Japanese Students Sent Message In A Bottle 37 Years Ago — It Just Arrived In Hawaii

Sep 30, 2021 by apost team

Messages hidden in bottles and sent out to sea evoke exciting and romantic memories from films, literature and television. A club of students from Choshi High School in Choshi, Japan, was studying ocean currents and decided to do some hands-on learning by sending out their own messages in bottles. They included forms that were meant to be returned if ever found.

In July 2021, 9-year-old Abbie Graham of Keaau, Hawaii, found a bottle that contained a message originally sent from those high school students 37 years ago in 1984. Abbie was ecstatic when she found the bottle on the beach at the end of Makuu Drive in Hawaiian Paradise Park, and she saw it as a hidden treasure for her to discover. After her family got the bottle open, they read the form that was inside. It was written in several languages, including Japanese, English and Spanish. 

The form asked the recipient to acknowledge that it had been found and to indicate their name, their address and the longitude and latitude of the place it was discovered. Abbie and her family filled this out to the best of their ability and sent the form back to Choshi High School.

Abbie’s father, John, shared that they struggled to find the school at first due to the website being in Japanese, but after the story gained traction thanks to a local newspaper, the school was contacted. The forms arrived in Choshi on Sept. 3, 2021.

The high school sent out 750 bottles from 1984 to 1985, and 50 were returned. The majority were found around Japan but others came back from the United States, the Philippines and China. Keep reading to find out more about this incredible story.

When the 9-year-old girl found the bottle hidden in the sand on the beach she was thrilled. 

“The first thing Abbie said was, ‘We found a message in a bottle,’” Abbie’s mother, Angie Graham, told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald in July 2021.

It is not often you find secret messages in bottles, so Abbie’s family was hesitant to define the bottle as anything other than litter at first. “I thought it was trash, and she thought it was treasure,” John Graham said.

Even her 10-year-old sister, Aubrie, was doubtful. “I thought it was probably one of the kids that lived there, they threw a bottle away,” Aubrie said, adding that the paper “was just flopping in the bottle.”

When asked if they’d contacted the school, John replied, “We looked online, but the website is all in Japanese, so we couldn’t read anything. So we figured we’d just maybe laminate it and send it back to the school at the address they gave us. We figure the people who sent it have got to be 50, 55 years old by now.” Mayumi Kanda, one of the club members from 1984, is now 54-years-old. 

The Mainichi reports that the family was able to send the form back to the school after all. Vice Principal of Choshi High School, Jun Hayashi, said at a briefing, "We thought the last one was found in Kikaijima. We never imagined another would be found 37 years on.”

A current student of the school expressed: "I want to cherish the connection the bottle brought us across borders and spacetime."

apost.com

What do you think of this message found in a bottle? What would your reaction be if you discovered the bottle? Let us know, and be sure to send this on to your friends and family.