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Expanding horizons and shrinking the world
Curiosity about and openness to other cultures lead to a friendship that spans 40 years.
by Melanie Zuercher
It’s been said many times, in many ways, that Bethel students seem, in high numbers, to develop and keep a particular “curiosity about the world.”
Some of the evidence for that can be seen in the places graduates have gone after finishing college and the network of relationships they build that reach around the world. One special reunion during this year’s Alumni Weekend, May 21-22, shows this is not a recent phenomenon.
Doyle Preheim ’63, Santa Fe, N.M., grew up on a farm near Freeman, S.D. When it came time for college, “I didn’t even consider another school,” he says. “It was almost an automatic pipeline to Bethel, at least for Mennonites from Freeman.”
In the middle ’60s (the height of the Vietnam War years) and married to his first wife, LaDonna, Doyle needed to find an alternative service assignment. He chose to take a position through the General Conference Mennonite Church, teaching conversational English for three years, 1966-69, in Miyakonojo, Japan, on the southern end of the island of Kyushu.
Miyakonojo was the hometown of Toshihiro (whom friends and family call Hiro) Fukudome ’72, a high school student at the time Doyle arrived. “I was a curious kid,” Hiro said. “I excelled in English.” He wanted to learn more than he was getting at school, so he joined one of Doyle’s classes – and came to respect his teacher.
“I have a memory of Hiro and his father coming up our walk,” Doyle says. “We invited them into our tatami [front] room, and I remember us sitting there, talking about where Hiro might go to college in the United States.”
“Hiro didn’t want to go to the East or West Coast, where he would have been in a Japanese ‘bubble,’” says Connie (Harms) Fukudome ’71.
“I didn’t have connections to prestigious schools,” Doyle adds. “But I knew Hiro’s intention was to improve his English, so I thought about Freeman Junior College, a small school where he’d have lots of individual attention. My parents [Celia and Chris Preheim] were still alive then, still well and farming.”
So Hiro went from his hometown of 100,000 or so to the tiny town of Freeman in the middle of the American Great Plains. The Preheims immediately took him under their wing, introduced him to everyone in the community and quickly became “like my parents,” Hiro says.
“The larger Preheim family adopted Hiro as their own,” adds Doyle.
After two years at FJC, it was time for Hiro to think about completing a four-year degree. “Galen Regier [who ended up going elsewhere] and I came to visit Bethel,” he says. “I was considering other schools, like Northwestern University, but I felt this was a good school. I don’t remember how I finally decided.”
Meanwhile, Connie Harms had been growing up east of Newton in the Whitewater community. She was the first in her family to go to college (a younger brother followed) and she chose Bethel.
She had already developed an interest in other cultures, starting in fifth grade when her family hosted a foreign exchange student from India.
At Bethel, she and Hiro ended up as co-workers in the cafeteria. “I always said I wanted to know more about Japan,” Connie says. “But we actually didn’t date in college.”
Connie, who got her degree in elementary education, went to the Netherlands right after college, and then taught three years in Hutchinson.
When Hiro came to the United States to study, he says that he thought “I would either be a professor or go into diplomacy. After finishing at Freeman [and taking six months off to go home to Japan], I began thinking that teaching might not be what I wanted to pursue.” He began looking at business in addition to diplomacy and ended up majoring in economics at Bethel, where J. Lloyd Spaulding became a mentor with whom Hiro kept in touch until Dr. Spaulding’s death.
Though Hiro and Connie didn’t date while they were at Bethel, the seed of interest had definitely been sown.
After graduation from Bethel, Hiro joined Sanrio – the company perhaps most famous in the United States for the “Hello, Kitty!” brand. Through Sanrio, he was “associated with Hallmark for about four years. I promoted Snoopy and all kinds of things.”
Because of his connection to Hallmark, Hiro made frequent business trips to Kansas City – and he renewed his acquaintance with Connie during those times. In 1973, Connie went on a “literary bicycle tour” to Japan through Fort Hays State University, and visited Hiro in Tokyo.
They got engaged later that year and in 1974, they married in Connie’s home church, Grace Hill Mennonite. Celia and Chris Preheim attended, Doyle sang at the wedding and Doyle’s brother-in-law, Palmer Becker, officiated.
Hiro and Connie maintained their relationship with the older Preheims until their deaths – Celia in 1998 and Chris in 2004.
“We wrote to Doyle’s parents every Christmas,” Connie says. They visited the Preheims as a young married couple and also later with their children, Eugene and Marie.
However, after the wedding, Doyle mostly lost contact with Hiro, he says, except for the news he got from his parents. After finishing his term in Japan, Doyle went to graduate school in southern California and eventually to a long career teaching music and directing choirs at Goshen (Ind.) College, as well as raising two daughters, before retiring to Santa Fe in 2003.
Hiro earned an M.B.A. at the American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird) in Glendale, Ariz. Over the next 12 or so years, he changed jobs several times – from Polaroid (two years, in which the family lived in Boston) to director of Tupperware Japan to president of Mattel Japan. For the last 14 years, he has been president and representative director for Chicago-based ACCO Brands Japan, which does book binding and makes paper shredders, among other things.
Connie lived in Japan for 30 years. In 2006, she retired after teaching 25 years at the American School in Japan, Tokyo, and in 2007, she moved to Redmond, Wash., where the Fukudomes owned a house. Daughter Marie (who pronounces her name the Japanese way, in three syllables: Mah-ree-ay) works for the Hyatt Hotel Group in Chicago. Son Eugene is married to Angela, a Filipina, and the father of the Fukudomes’ grandson, Max. Both Angela and Eugene are doctors in Boston – Eugene is in general surgery residency, preparing to go into plastic surgery, while Angela is an ophthalmologist specializing in glaucoma.
“Angela and Eugene asked us a long time ago if we would live with them,” says Connie. “We said: ‘Eventually – yes.’ We now have a condo in the same complex they do in Boston.”
“I’m planning to retire sometime,” Hiro says. “I still enjoy my work.”
The Fukudomes and Preheims (Doyle and Mary Jo Goering ’67 married in 1988) reestablished contact in 2009, when Connie sent an e-mail: “We’re coming to Santa Fe for a quick weekend trip, for the 70th birthday celebration of an international school colleague who lives part-time in Santa Fe. Can we stop and see you?” The immediate response: Yes!
Ever since she and Doyle married, Mary Jo says, “When we would go to visit Doyle’s parents, they would always talk about Hiro and Connie. The contact [Hiro and Connie] kept meant so much. As a newcomer to the family, I picked that up right away. They would share the [Christmas] letters and were so proud of Hiro.”
The Fukudomes and Preheims had a reunion during Alumni Weekend 2011, which was the 40th anniversary year for Connie’s Bethel class. In addition to the time the four of them spent visiting, they also went together to see Lloyd Spaulding’s widow, Blanche, at Kidron Bethel Village near the Bethel campus (Mrs. Spaulding died June 25). They hope to get together again in 2012, when it’s time for Hiro’s 40th class reunion.
The first time she met Connie and Hiro, Mary Jo says, “I felt like these were friends I’d always had but never met until that day. Sometimes you meet people like that.”
Mary Jo points to her time teaching English in Congo for two years after college as “a formative experience I couldn’t have had any other way.” Doyle adds, “[Experiencing other cultures] gives you a curiosity about the world.”
And, perhaps, makes you seek out mentors, welcome a young foreign student as if he were family, and weave a web of relationship that remains tight even after 40 years.