Four years after tsunami, Japanese fisherman reunites with his boat in B.C.

Four years after a tsunami swept scallop fisherman Kou Sasaki's boat out of the harbour in the small Japanese port city of Ofunato, he saw the vessel for the first time again on the weekend, floating peacefully at rest in an inlet on the British Columbia coast.

After he clambered aboard, Mr. Sasaki sat in the bow, buried his face in his hands and wept. It had been a long time since he'd last seen the small open boat, which drifted across the Pacific, along with more than one million tonnes of debris, after the tsunami struck Japan on March 11, 2011, killing more than 15,000 people.

Mr. Sasaki's boat was salvaged near Klemtu, on the central B.C. coast 200 kilometres south of Prince Rupert, in 2013. The barnacles were scraped off, and it was named the Japanese Drifter and put into service by the Spirit Bear Lodge, which uses it to take tourists looking for the area's famed spirit bears.

Earlier this year, Yoshi Karasawa, a Japanese-Canadian woman, was on a bear-watching tour with her husband, Vancouver developer and philanthropist Michael Audain, when she saw the boat and was asked by the lodge manager if she could help find the owner.

With the help of friends, Ms. Karasawa traced the registry number of the boat, originally called Twin Pines, to city records in Ofunato. Soon she was on the phone to Mr. Sasaki – not only telling him that his small boat had survived a miraculous 7,000-kilometre crossing of the Pacific Ocean, but that she was inviting him to Klemtu for a reunion.

On the weekend, Mr. Sasaki, his wife, Shuko, Ms. Karasawa and a group of tourists set off from Spirit Bear Lodge to find the Japanese Drifter, which was moored at a bear-watching site on the coast nearby.

When they approached the location, one of the bear guides pointed to the small vessel, said Ms. Karasawa, and Mr. Sasaki started to shout, "There! Oh there!"

She said he jumped into the empty boat, then began to weep. "We are together," he said.

"Everybody was overwhelmed," Ms. Karasawa said.

Mr. Sasaki, 45, later pulled out a flag he'd been given when he first got the boat in his early 20s. The flag bears the name of the vessel and is a traditional way of welcoming a new fishing boat to a fleet.

He waved the flag, which is supposed to bless a fishing vessel with good luck, and left it with the people of Klemtu. After the tsunami struck, he got a new scallop boat and is not seeking the return of the Japanese Drifter.

Ms. Karasawa said Mr. Sasaki was deeply grateful to the people of Klemtu for saving his boat and hosting his visit.

"What shall I do for them?" he asked her.

She told him the Kitasoo people would welcome him with traditional blessing and greeting songs, and suggested that the best way to let them know how he felt was to respond in kind.

He said a traditional Japanese song about renewal would be in order.

"We went to a singing teacher and tried to practise," she said.

The evening after he was reunited with his boat, Kitasoo dancers welcomed Mr. Sasaki in a ceremony at the village's big house, or communal gathering place. Then Mr. Sasaki, his wife and Ms. Karasawa stood and sang in reply.

"The song is [that there is] all over white snow, but you can smell spring comes," Ms. Karasawa said. "It's beautiful. Very soft. Some people were overwhelmed."

She said that in addition to seeing his boat again, Mr. Sasaki was lucky enough to see a spirit bear, a black bear with white fur.

"He was asked, 'What was the most fantastic? The bear or the boat?' He said both," Ms. Karasawa said.