San Jose has eight sister cities, from Okayama to Dublin.  Here’s what that means

Walk into the Japanese Friendship Garden in Kelley Park and you are standing inside a friendship that is almost 70 years old.  The city built the garden in 1965 as “a symbol of everlasting friendship” with Okayama, Japan, and patterned it after Korakuen, the famous garden in Okayama.  Okayama is one of San Jose’s eight sister cities, and it was the first.

Here is what a sister city is, who San Jose’s eight are, and what the city gets out of them.

What a sister city is

A sister city is a long-term partnership between two communities in different countries.  Sister Cities International, the national nonprofit founded in 1956 to support these ties, says a relationship becomes official when the top officials of both places sign an agreement.

The idea came out of the Cold War.  President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched it at a 1956 White House conference on “citizen diplomacy,” the notion that ordinary people could build trust between nations even when their governments did not get along.  Today the group says it serves programs in more than 400 American communities, linked to more than 1,800 communities in more than 140 countries.

San Jose was in at the start.  City reports say San Jose was a charter member of the national network and was invited by the federal government to form one of the country’s earliest ties.

City Hall does not run the day-to-day work.  Each relationship is run by a volunteer nonprofit, which a 2016 city review found typically had 10 to 25 active members.  A June 2025 city report says the city gives each active group up to $3,000 a year in reimbursable expenses.

The eight, in the order they joined

• Okayama, Japan (1957)
• San José, Costa Rica (1961)
• Veracruz, Mexico (1975)
• Tainan, Taiwan (1977)
• Dublin, Ireland (1986)
• Pune, India (1992)
• Ekaterinburg, Russia (1992)
• Guadalajara, Mexico (2014)

The same June 2025 report lists four of the eight as active programs today:  Okayama, Dublin, Pune and Guadalajara.

Okayama, Japan:  the oldest friend

San Jose and Okayama signed their agreement on May 26, 1957, according to the Consulate-General of Japan in San Francisco.  A 2016 city memo calls it the third sister-city tie formed anywhere in the United States.

Okayama is a city of about 717,000 people that faces Japan’s Seto Inland Sea.  Its Korakuen garden is billed by the garden itself as one of the Three Great Gardens of Japan.

The ties are personal.  In April 2025, a 20-member group from Okayama’s city council and chamber of commerce visited San Jose, the first such delegation since 2017.  Okayama is planning an indoor sports arena, so the visitors toured SAP Center and took in a Sharks game.

Students go both ways.  Six San Jose high school students spent a week in Okayama on an exchange, the 2025 report says, and eight Okayama middle and high school students were set to spend a week in San Jose in summer 2025.  San Jose-Okayama Sister Cities, the volunteer group, scheduled a homestay trip to Okayama for July 20 to 27 this year.

Floods damaged the garden in 2017.  An invitation sent on behalf of Councilmember Bien Doan set a reopening ceremony for May 3, 2026, with a new Taiko Bashi bridge and water back in the ponds.  Okayama has asked San Jose to send a delegation in 2027 for the 70th anniversary.

Dublin, Ireland:  a run, and a scholarship

The Dublin tie began in 1986 between San Jose Mayor Tom McEnery and Bertie Ahern, then Dublin’s lord mayor and later Ireland’s prime minister.  Dublin City, the area its city council governs, had 592,713 people in Ireland’s 2022 census, and 27% of them were born outside Ireland.

Many San Joseans know this relationship without realizing it.  The San Jose Shamrock Run, which the city calls San Jose’s leading St. Patrick’s Day event, sold out in March 2025 with more than 2,300 runners and helps pay for the Pat McMahon Scholarship.  The Dublin group also runs a graduate exchange, started in 2012, between University College Dublin and San Jose State University that includes an internship at a Silicon Valley tech company.

The group says it was the first graduate-level scholarship exchange offered by a U.S.-Irish sister-city program.  Dublin’s lord mayors visited San Jose in 2023 and 2024, and four San Jose council members went to Dublin in September 2024.

Pune and Guadalajara

Pune, India, is the second-largest city in the state of Maharashtra.  The district government calls it “The Oxford of the East” for its schools and says it is home to information technology, engineering and auto industries.  The San Jose Pune Sister City group says the pairing was proposed in 1989 because the two cities are similar in size, climate and education.

Guadalajara joined in 2014, the newest of the eight.  Its city government says it was founded for the final time in 1542 and now anchors a metro area of just over 4 million people.  It hosts an international book fair, the FIL, started in 1987, that the city calls the second most important in the world.  A 2016 San Jose memo says the city added Guadalajara knowing its first Mexican partner, Veracruz, had long been inactive.

The quieter four

San José, Costa Rica, shares more than a name.  Costa Rica’s national museum says it became a city in 1813 and the country’s capital in 1823, and grew on coffee and tobacco.

Tainan, Taiwan, is the island’s oldest city and its former capital, according to Taiwan’s tourism agency.  It is known for the Yanshui Beehive Fireworks Festival.

Veracruz, Mexico, was the main port of colonial New Spain.  Mexico’s national history institute says Hernán Cortés founded the first town council of New Spain there on April 22, 1519.

Ekaterinburg, Russia, sits on the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains.  It was called Sverdlovsk from 1924 to 1991, the year before San Jose’s tie began.  The 2016 memo listed it as inactive.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the city faced questions about whether to cut the tie.  In June 2022, then-Mayor Sam Liccardo said the city had written to community leaders in Ekaterinburg to express outrage, but would not end the relationship.  “If we terminate a ‘sister city’ relationship because of the evil actions of a national regime, then the entire program has little purpose,” he said.  The city’s 2025 report still counts it among the eight.

What San Jose gets out of it

City reports list what the groups do:  student exchanges, scholarships, visiting delegations, film showings, equipment for city community centers and the “Downtown Doors” art project.  The city’s own 2016 review was frank that the volunteer groups’ activities “typically bring social and cultural, rather than economic, benefits.”

The Dublin group makes an economic case anyway.  It says 40% of foreign direct investment in Ireland comes from within 25 miles of San Jose.  Its past scholars have gone on to jobs at Apple, Intel and Cypress, the group says.

For most residents, the payoff is simpler:  a koi pond in Kelley Park, a St. Patrick’s Day run downtown, and a reason for a San Jose teenager to spend a week with a family in Japan.