Sister city history - Bath Maine and Tsugaru Japan

The Cheseborough was a 19th-century American ship which wrecked off the coast of Japan in 1889.On October 30, 1889, driven by a typhoon, she ran aground off the coast of Shariki, Aomori Prefecture, Japan. In a courageous rescue, the villagers saved a number of the crew and nursed them back to health.
Forecaster The Coastal Journal Edition- byAlex Lear 

Sister City history - Bath Maine with Tsugaru Japan

BATH, Maine — The story of the Bath-Tsugaru sister city relationship is one of tragedy turned to friendship. The bond was forged by unlikely circumstances, creating common bonds among people from two greatly diverse societies, separated by more than 6,000 miles.

The tale began in 1889, when a typhoon caused the Bath-built ship Cheseborough to crash on a shoal a mile offshore of Skariki, Japan. Residents of that northern Japanese town cared for the handful of survivors, whose grateful families kept in touch with the benefactors via letters for years to come.

A century later, in 1989, a delegation of officials from Shariki – which later merged with four other villages to form Tsugaru City – traveled to Bath to propose a formal sister-city relationship. 

Since 1990, students from the Bath and Tsugaru regions have taken part annually in an overseas exchange program, and a declaration of the relationship was signed in 1993.

The Bath-Tsugaru Student Exchange Program is marking the 30th anniversary of the delegation’s arrival in two ways.

1.  An April 1, dinner at the Henry and Marty Restaurant in Brunswick will raise money for student travel scholarships. The program’s board hopes to raise at least $3,000 toward trip scholarships. 

About half of the dinner’s 50 seats were sold as of last week.

2.  The milestone anniversary will also be commemorated through the installation on the city’s planned Riverwalk of a memorial to the longtime friendship – a bright red torii gate like those often encountered in Japan.

“There are a lot of places where you go through these gates, and it’s just so welcoming,” said Aaron Park, a city councilor who owns Henry and Marty. He was one of the adult chaperones on last year’s trip to Tsugaru, along with exchange program coordinator Jen Jones.

Imbued with the value the sister city hosts placed on the friendship’s milestone, “I came back with this idea that we need to celebrate something on our side, and do our part, because they are definitely attaching significance to this,” Park said March 21, in an interview alongside Jones, program President Will Laliberte, and Lindsey Goudreau, the city’s marketing and communications specialist.

Park, a program board member along with Goudreau, seeks ways to boost the organization’s profile and renew its message of amity across the miles, with Japan.