Thumbnail photo: Takeya Owada, who is in the oyster fishery business, shows his fellow delegates from Rikuzentakata how to shuck one of the oysters Mike Schmidt and Erik Karle, of Schmidt’s House of Jambalaya grilled at the Taste of Japan event on Friday. | Photo courtesy of Jen Schmidt
Taku Sasaki gave a simple “nice to meet you, konnichiwa,” when he and his fellow travelers filed into the Del Norte County Airport on Thursday.
After exchanging hugs, handshakes and bows, the Rikuzentakata mayor and his fellow delegates from Japan grabbed their bags and were whisked away to their first event, the cardboard boat races at the Fred Endert Municipal Pool.
Coinciding with the Kamome Festival, this visit marks a new development in the Sister City relationship between Crescent City, Del Norte County and Rikuzentakata. The current delegation, consisting of 21 city officials, business leaders, students and educational leaders, is the largest to visit since cultural exchanges began more than a decade ago, according to Kiyoshi Murakami, Rikuzentakata’s senior international affairs advisor.
In addition to the festivities, government officials from both sides of the ocean met with Kotaro Otsuki, the consul general of Japan in San Francisco. The discussion revolved around continuing to maintain and grow their friendship, Murakami told Redwood Voice Community News.
“Not only school to school, but also people to people, businesses, we have a number of different types of opportunities,” Murakami said Friday during the Taste of Japan fundraiser for the Kamome Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to furthering cultural exchanges between Del Norte and Rikuzentakata. “Also, it is very important for us to make sure that disaster management needs to be done. One thing we are working on is maybe it’s a good idea to have a statewide or nationwide or international disaster management forum.”
For the fourth year in a row, Crescent City and Del Norte County held a festival to celebrate their friendship with Rikuzentakata. During the week, restaurants had special menu items, there was a Boats of Hope self-guided tour featuring replica hand-painted Kamome boats and Kamome Kon, a Del Norte High School Japan Club take on Comic-Con featuring anime costume contests and a screening of My Neighbor Totoro.
On Wednesday, the Del Norte Association for Cultural Awareness showed the film Samurai in the Oregon Sky. Created by filmmaker Ilana Sol, the documentary tells of Japanese pilot Nobuo Fujita, who in 1942 dropped incendiary bombs on the forests around Brookings. In 1962, the Jaycees invited Fujita to visit Brookings where he presented his family’s 400-year-old samurai sword to its people.
During a Q/A following the film screening, Sol said that while the attacks were fascinating and “historically significant,” she wanted to focus on the reconciliation.
“I really wanted to know, how on earth did these people come together and, after a war as terrible as World War II, in a time with no internet, they did this without any politicians,” Sol told the audience following the screening. “These were just civilians who found each other.”
On Friday, in addition to the evening event, Del Norte third- and fifth-graders practiced CPR, put together a first aid kit and toured a CalFire helicopter as the delegates looked on. Some of the delegates gave Crescent City Police Department K9 Sgt. Kostya some pets before his partner, Officer Daniel Sanders, put him through his paces.
“In Japan, they don’t have the opportunity to keep in touch with a K9,” Kamome Foundation member Aki Downing told Redwood Voice Community News. “We don’t have K9 demonstrations.”
The residents of Del Norte County and Rikuzentakata found each other thanks to a 20-foot fishing vessel that washed ashore on South Beach two years after the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.
When that happened, then-Del Norte County Sheriff’s Cmdr. Bill Steven and others determined that the boat was named Kamome — the Japanese word for seagull — and that she had belonged to Takata High School in Rikuzentakata.
Steven’s son John and his classmates scraped the barnacles off and worked with local businesses to get Kamome home. It was an act that led to a Sister School relationship between Del Norte and Takata High Schools in 2015 and Sister City pacts between Crescent City, Del Norte County and Rikuzentakata in 2018.
In 2023, Crescent City, Del Norte County and Rikuzentakata celebrated their relationship with a festival honoring the boat that started it all.
On Friday, between cheese cubes and glasses of sake, Steven said he’s confident the friendship between Rikuzentakata and Del Norte County is strong partly because there are many facets to it.
“We just have so much going on, there’s the student thing going, the businesses, the teachers in 2019,” he said referring to a previous delegation who visited Del Norte. “I think it’s got a really good chance of going on for a long time because it’s branched out in so many different directions.”
Del Norte County District 5 Supervisor Dean Wilson said that one reason the friendship has endured is because of the story behind it — Kamome washing ashore two years after the tsunami and Del Norte High School students who cleaned it up and brought it back home.
It was so compelling that NBC Sports featured Kamome at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, he said.
Steven, however, noted that the two communities both know what it’s like to experience tsunamis, which adds another layer.
“It’s not just some other coastal town, it happens to be a coastal town that knows that pain,” he said. “It’s a small town, rural, (there’s) logging and fishing.”
On Friday evening, following a meeting with officials from both communities, Otsuki took part in the Taste of Japan fundraiser. Grassroots exchanges like the connection between Crescent City, Del Norte County and Rikuzentakata, in large part, form the foundation of relations between the United States and Japan, he said.
According to the consul general of Japan in San Francisco, one topic that was brought up during the meeting Friday morning was the possibility of inviting a Japanese instructor to Del Norte County to teach Japanese to adults as well as children.
Otsuki said he’d like to see more young people involved in the exchanges.
“They will be the leaders,” he said. “They will lead future activities between the cities.”
John Degler contributed to this article.
