For high school teacher Rene Mills, her only exposure to Japan until recently was her grandfather's recollections of his trips to the Far East as a seaman with the American shipping giant Lykes Lines in the 1920s and 1930s.
Mills, a humanities and English teacher at Edward Reynolds West Side High School in Manhattan, remembers hearing her grandfather, Fred Berger, tell riveting tales about his journeys to Japan as she sat on his lap.
For Barbara Tanzman, an art and technology teacher at Brooklyn Technical High School, Japan is a new addition to the list of countries she knows firsthand, having visited last summer for the first time.