Kia Ora, ladies and gentlemen.
I’m pleased to acknowledge all the familiar faces and good friends of ours. Today I’m especially happy as we are here to celebrate 25 years of sister city relationship. It’s our great pleasure to renew our friendship with you.
Personally, when I look back into the past, it was 2009, more than 10 years ago, that I first joined the Minoh Hutt Friendship Club. For short, we call ourselves just Hutt Club.
Right after I retired from the job I joined the Hutt Club. So far I was lucky enough to visit your beautiful city two times, first in 2012 and the second time in 2018. In both cases we were cordially welcomed.
We met many friends and we paid visits to a number of beautiful places. I was especially impressed when we visited the local winery and tasted the quality wine of New Zealand. It was a time of my life.
In our Hutt Club, we have a number of events that we do both monthly and annually. This year, however, because of the pandemic situation of the Covid-19 we were forced to give up some of the regular events. Very often we had to communicate each other over the email correspondence. We only hope that we will get rid of this nightmare and return to normalcy.
One more thing I’d like to mention here is that we could finally complete the translation of your book, Lower Hutt -The First Garden City and published its Japanese version only a couple of months ago. We sent some copies to your city hall and if you are interested we would like you to take a look. Looking back into the past five years those were the days of hard work. It took us five years from the day we started the translation to the day we finally published the book. The leading figure of this project is Mr Sato, our former president. Let’s give him a big hand.
Thank you for your attention and once again I would like to propose a toast. Congratulations on the 25th anniversary and God bless you. Cheers!
Mr. Kazuhiko Kawashima
Hutt Club Member
July 2020