- TOKYO: A Japanese girl has thanked a US sailor in Hawaii for finding a bottle she had tossed into the sea off Japan’s southern coast as a child, and is delighted to be reconnected with her old classmates as a result.
Seventeen-year-old Saki Arikawa says she’d almost forgotten about the bottle and initially couldn’t believe it was found after five years.
In a telephone interview Sunday from her hometown in Kagoshima, she said “it’s a miracle” the bottle was found.
The clear glass bottle was found Thursday by Petty Officer Jon Moore during a beach cleanup at the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai island.
The bottle contained four origami cranes, a photo of Arikawa’s elementary school class and a note dated March 25, 2006, and signed by Arikawa saying she wanted it to be “a graduation memory.”
