While there, a Japanese friend of theirs, whom they met through the rotary almost 20 years ago, took them to Hollister’s sister city, Takino, Mary McCullough said.
“We were met by the city dignitaries and they treated us like a king and queen,” she said. “It’s nicer (than Hollister) – there’s much more public space and it’s all well-maintained.”
McCullough asked the mayor of Takino, who was taking the couple sight-seeing around the city, how two small, out-of-the-way cities on opposite sides of the world could ever become sister cities, she said.
The connection came 15 years ago through Ozeki Sake USA Inc., a sake company that has plants in both cites. At that time, both Hollister and Takino were about the same size with 17,000 people.
Hollister is now more than double that size, but Takino has remained a small, agricultural-based town, McCullough said.
“For a city that size it was absolutely wonderful. They have a bronze statue of a cowboy on a bronco from Hollister and a ‘Hollister Street’ right in the center of the city,” McCullough said. “It was quite a surprise.”
Hollister Rotary Club member Larry Barr, who will become the club’s new president in July, also attended the international convention, but did not visit Takino.
The event, which attracted 45,000 Rotarians from across the world, was interesting and helpful, but it was a sightseeing trip he took that affected him the most, he said.
“The one thing I wanted to do was go to Hiroshima. I had kind of been chastised by my peers… it’s kind of a morbid thing to do on vacation,” Barr said. “But it was absolutely moving.”
Hiroshima, which was ravaged when the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb in 1945 during World War II, has been successfully restored and has a peace park to commemorate the people who were killed, Barr said.
Besides the emotional impact from visiting Hiroshima, Barr was also impressed with the impact the Rotary has on the world, he said.
“This was an eye-opener,” he said. “I didn’t realize how big Rotary is and how much of an influence it can… have around the world.”
For more information on the Hollister Rotary Club, log onto http://rotary.hollisteronline.com
Erin Musgrave can be reached at 637-5566, ext. 336 or at
