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Where EAST meets the Northwest

Misaki Murakami: (AP Photo/Yoko Watanabe, Sankei Shimbun)

David and Yumi Baxter: (AP Photo/The Baxters via Kyodo News)

OVERSEAS TREK. Misaki Murakami (top photo) stands where his home, which was washed away by the March 11, 2011 tsunami, once stood, while talking on a mobile phone with Alaska residents David and Yumi Baxter (bottom photo), in Rikuzentakata, Iwate prefecture, northern Japan. David Baxter found Murakami’s soccer ball, which was lost in last year’s tsunami, on a remote Alaskan island.

From The Asian Reporter, V22, #09 (May 7, 2012), page 8.

By Malcolm Foster

The Associated Press

TOKYO — A teenager who lost his home in Japan’s devastating tsunami now knows that one prized possession survived: a soccer ball that drifted all the way to Alaska.

Officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) say the ball with the youngster’s name inscribed on it is one of the first pieces of debris from last year’s tsunami to wash up on the other side of the Pacific.

A man found the ball while beachcombing on an Alaskan island, and his wife, who is Japanese, talked with its owner, 16-year-old Misaki Murakami, by phone. The ball is on its way back to Japan.

Murakami, from the town of Rikuzentakata, was surprised and thankful the soccer ball has been found more than 3,000 miles away.

"It was a big surprise. I’ve never imagined that my ball has reached Alaska," Murakami told public broadcaster NHK. "I’ve lost everything in the tsunami. So I’m delighted," he said. "I really want to say thank you for finding the ball."

He was particularly glad because all furniture and sentimental items in his home had been washed away in the March 11, 2011, tsunami, which devastated a long stretch of Japan’s northeastern coast and killed about 19,000 people.

The ball, which also had messages of encouragement written on it, was given to him in 2005, when Murakami was in third grade, as a goodbye gift when he transferred to another school.

Debris from the tsunami initially formed a thick mass in the ocean off Japan’s northeastern coast and has since spread out across the Pacific. In February, NOAA said currents would carry much of the debris to the coasts of Alaska, Canada, Washington, and Oregon between March 2013 and 2014, though they noted that some of it could arrive this year.

Last month, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter, the Ryou-Un Maru, fired on and sank a fishing boat in the Gulf of Alaska that had drifted from Japan after the tsunami. Authorities had deemed the ship a hazard to shipping and to the coastline.

David Baxter, a radar technician from Kasilof, Alaska, found Murakami’s ball while beachcombing in March on Middleton Island, 70 miles south of the Alaskan mainland.

"When I first saw the soccer ball I was excited to see it and I thought it was possible it came from the tsunami zone," Baxter told The Associated Press by e-mail.

Baxter’s wife, Yumi, reached Murakami with help from a Japanese reporter. Murakami expressed his gratitude to the couple "for wanting to take the time to even try to find him," David Baxter said.

The couple plans to visit Japan in May, but do not plan to deliver the ball directly to Murakami. They are somewhat reluctant to visit him because they don’t want to create too much of a commotion, Baxter said.

Baxter also found a volleyball with Japanese writing on it a couple of weeks later, and NHK reported that its owner was also found — Shiori Sato, 19, from Iwate prefecture (state), which was hit by the tsunami.

The ball had her first name on it, and a viewer called in to the broadcaster to suggest contacting Sato.

"Good heavens!" she told NHK. "I want to say (to the ball) ‘Welcome back!’ I think it’s a miracle."