Palmer celebrates Sister City, plans fund-raiser for Japan

PALMER — For her first exhibit as director of the Palmer Museum of History and Art, Melissa Jenski was handed a doozy.

The plan at the start was to display all the gifts Palmer has received from its sister city of Saroma, Japan. The exhibit was planned to celebrate the 30th anniversary of that relationship.

Simple enough, right?

But there wasn’t any kind of central repository for the gifts. Some were at the senior center, some at Palmer High School, others at city hall and still more in storage.

It took about a week to get it all together.

And then, in the middle of their planning, a massive earthquake and tsunami sent the nation of Japan into disarray. Saroma escaped relatively unscathed, but with all the suffering around that island nation, city leaders quickly decided that the exhibit opening should be expanded into a larger charitable effort.

Speaking Wednesday, Jenski had a draft of all the events that have been added to the opening. Scheduled for Sunday, starting at 2 p.m., it’s now been dubbed the Saroma Festival and is happening at both the museum and the Palmer Train Depot.

George Carte, responsible largely for creating the sister city relationship, will talk, as will current mayor DeLena Johnson. There will be haikus and aikido, acupuncture presentations, a silent auction, sumi-e painting, Tomodachi Daiko Drummers, and a room set up for Zen medication instruction.

Jenski said that though the drum performance is exciting, she’s most eager to see the traditional tea ceremony, which takes about a half hour to perform.

“I’ve seen drummers before, but I haven’t really seen a tea ceremony,” she said.

Days before the big day, Jenski was still hard at work. She’s lining up someone to play the koto — another of Saroma’s gifts. It’s a 7-foot-long stringed instrument with a very distinct sound.

Jenski said she’s been told Saroma has a similar collection of gifts from Palmer, though she’s not 100 percent sure what it includes.

“I’m told that they have a display case in their city hall,” she said.

As for the museum’s display, although the cases are full, there’s work there to be done as well.

“We’re hoping to get a little bit of signage to explain everything,” she said.

She said the dolls on display are fascinating. They’re all one-of-a-kind and highly detailed. She’s been told that a lot of Japanese girls have similar collections, though she assumes few are as elaborate as Palmer’s.

And what will you see there? The list includes at least one sword, a set of chunky wood-shafted golf clubs, samurai helmets and a flurry of origami paper cranes, to name a few.

“Lots of these things are just amazing,” she said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.