Tokyo: A message during a bottle released 37 years ago by Japanese highschool students has been found — around 6,000 kilometres (3,700 miles) away in Hawaii.
Members of a science club at Choshi highschool in Chiba, east of Tokyo, released 750 bottles into the ocean between 1984 and 1985 to research ocean currents.
The bottles — which contained messages in English, Japanese and Portuguese asking the finder to contact the sender — have washed up in places as far-flung because the Philippines, Canada and Alaska.
But none had been found since the 50th bottle was discovered in 2002 in Japan’s southwestern Kagoshima Prefecture.
The 51st bottle was discovered by a nine-year-old girl on a beach in Hawaii in June, the varsity announced, with the postcard-sized messages still largely legible.
“I was really surprised,” school vice principal Jun Hayashi told AFP on Friday.
“The 50th bottle was found 19 years ago, so i assumed it had been finished. I didn’t think any longer would be found — i assumed that they had all sunk.
Hayashi is “hoping someone will find the 52nd now”.
The club that released the bottles ended aroused in 2007.
But the varsity said two student representatives decide to send a letter and a miniature flag to the finder, who was named by the Hawaii Tribune Herald newspaper as Abbie Graham.
Mayumi Kondo, a member of the science club in 1984, said the invention had “revived nostalgic memories” of her schooldays.
“Thirty seven years may be a while for citizenry , but on the opposite hand, it really drives home just how big and mysterious the world and nature really are,” she said.