This year marks the 75th Anniversary of the Seikei-St. Paul’s exchange program. All year, we will be celebrating the long history of this invaluable friendship between two schools separated by geography and culture yet fortuitously brought together by this one big idea.
How did these two schools on opposite sides of the world connect?
After the close of World War Two, Sixth Rector Henry Kittredge wanted to expand student admissions to other countries, thereby exposing St. Paul’s students to a multitude of other cultures. Kittredge wrote in his 1949 annual report: “If the School is to do its duty in preparing American boys for the kind of life into which they will emerge, we must give them every opportunity to associate at close range and for considerable periods of time with boys of other nationalities. If our School is to live it cannot remain in a sort of rarefied isolation any more than our Nation can.”
Kittredge enlisted the help of David McAlpin Pyle, a SPS Sacred Studies teacher who had lived in Japan, and who had connections at Seikei Gakuen, a private high school located just outside Tokyo. Pyle contacted English teacher Mamoru Shimizu, who encouraged the idea on his end and helped to find and support the first student.
That first student was Minoru Makihara ‘50. He arrived at SPS in the fall of 1949. You can read his now-famous Hugh Camp Cup speech HERE. Makihara was followed by Tatsuo Arima ’53 and Yoshiaki Shimizu ’55. Together, these three would be lifelong supporters of the Seikei exchange and the driving force in continually moving the program forward.
A lot has happened since those first three pioneers, but the deep connection between the schools remains the same. During the 70th anniversary in 2019, current Rector Kathleen Giles wrote:“For the past seventy years, and through all of the astonishing winds of change that have enveloped the world, the Seikei-SPS partnership has remained a steady beacon of generosity, understanding, and optimism. This long partnership, founded upon one “generous idea” in a world ravaged by war, has given rise to decades of good will and mutual inspiration.”
To learn more about the Seikei-St. Paul’s exchange, come visit our fall term archives exhibit on the third floor of Ohrstrom Library or check out A Generous Idea by David T. Dana III ’55.
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