Indeed, she did.

Anderson, a 2008 graduate of Randolph-Macon, was teaching English in a coastal city of Japan when she was killed in the March 2011 tsunami. Anderson, who lived in Chesterfield County, also had graduated from St. Catherine’s School, which happens to be Mayberry’s alma mater, too. It was there that Mayberry came to know of Anderson as the students and faculty gathered to pray for her when it was learned she was missing and later raised money to benefit relief efforts in Japan in her memory.

“I called my mom,” Mayberry said after hearing about the January class, “and said, ‘What would you think about me going to Japan?’”

Mayberry, a sophomore, is back from the trip, and I met her in a coffee shop last week to hear about it. Though she hadn’t known Anderson personally, Mayberry felt connected to her through their common schools and their shared ambition: Mayberry is a psychology major and education minor who wants to become a teacher. “I really wish I’d known her,” Mayberry said. “She inspired so many people even before she passed away. All of St. Catherine’s knew her. All of Randolph-Macon knew her. Everyone knows in Japan she was such a great person. A great teacher.”

The R-MC class of seven students and two professors visited several of the schools where Anderson had taught during her 2½ years with the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme, including the last one in the coastal city of Ishinomaki. Anderson was last seen pedaling her bicycle toward her home after making sure her elementary school students were safe following a major earthquake that a few minutes later caused the tsunami that took her life. Ishinomaki was among the hardest-hit of Japanese municipalities. According to news reports, more than 3,000 people in the city of 160,000 were killed and more than 20,000 homes were destroyed. The city has not fully recovered. A guide took the R-MC group to an overlook for a view of the city and the Pacific Ocean and pointed out a substantial area that looked, Mayberry said, “like a construction site.”

“Our tour guide said there used to be houses and schools there, a whole other city,” she said.

As we approach the fifth anniversary of the tragedy, Mayberry said many people remember Anderson: the teachers who taught with her, the school principal who recalled her as “a sunny person,” the mother they encountered in a park who discovered where the Americans were from and said, “Oh, Taylor taught some of my children.” A tour guide told the group, “Everyone here knows Taylor.”

The local television station and newspaper sent reporters to chronicle the American visitors once they determined their connection to Anderson.

“That’s really heartwarming to us because I think one of the best things that we can experience is people who knew Taylor and tell us stories about her,” said Taylor’s father, Andy Anderson.

Andy and Jeanne Anderson, who still live in Chesterfield, set up the Taylor Anderson Memorial Fund to help students, schools and families in the Ishinomaki area recover from the earthquake and tsunami and to further their daughter’s dream of being a bridge between the United States and Japan. The fund supports 16 projects from reading corners (called “bunkos”) in schools and community centers to an exchange program for students from Ishinomaki and Richmond. The Andersons visit Japan at least once a year, and Taylor’s brother, Jeff, is now teaching English in Japan with the same program his sister did.

“Just spreading her spirit around has been very satisfying for us,” Andy Anderson said in a phone interview Friday.

In addition, the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership provided a grant to Randolph-Macon to strengthen Japanese studies as part of the college’s Asian studies program. The grant, called, “Honoring the Life, Work and Good Spirits of Taylor Anderson,” enabled the college to increase its course offerings in Japanese language and culture and enables students to travel to Japan as part of their studies — such as the course Fraser Mayberry took in January.

Mayberry carried gifts from Randolph-Macon and St. Catherine’s, including two suitcases of donated books for the reading corners and handmade bookmarks decorated by R-MC students.

“It was great to be able to walk into her schools and see her classrooms,” Mayberry said. It was even better, she said, to arrive and find pictures of Anderson, accompanied by small U.S. and Japanese flags, on the shelves her family donated to hold books in English for the students to read.

“It was cool,” Mayberry said.

This is cool, too. It was 10 years ago when Anderson made a similar January school trip to Japan — the class was a history of Tokyo — and she fell in love with the country. She had been interested in Japan since she’d encountered a teacher in elementary school who had grown up in Japan, her father recalled, but it was that trip a decade ago that cemented her love for the place. “I’ll be back,” she wrote in her journal after that trip.

In 2008, when she returned to Japan to begin teaching, what she wrote recalled that earlier promise:

“It’s good to be back again.”