Rikuzentakata representatives Kyoshi Murakami, Futoshi Toba and Akihiko Ito talk about how their community survived the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. | Photo courtesy of Chris Howard

Chris Howard talks about Del Norte County’s relationship with Rikuzentakata, Japan everywhere he goes, so Kamome’s story isn’t new for his colleagues with the Rural County Representatives of California, or RCRC.

But when he brought Council Chairman Akihiko Ito, Mayor Futoshi Toba and Kyoshi Murakami, senior executive advisor for Rikuzentakata, to the organization’s annual meeting as the keynote speakers last month, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room, said Howard, who represents Del Norte County’s District 1.

The three Rikuzentakata delegates told county leaders from across California how their community survived the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and how it led to a now six-year-old Sister City relationship with Crescent City and Del Norte County.

“It was a powerful conversation based on the leadership Mayor Toba delivered quite well and the tough choices [he] made — staying and doing your job or losing your wife,” Howard said.  “And obviously the hope piece of it, which was geared toward what we’ve done since [the tsunami] with the ventures between us and Rikuzentakata.”

According to Howard’s District 1 colleague, Supervisor Darrin Short, the three panelists set the stage for a charity basket auction that generated $31,000 for the Kamome Foundation — the nonprofit organization named for the 20-foot long fishing vessel that washed ashore at South Beach 11 years ago and led to a sister school relationship between Takata High School and Del Norte High School.

Items in the basket included hotel stays, a barbecue with the mayor and a trip on an oyster fishing boat in Rikuzentakata — everything but a plane ticket. There were goods from Alexandre Dairy, passes to Ocean World, SeaQuake swag and a fishing trip from Mike Coopman, Short told his colleagues at the Board’s Sept. 24 meeting.

The donations didn’t stop with the locals at RCRC’s annual meeting. According to Short, representatives from Merced were offering tours of their ranch and a barbecue. Another county supervisor donated a stay at his cabin, and SiteLogIQ, which is working on a microgrid project in Del Norte County, offered a winery tour and a fishing trip.

Some offered to donate to the Kamome Foundation itself, Short said.

“I don’t know how to explain the temperature of the room,” he told his colleagues. “It seemed like the room was on fire, everybody was jumping up wanting to help out the Kamome Foundation and the cause and that Sister City relationship.”

Another piece of the Sister City puzzle has to do with Last Chance Grade, the slide-prone area of U.S. 101 south of Crescent City. At the Board’s Sept. 24 meeting, Howard noted that Caltrans is in the process of investigating what it would take to construct the tunnel option for taking the highway around the landslide.

Caltrans is looking overseas for how to build that tunnel, Howard told his colleagues. He said he spoke with Caltrans District 1 Director Matt Brady about connecting with transportation representatives in Japan.

“We utilized our relationship with Japan, a country that is riddled with geologic instability and, more importantly, is experienced in tunneling,” Howard said, adding that some of those tunnels go for hundreds of miles and were completed in roughly 10 years. “Kyoshi has relationships with what their cabinet secretary equivalent is in the Ministry of Transportation and we sat down with Director Brady to suggest that they pay a visit on this side of the ocean. So, that is in the works for October of next year.”

Howard later told Redwood Voice that due to the organic nature of how Del Norte County and Rikuzentakata’s friendship formed, their story is helping to revive other Sister City relationships.

According to him, seven county representatives approached Meg Mizutani, president of the California-Japan Sister Cities Network, and Kevin O’Donnell, Japan representative for Sister Cities International, to ask about how to either establish a Sister City relationship or revive a Sister City relationship.

Mizutani and O’Donnell attended the RCRC annual meeting as did Osumi Yo, the consul general of Japan in San Francisco, Howard said.

“All three of those individuals expressed that this presentation should be done at next year’s US/Japan Sister City Conference in Osaka and that we should at least plan on providing that address there,” he said.

Howard was one of the founding members of the Kamome Foundation’s Board of Directors. The nonprofit was created by former sheriff’s commander Bill Steven in 2021 as a way to further student exchanges between Del Norte County and Rikuzentakata without continuing to use government dollars.