Message in a bottle

In March 2006, the sixth graders at an elementary school in Kagoshima, Japan wrote notes and put them into glass bottles along with photographs or whatever they decided.

Then they dropped the time-capsule bottles into the ocean.

This was done because in Japan the school year ends in March and sixth grade is the last year of elementary school…so those kids would move onto to junior high school the following month.

It took five-and-a-half years but last week an American sailor with the U.S. Navy found one of the bottles washed up on shore in Hawaii.
Inside was a note written by, then twelve-year-old, Saki Arikawa that said it was an “elementary school graduation memory”, a few origami cranes and a photograph of Saki and her classmates.

The photo of Saki Arikawa and her sixth-grade classmates that was in the time-capsule bottle

When a news reporter contacted Saki Arikawa to tell her that the bottle had been discovered in Hawaii, she said it was an “incredible miracle” because she had long given up hope that it would ever be found by anyone.

Saki and her classmates are all seventeen years old and will be graduating from high school next March. But after the news of the bottle’s discovery, Saki had a reunion with her sixth grade teacher and some of her classmates…all of whom had not seen each other since March 2006.

Now, Saki said, she would like to meet the kind American sailor who found her bottle.