More than a decade ago, Ikumi Yoshimatsu chose the famous Martin Luther King, Jr. "I Have a Dream" speech to recite at her junior high school in Kyushu and the powerful words stayed with her.
"I studied about Martin Luther King, Jr. and I so respect and was impressed by what he did," the 2012 Miss International winner told third-graders at a New York school, recalling the difficulty of memorizing it with only an old cassette tape recording that her mother had given her.
Mesmerized by the Japanese beauty's story, the Brooklyn children from Public School 307 listened intently to her connection to the civil rights leader who mobilized more than 200,000 people in the U.S. capital nearly half a century ago.