Story by Kathy McPherson
Masaki Okawa ’77 attended Durham Academy for only one year — 1976–1977 as an AFS Intercultural Programs exchange student from Japan — but those nine months represent decades’ worth of impact on his life.
“I owe so many things to my year at DA,” Okawa said when he returned to campus for Homecoming Weekend and his 45th reunion last September. “It's strange because it was only one year, my senior year, but that year changed my life forever.”
It was the third time Okawa had returned to DA. He visited in 2007 to participate in his 30th reunion activities — marking the first time he left Japan since 1977 — and also visited DA in 2017. After his 2007 visit, Okawa wrote a letter to his math teacher, Dr. Steve Davis, to tell him about the impact the teacher had on his life.
Reflecting on his senior year at DA, Okawa said “the most distinctive thing I learned from Durham Academy is that everything has to be seen from more than one frame of reference. … It's easy to say A is better and B is worse, but that's not true.
“What I want to say is I learned to appreciate or respect the differences at Durham Academy. Of course, I learned English, I learned mathematics, physics, and I owe everything, my entire existence, to Durham Academy, Dr. Davis and those teachers.” When Okawa was on campus in September, he participated in dedicating the STEM building's math faculty office in honor of Davis.
Photo by Kathy McPherson
Okawa had been studying English for five years when he came to Chapel Hill in July 1976 to live with his host family, DA students Emily Oliver ’80, Todd Oliver ’84 and their parents.
“It was very different and very difficult because I couldn't understand what was going on around me. I didn't understand English at all, not at all. It was very difficult to follow the classes, especially English and U.S. History. Those two subjects were very, very difficult for me.”
AP Physics and AP Calculus were not as challenging. “Those two — well, those are very difficult courses — but still, they have physics and maths, so language was not a big deal for me.”
Okawa said the Upper School was very different then. Students used pencils to take notes during class because “there was only one computer terminal on campus, which [classmate] George Williams used.”
He remembered that he was the only Asian person in the class of 1977 and was one of only two students of color in the class. He was amazed when Head of School Michael Ulku-Steiner told him students of color now comprise 45% of DA’s enrollment.
Okawa returned to Japan after his year at DA, graduated from Nagoya University, earned a law degree from Kyoto University and works in Tokyo, a city with a population of 14 million. He doesn’t practice law, but works to help U.S. and international companies get patents.
“The patent firm I work for is very old. It was established in 1902. The founder of the patent firm was general counsel to Gen. [Douglas] MacArthur and had a very strong connection with the U.S. We have many American clients — let's say, 95% of our clients are American corporations.
“We work for companies such as Microsoft, Pfizer, Honeywell, John Deere. I'm in the electronics, computer, communications and internet section, so some of the inventions I handle are from Microsoft. Also, recently the headquarters of Honeywell moved to Charlotte, so interestingly, I write many emails to them.”
Writing emails to a multinational company headquartered in North Carolina’s largest city is a quantum leap from 1976, when Okawa learned he was headed to North Carolina and had no familiarity with the U.S. state that would be his home for a year.
It was Okawa’s father who encouraged him to study and stay in the U.S. Okawa grew up in Ito, a resort town about two hours from Tokyo. His father, a university professor who commuted between Ito and Tokyo, had traveled to the United States as a tourist.
Okawa remembered his father saying, “Masaki, hey, you have to go to that great big, great country to see things. He didn't specify what I should do, but he said, ‘Why don't you apply to this [AFS exchange program]?’ If he didn't, maybe I wouldn't have come.”
His life-changing experience as an exchange student has led to Okawa serving as an interviewer for Japan AFS for 30 years.
Coming to the U.S. for his senior year of high school meant Okawa started college a year later than his classmates because in Japan school starts in April, not in August or September. “I had to wait until the next spring to go to college,” Okawa said. “If I didn't come to the U.S., I would have gone [to college] in 1977 but I had to wait until ’78.
“Some people said that you shouldn't do that, because you can go to the university right away. But to me, it was not a bad choice because I got so many things from my experience. If I didn't come to the U.S., my life would have been not very different from other people in Japan. My life has been different from my, let's say, high school classmates in Japan, because I came to the U.S. and attended DA.”