Judy Kassouf Cummings

To a fourteen-year-old girl living in Lakewood, Ohio, it seemed both exciting and exotic to receive letters from 7,000 miles away.  Not everyone at St. James Catholic School was eager to correspond with an overseas pen pal, but I jumped at the chance.  Perhaps it was because our family already had cultural ties overseas and I was used to being different than my Irish-Catholic classmates.  Perhaps it was my intellectual curiosity; I yearned to know what lay beyond Lake Erie and the borders of my home state. Whatever the reason, I remember my hands perspiring in anticipation as I opened my first letter.  Years later, I still recall the address on the envelope: 

        2 Ku Kashigama

        Hagi-City

        Yamaguchi-Ken, Japan 

My pen pal's name was Miyoko, and her father was on a Tokyo Olympic's steering committee.  “Did I like sports?”  she wondered.   And would I accept a small gift from her? 

“Yes and Yes,” were my eager replies.  Excitedly, I awaited her second letter, which arrived two weeks later.  Inside was a crimson-colored, enamel pin with five interlocking silver rings and the inscription: Tokyo 1964.

While I never met my Japanese pen pal, I recall the Tokyo Olympics as being transformative for Japan.  It was as if the Phoenix had risen from the ashes of World War II destruction; the city of Tokyo entirely rebuilt for the event.

I remember watching the Olympics on a black and white TV.  Although they were the first Olympics broadcast via satellite in color, our family didn't own a color set at the time.  Still, it was a broadcasting feat as an advertisement touted: "Tonight, see history made on your TV set.  Not filmed but live – sent by an amazing 83lb satellite parked over the Pacific.”

And somewhere across the span of nearly 7,000 miles, two teenage girls sat riveted to the events of the Olympics in Tokyo.  One of them wore a small, enameled pin.