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“Raise your hand if you’ve ever done something nice for somebody.”

Bill Steven and Blake Inscore fronted Harley Munger and Laura Haban’s latest creation commemorating the Sister City relationship between Crescent City and Rikuzentakata, Japan on Friday.

Speaking to 1,000 Del Norte County students in grades 3 through 5, Steven and Inscore told them how great tragedy often leads to great friendship.

Both men, founding members of the Kamome Foundation, told students how their organization’s namesake, a 20-foot long fishing boat washed ashore on South Beach two years after a tsunami ripped it away from Rikuzentakata.

Pointing to Munger’s rendering of the boat, Steven described how 10 years ago, his son John and his classmates at Del Norte High School scraped the barnacles off and worked with local businesses to get Kamome home.

“It turned into a Sister City relationship between the entire town of Rikuzentakata and Crescent City,” Steven said. “Now we’re friends with the whole town!”

The Kamome Festival celebrates the 10th anniversary of the boat’s arrival in Crescent City. It also commemorates the fifth anniversary of the Sister City pacts both communities entered into in 2018. The celebration will include an official unveiling of the mural at Beachfront Park as well as a traditional Taiko drum performance and the screening of the Kamome documentary on NBC’s Peacock streaming service.

Friday morning was devoted to teaching youngsters about the importance of preparing for an emergency. District 2 Supervisor Valerie Starkey delivered more than 750 pillow cases to each elementary school. Each student decorated their pillow case and turned it into a “go bag” they can take with them in an emergency.

When they arrived at the Cultural Center, the kids made trail mix to learn about food rationing, played an obstacle-course game to learn about the importance of teamwork in an emergency and folded Origami cranes with first responders.

“What brought our two communities together was disaster,” Starkey told the Wild Rivers Outpost, adding that students with DNHS’s Japan Club also pitched in to help with the festival. “I want to make sure we’re introducing emergency preparedness during a non-disastrous time. That (kids) will be in a situation where first responders are friendly so they know that those guys are here to save me and protect me in an emergency.”

They also added their signature to a banner Crescent City will gift to a delegation from Rikuzentakata. Before the youngsters entered the Cultural Center, City Manager Eric Wier greeted them, telling them that the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami was 45 feet tall. This is why having a “go bag” is so important, he said.
Wier also described Kamome’s journey across the ocean to

Crescent City and back again to Japan and urged them to add their signature to the city’s banner.

“That banner over there says ‘Friendship spans an ocean’ — it says this in Japanese and it says this in English,” Wier said.

That’s not the only gift Crescent City and Del Norte County will give Rikuzentakata. Harley Munger created a second Puzzle Mosaic mural, weighing about 600 pounds, Inscore said.

“We’re going to send it to Rikuzentakata as a gift from you,” he said. “Four-thousand six-hundred and eighty-four miles! That’s how far Kamome traveled. That’s how far the mural is going to go back.”

The celebration will continue with the mural unveiling at 5 p.m. at Beachfront Park and with a ceremony 6 p.m. at Crescent Elk Middle School.

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