At least part of the problem is a clash of management cultures. American colleges tend to be democratic institutions, with decisions made jointly by trustees and administration officials, with input from faculty, alumni and students. But in Japan, Okinaga, 58, runs Teikyo like a family business. He founded the school in 1966 and built it into one of Japan’s five largest universities. In recent years Okinaga saw that many Japanese students were eager to learn English, so he took his school multinational. For $12 million he bought controlling interest in Salem College in West Virginia. Since then he has added Post College in Waterbury, Conn., Marycrest College in Davenport, Iowa, and Westmar. He purchased a vacant campus in Denver for $7 million and renamed it Teikyo Loretto Heights. The plan had another element: because Japanese schools charge entrance exam fees, Teikyo stood to profit from luring applicants to its overseas campuses.
Though Okinaga and his wife sit on the boards of the American schools’, they have allowed a fellow countryman to take the lead at three of their American campuses. Takashi Yamanaka, a businessman from Japan, scouted U.S. colleges for Okinaga and brokered some of the purchase deals. Yamanaka, in turn, recruited Des Moines lawyer Robert N. Helmick, 33, secretary general of the U.S. Golf Federation, as a colleague and ally. Some staff members complain that Yamanaka makes arbitrary decisions. At Westmar, for example, he informed the faculty that he had personally exempted the Japanese students from the school’s English competency requirement. At Loretto Heights, Richard Koeppe, a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, resigned from the board this month charging that trustees were kept in the dark. “[Yamanaka and Helmick] never called board meetings,” he says. But Helmick, a Loretto Heights trustee, says that the board was included on all decisions. “The management style is just like that of any other American school,” he says.
The Teikyo colleges are, in fact, like any other American school–except for the presence of so many Japanese students. Populations vary: at Teikyo Post, only 52 out of about 2,100 students next year will be Japanese, but the enrollment at all-Japanese Loretto Heights will be 455. Teikyo wants its students to experience an American education. Many Japanese admire higher education in the United States; they believe it fosters creative thinking better than their own highly structured learning-by-rote system. Since classes do not have translators, new students spend the summer working on their English before the fall term. So far the results have been mixed. Richard Fleck, an English teacher at Loretto Heights, believes the writing skills of last year’s entering class now equal “pretty intelligent American high-school [students].” Other assessments are less encouraging. Gregory Clapper, who recently resigned a professorship at Westmar, says a former colleague told him about a history midterm exam this summer. Of the three Japanese students in his class, one didn’t show up, another stared out the window and the third jotted down a few sentences and left.
For many of the students, the American experience has been disappointing. The idea was that Japanese students would mix with Americans and perfect their English. The two worlds have met but not really interacted. “[It’s] like a junior-high-school dance,” says Scott Swanson, an English as Second Language teacher at Teikyo Westmar. “You’ve got one group on one wall and another group on the other. They really want to talk with each other but they’re scared.”
Some Japanese students aren’t prepared for small-town American college life. For those expecting Sunset Strip nightlife, a town like Salem, W.Va. (population: 2,706) where the local cafe is a haven of sophistication, comes as a blow. A homesick group at Westmar bicycled 120 miles to Omaha, Neb., in a quest for Japanese food last year. Even though Denver offers more amusements for Loretto Heights students, a big city has its drawbacks, too. Six students were beaten in a racial attack last fall; Denver residents rallied to support them. But by the end of the year 70 students had withdrawn, some of them disaffected in part by the attack.
Nonetheless, the Teikyo team intends to keep giving it the old college try. The resignation of the presidents doesn’t disturb Helmick. “Presidents move on to bigger and better things,” he says. Teikyo has raised faculty salaries by as much as 30 percent and given local economies a boost by importing young and affluent Japanese consumers. Perhaps the setbacks are merely growing pains. For now, Okinaga has no plans to expand: “Five colleges in the United States are enough, I think.”
title: “Coming To America” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-08” author: “Christina Le”
PERCENTAGE OF FOREIGN VISITORS TO THE UNITED STATES
1986 Canada 41.6% Mexico 24.0 Other 19.3 Japan 6.5 U.K. 4.3 Germany 2.6* France 1.7 2000 Canada 30.1% Other 29.1 Mexico 17.4 Japan 12.2 U.K. 7.0 Germany 4.1 France 2.2 *WEST GERMANY. SOURCE: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
title: “Coming To America” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-03” author: “Gladys Kuhn”
The truth is more complicated, but no less compelling. In real life the lad, whose name is Edwin Daniel Sabillon, made a few things up. His mother is alive and well and living in Honduras. So is his grandmother. His father, Grevis Sabillon, died last year–from AIDS, not a hurricane. The boy has relatives in Hialeah, Fla., and for about two months this year, Edwin lived with them. But when they insisted he had to go to summer school, he lit out for New York–where, last week, he wowed cabdriver Jose Basora, the cops of the 43d Precinct and the news media. “The women officers at the station house wanted to take him home,” one detective says. So did hundreds of New Yorkers, who flooded the phones with adoption offers.
His story fell apart about 24 hours later, when New York cops reached his relatives in Florida. Now, his Aunt Aurora says, “I can’t have him in my house–I’m afraid that he will leave again.” His grandmother, in Honduras, says she wants Edwin to come home but also believes the boy should be in reform school. Late last week Edwin was being held at a New York hospital, pending the outcome of medical testing for tuberculosis.
But as New York Police Commissioner Howard Safir told NEWSWEEK, the boy didn’t make up his entire journey. Edwin had in fact traveled alone from Honduras to the United States, and he was every bit as resourceful as he claimed to be. He was raised by his grandmother, says Hector Manuel Turcios, a child-welfare official in Edwin’s home village, San Buenaventura. “He was kind of a street kid–he sold corn tamales and bread, and the money went to the family. That’s how they lived.” Last September, Edwin left San Buenaventura for Miami to find his father, whom he had never seen. But when he got to Texas, he called his relatives and was told that his father, terminally ill with AIDS, was going home to die. Edwin got home in time for the funeral. In February, he sold his bicycle and disappeared again. This time, he made it all the way to Hialeah–and eventually New York. “He still believed his father was alive,” his aunt says (denial is not uncommon among kids who lose a parent to AIDS). “He wanted to go look for him.” Now she just hopes a family in America will adopt him and give him the kind of life he was searching for–just the happy ending a summer adventure deserves.
title: “Coming To America” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-09” author: “Cynthia Brenneman”
NEWSWEEK: When you were just starting to tour in the U.S., some of your American marketers wondered if you might change your lyrics for American kids. They wondered if they would know that “mosh banana” was “mashed banana.”
Murray Cook: I had a theory fairly early on that children don’t learn those cultural differences until they’re a bit older. They’re just learning about language anyway, so they can handle the differences, especially in the age group we’re dealing with. They’re still learning what things are called. We say things differently, and they seem to accept that quite readily.
You do 300 shows a year and they’re very physical. Do you ever hurt yourself?
We did a fairly big tour in Australia and at end of the year and toward the end of the run, Anthony [the Wiggle in blue] hurt his back quite badly. We had a chiropractor and a physiotherapist working together so he could continue. But it’s a very physical show, and we’re getting older. Greg [the Wiggle in yellow] has fairly chronic knee trouble, too, mostly from jumping up and down. He has occasionally missed shows. We have an understudy system.
Talk about the Wiggles’ transition from a band to a brand.
Well, as with most things we do, it happened gradually. Until fairly recently, we haven’t really been that great on having meetings and stuff like that [laughs]. Things happen fairly organically with us. But yeah, early on, we just wore colored shirts, and now we’ve got the Wiggles logo on there. That was so people could see us straight away and know that that was us. And in Australia, any merchandising we’ve done has mainly been a response to people asking us for things.
Let’s talk about the licensing deal with Walt Disney International for Asia to create clones of the Wiggles–first in Taiwan and then in Japan, and possibly Korea, Thailand and China. Is this because you guys can’t be everywhere at once?
We just felt that in non-English-speaking countries, it wasn’t really going to work with us. Basically they’re not going to understand what we’re saying. Even if you dubbed it, I don’t think that’s as effective. Disney has the structure in places in places like Asia, where it would take us a long time to set up. It just makes sense to do it through a third party.
You watched them cast the Taiwanese version. What was that like?
A little surreal. But it was quite moving actually. It’s something we’ve created. Seeing someone else do it was both really fun and quite moving. It was an emotion I didn’t really expect. I felt quite proud of it. The people they’ve chosen are great. And there’s a twist: the red Wiggle is a girl.
Some analysts predict that with the additional versions of the Wiggles, this could be a billion-dollar business. How do you respond to that?
Mostly we sort of laugh at it. We’re not really businessmen, we’re just musicians and entertainers and teachers. We’re from that background. We don’t think too much about the dollar side of things, I know that sounds a bit ingenuous. But we have business people who look after most of that.
Jerry Seinfeld brought his daughter backstage to meet you after a concert. Robert De Niro and John Travolta also brought their kids.
That is really amazing to us. It happened again today, doing “Live with Regis and Kelly.” Jerry and his wife brought their little girl along again. You sort of go, “Oh, hi, how are ya?” and then afterward you go, “That’s so strange, saying ‘hi’ to Jerry Seinfeld like he’s a friend.” We don’t really know him. But I guess enough to say hello. That’s exciting for us too, we’re still pretty star struck.
title: “Coming To America” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-05” author: “Francisco Saavedra”
But in just a few weeks, the Obvio– which Machado’s designers modeled after an old Brazilian buggy–started getting second looks. Maybe it was the green-and-tangerine finish, or the trendy Brazilian Havaiana flip-flops glued to the gas and brake pedals. The engine–built to burn gasoline, ethanol or even natural gas–surely helped. “We had to rope it off at the San Francisco auto show” last November, Machado says. It wasn’t just idle gawking: by fall 2007, the first batch of a total of 50,000 Brazilian Obvios (some models fitted with electrical engines) will hit the United States. A separate deal to send another 100,000 to Japan and Europe is also in the works.
The Obvio–it’s Portuguese for “obvious”–owes much of its success to serendipity. Some months before its U.S. debut, a small, environmentally friendly California-based company called ZAP (Zero Air Pollution) had placed a $1 billion order with DaimlerChrysler to import “smart” minicars to the U.S. market. But the deal fell through. With “green” subcompacts sprouting up everywhere, ZAP put down $700 million for a 20 percent stake in the Obvio because “these are absolute pocket rockets,” ZAP CEO Steven Schneider says. “These cars are where muscle cars meet green cars.”
American consumers may not be as juiced. The Obvio is beyond small. Just nine feet long, it is 34 inches shorter than the Mini Cooper. (“Roadkill,” sniffed a skeptical blogger.) More important, while Brazilians are proud of their fleet of hybrid cars that can run on gasoline or alcohol distilled from sugar cane, the advantages of “flex-fuel” engines may be limited in America, where ethanol is still scarce.
Still, the micro’s moguls are counting on the allure of a car that goes from zero to 60 in 4.2 seconds and is competitive when it comes to fuel efficiency. The Obvio gets 40 mpg on the highway, 29 in the city, which is better than the Mini. At $14,000, it retails for about half the price of a Toyota Prius. (A sportier Obvio will fetch $28,000.) “If it does what it’s supposed to do, there is nothing else [like it] out there,” says Philip Reed, consumer-advice editor for online automotive Web site Edmunds.com. There’s certainly nothing else out there that looks like it.
