ANAHEIM : Japanese Students Help Fight Graffiti

When the junior class at the prestigious International Business High School in Tokyo was planning its trip to California, the students contacted the city to volunteer for a community service project.

Maybe we could work a day at an orphanage, the Japanese students suggested.

Well, we really do not have any orphanages in this area, city officials said, but we do need help painting over graffiti.

The students replied: What’s graffiti?

Thirty-seven members of the class got a firsthand look Monday at the aesthetic damage done by graffiti vandals as they spent three hours painting a stretch of wall along Lewis Street, a somewhat busy thoroughfare near the Santa Ana Freeway. It was the culmination of the students’ nine-day trip to the state that included visits to San Francisco, Los Angeles and Disneyland. They fly home today.

Previous cleanup efforts had erased most of the graffiti from the wall that the students were painting, but the bricks had been left a hodgepodge of various institutional shades of grays, browns and greens. The students’ job was to make the wall a uniform brown.

“What a bad thing to do to someone else’s property,” Hiroko Kawamura, 16, said through an interpreter as she used a roller to spread paint. “This is not pretty. It does not look nice.”

Graffiti, while not completely unknown in Tokyo, is very rare, the students said. Occasionally, vandals will paint their name on a park building, but graffiti is so unusual that it is lumped in with the other odd acts of vandalism that occur in the city of 8 million people.

The students could not envision needing a crew of nearly 40 workers to handle a vandalism cleanup effort.

When asked what would happen to a juvenile caught tagging in Japan, 17-year-old Koji Takahashi looked grim as he told of the consequences.

“He would be taken to the police station and scolded for an hour, maybe two,” he said. “Then they would call his parents. His parents would be very angry.”

First-time juvenile offenders caught in Anaheim face arrest, 200 hours of community service and the payment of restitution. More than 300 acts of graffiti vandalism are reported weekly in the city of 275,000 people.

Shinji Sumikawa, vice principal at the International Business High School, said the students on the trip are required to take part in community service projects. Another 170 students from the school spent Monday in the county cleaning up beaches, recycling products at landfills and bagging groceries at a food bank.

“That is the school’s philosophy, that students must help people and work in their communities,” Sumikawa said. In Japan, some students adopt older people and do their chores, while others work in children’s hospitals. “That they must work in their communities is the most important thing they learn.”

The students got a laugh when told that the clothes many had bought during their visit made them look like taggers. Some wore Los Angeles Raiders, Harley-Davidson and heavy-metal music T-shirts. Many wore their baseball caps sideways.

Takeshi Yoneda, 16, was wearing baggy black jeans, oversized tennis shoes and a red T-shirt that had a drawing of a can of spray paint on it. Next to the can was the phrase “high gloss.”

Takeshi said that when the group visited Carmel, he saw a boy roller-skating in a similar outfit. A skater himself, Takeshi went into a store and purchased an identical ensemble.

“I like the look,” he said.