In mid-March, a group of nearly 50 Michigan State University students boarded a bus bound for two manufacturing facilities with deep roots in Japan’s Shiga Prefecture, the landlocked region surrounding Japan’s largest freshwater lake — Lake Biwa. The relationship that trip drew upon was nearly 60 years old.
The sister-state partnership between Michigan and Shiga was formalized in 1968, bringing together two regions — a world apart — but both deeply defined by great bodies of fresh water: Michigan by the Great Lakes and Shiga by Lake Biwa. What has blossomed from that original agreement includes meaningful student exchanges, annual exchange missions and the Japan Center for Michigan Universities, or JCMU, a consortium-run education abroad program that places Michigan students on the shores of Lake Biwa in Hikone, Japan.
Keiko Nakajima, the 25th official representative dispatched by the Shiga Prefectural Government to Michigan, organized this year’s bus tour, which is funded by the MSU Asian Studies Center. The two companies on the tour were Asahi Kasei Plastics North America and Daifuku North America, both rooted in Shiga and operating largely out of public view despite their outsized presence in daily life. Daifuku makes automated conveyor systems that sort luggage in airports around the world, and Asahi Kasei manufactures high-performance plastics and polymers.
“It may come as a surprise,” Nakajima said, “but certain Japanese companies operate with an American-style culture and environment. We hope this helps students build a more varied image of Japanese business.”
The international business course behind the tour, IBUS 211, co-developed by Japanese instructor Mariko Kawaguchi and Sarah Scott of the Broad College of Business, was designed to close the gap between classroom theory and factory floor reality. Scott learned of Kawaguchi’s proposal through her work on MSU’s Japan Council and immediately recognized what it could become.
“It seemed like an excellent opportunity for students,” Scott said, “and presented an opportunity for cross-disciplinary collaboration between the Broad College and the Department of Linguistics, Languages and Cultures. Partnering on the course and the bus tour is truly a win-win for everyone.”
Japanese companies account for more than 39,000 direct jobs in Michigan.
“Experiential opportunities allow students to see the theories they learn in class put into practice,” Scott added. “For an international business course, that means gaining direct insights into how topics such as foreign direct investment, tariffs and the importance of culture and intercultural communication directly influence business operations.”
Three students on this year’s tour have already been to Japan. Colton Doiron and Megumi Togashi spent this past summer at JCMU in Hikone. Oscar Labit traveled to Shiga as a delegate on the Michigan-Shiga Goodwill Mission in July 2025 and lived with a host family. While there, he had the opportunity to meet with prefectural officials alongside Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Doiron came back from Hikone with a new appreciation of how to be good host. He took note of the unique lake culture, the sincere welcome extended to JCMU students by locals who knew the program well. And this semester, when Japanese exchange students arrived at MSU, he prioritized organizing special outings and made introductions to help them feel more at home.
“Being at JCMU heavily influenced how I treat study abroad students now,” he said. At Daifuku, he recognized something he had absorbed abroad: the company’s guiding philosophy of long-term thinking, of asking how a business endures a century rather than a quarter. “They kind of carried that with them,” he said.
Togashi, who is Japanese American, found in JCMU a kind of clarification. Raised speaking Japanese at home but educated in American schools, she arrived in Japan knowing the language but not quite knowing herself in it, and she arrived with a level of context most students don’t have. Before the JCMU summer program began, she spent a month staying with a family in Tokyo, visiting 15 to 20 museums and historical sites across the city, which broadened her understanding of the diverse history, culture and art of the country.
The contrast between Tokyo and Hikone became its own lesson. “Shiga, and specifically Hikone, is very much a smaller town, almost suburb-like, like Midland County, where I’m from,” she said. Moving between the two cities sharpened her sense of Japan’s regional variety in a way no classroom could.
The summer at JCMU also helped Togashi build her confidence in speaking Japanese and, on the bus tour, to approach Japanese employees at each company, ask for business cards in the traditional manner and better navigate the formality those exchanges require. She also carried that regional awareness into her observations of the companies themselves. “I think it’s important to remember that people are from specific locations in a country, rather than just assuming they share the same experiences as everyone from that country.”
Labit, whose entry point was citizen diplomacy rather than education abroad, came away with a conviction about what the Michigan-Shiga partnership does right: It keeps going. His hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, technically maintains sister-city ties too, but the contacts have not persisted. Michigan and Shiga have sustained the relationship for nearly 60 years, and he believes the reason is fundamentally human.
“Regardless of political, business and cultural sharing,” he said, “the most important connection is between citizens because that’s how you break down barriers and sow the seeds for a plentiful future.”
Nakajima is thinking toward 2028, when the partnership turns 60. The volunteers who sustain it on the American side, she noted, are largely alums of the educational exchanges — people who went to Japan as young individuals and returned to Michigan committed to the relationship.
“Encouraging the younger generation to participate,” she said, “will be the primary engine for ensuring the long-term sustainability of our partnership.” “Success,” she added, “would be fostering students who become bridges between economies, between people and between two places that chose, a long time ago, to keep finding each other across the water.”
