CRESCENT CITY, California--At a local event held here recently, Blake Inscore, the former city mayor, asked elementary school pupils what they should do if a powerful earthquake struck.

The children said they would flee to higher ground, among other replies.

That is a lesson carried and delivered by a small boat swept away in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami that washed ashore two years later, which bridged two cities across the vast Pacific Ocean. 

The Kamome Festival was held on April 14 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the boat named “Kamome” (The Seagull) from the city of Rikuzentakata in Iwate Prefecture.

The students at the festival received a picture book about the boat and other items and put them into an emergency bag made from a pillowcase.

“I heard a story about the boat from Rikuzentakata from my family,” said Hunter Aguiar, a fifth-grader at Mountain School. “I also watched a documentary. I was moved.”

In April 2013, a resident found a boat, approximately six meters long, on the shores of this city in northern California located near the Oregon border. 

The Kamome bore the name of Takata High School, which had used the boat for training students in scallop farming and diving.

Bill Steven, who was a commander with the local sheriff's department at the time, decided to return the boat to its owner.

He asked John, then a high school student, “Why don’t you high school students do something good for other high school students?”

John, now 25, responded, “It is a good idea.”

He cleaned the barnacle-covered boat with five other high school students.

They produced a documentary about the Kamome, solicited donations and sent the boat back to Rikuzentakata on a container ship arranged by Nippon Yusen KK free of charge. 

The six high school students visited Rikuzentakata in 2014 with assistance from the Japanese and U.S. governments.

“This whole experience is life-changing,” recalled Halie Dearman, who remembers mounds of earth in tsunami-hit areas of Rikuzentakata she saw during the trip.

Dearman, 26, who now works as a nurse, still exchanges messages on social media with her friends in Rikuzentakata.

Crescent City went on to establish a sister city relationship with Rikuzentakata in 2018.

While in-person exchanges have been suspended for the past three years or so due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, the two cities hope to resume sending their students to visit each other as early as February 2024.

Residents said the two cities have much in common, most notably a history of tsunami disasters.

In 1964, 11 people were killed when a tsunami struck Crescent City at night following a magnitude 9.2-earthquke in Alaska.

Both are relatively small cities surrounded by the sea and mountains that rely on their fishing and forestry industries.

Crescent City’s population is shy of 7,000, less than half of Rikuzentakata, and is declining.

Only 20 to 30 percent of high school graduates go on to universities and other institutions to study further. Many others start working, but workplace choices are limited in the city.

Jeff Harris, superintendent of the Del Norte unified school district, said many people leave Crescent City after graduating from high school.

But he said young people have received a significant stimulus from exchanges with their contemporaries in Japan, citing a Japan Club set up at a local high school as an example.

“For many of our students, without the sister schools' activities, they would be focused just on Crescent City,” Harris said. “By having these experiences, they're now looking at a much broader national and international picture.”

The interactions appear to be mutually beneficial.

Ichio Yamada, superintendent of the Rikuzentakata board of education, who attended the Kamome Festival, said an increasing number of high school students are studying on international exchanges.

“We want to nurture people being active internationally,” he said.

Intercity relationships are expanding in businesses, too.

Kevin Hartwick, 62, founder of beer brewery Sea Quake, produced Kamome Ale, a brand inspired by the boat from Rikuzentakata, in 2018

The bottle comes with a pink label that features the drawing of the famed lone “miracle pine tree” in Rikuzentakata, which survived the 2011 tsunami.

Hartwick visited Rikuzentakata in 2019 and signed a technical partnership agreement with a local brewery.

Rumiano Cheese, a maker based in Crescent City, also produces a Kamome brand cheese product and donates part of the proceeds in support of high school students.

In February this year, a trade fair was held in San Francisco to promote food products from Rikuzentakata.

The second event planned for next year is expected to introduce food products from Crescent City as well.

Kiyoshi Murakami of Rikuzentakata Agency Co., who is involved in the project, said the relationship with people in Crescent City provides hopes for Rikuzentakata.

Plans are also under way to invite young people from Rikuzentakata to Crescent City for vocational training in dairy farming and beer brewing.

Toward the end of the Kamome Festival, a mural symbolizing the friendship between the two cities was unveiled.

Harley Munger and other artists spent a year in creating the mural, which depicts young people holding up the Kamome boat in a way that links the two cities across the Pacific Ocean.

The second mural of the same design will be donated to a museum in Rikuzentakata.

“While our high school students 10 years ago would not have comprehended that, today we stand here because of the vision of young people who are willing to take ideas that were given to them," Inscore, the former mayor, said. “It will be this permanent reminder of this powerful relationship (between the two countries).”