A 9-year-old girl found a glass bottle on the beach at Paradise Park in Hawaii. It was one of 750 bottles that were thrown into the sea near Tokyo’s Miyakejima Island between 1984 and 1985.
After picking up the glass bottle, little girl Abbie Graham discovered pieces of paper inside with contact information in multiple languages including Japanese, English and Portuguese, explaining its origin and asking the finder to contact Choshi High School, located in Chiba Prefecture, Eastern Japan.
Graham mailed the correspondence back to Choshi High School. It turned out that the messages in the glass bottles were part of a science experiment to study ocean currents, conducted by students from the Natural Science Club at Choshi High School.
Most of the 750 bottles were found in Japan's Okinawa, Akita and Kyoto prefectures. Others washed up on various shores as far away as the Philippines, China and along the west coast of the United States. The 50th bottle was discovered in 2002 on Kikaijima Island in Kagoshima Prefecture, southwest Japan.
Due to measures to prevent harmful environmental behavior, the Club has stopped releasing glass bottles into the sea since 2007. - Photo: Internet
“I thought the bottle found in Kikajima was the last one. After 37 years, I didn’t think any more glass bottles would be found,” Vice Principal Choshi said at a press conference on September 15.
Former students of the Choshi School Natural Science Club were deeply moved by the discovery. Mayumi Kanda, 54, a member of the club in 1984, thanked everyone involved for finding the bottle nearly four decades after it was thrown into the sea. “I was surprised, it brought back nostalgic memories of my high school days,” she said.
