The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

The water crests and curls before it pounds the beach. Its foam spreads across the sand before the effervescent edge of the Pacifi c, rolls back by a few feet and another wave roughly takes its place.

This is Shi Shi. This is La Push. This is Long Beach.

One day in the early part of the 19th century this was Cape Flattery, and not far from this extreme Northwest point of the continental United States, three shipwrecked Japanese sailors found their way ashore after 14 months adrift at sea.

One was Iwakichi, 26. One was Kyukichi, 15. One was Otokichi. He was a mere 14.

They arrived at this place near Neah Bay in 1832 at a time when Japan was closed to the world under an isolation policy enforced at pain of death.

For these three men, the first Japanese to set foot in our young country just three decades after the Lewis & Clark expedition, it was a journey with no return.

Last week, the earth's plates shifted beneath Japan. The world's fifth-largest earthquake since 1900 moved that country 12 feet closer to the United States and sent a tsunami to the eastern part of the Pacific Rim with waves reaching eight feet.

The wall of water forced evacuations up and down our shores from Hawaii to California.

Reading about the disaster, my mind went back to my last trip to Japan.

In the late 1980s, I was invited to come to Tokyo by the John Manjiro Society to join a group of Northwest residents and professionals to commemorate the legacy of another shipwrecked Japanese sailor. At the time, I wrote about international business for the Everett Herald.

At age 14, Manjiro landed on the Japanese island of Torishima in 1841 and was rescued by an American whaling ship that brought him to New England, where he lived for 12 years and received a well-rounded American education.

He took the risk of returning to Japan, where he was interrogated numerous times before he was allowed to reunite with his mother in Tosa. There, he became a teacher and advocate for opening doors to the West.

When Admiral Perry and his gun ships came demanding trade with Japan in 1853, Manjiro was the diplomat who helped roll back Japan's centuries-old isolation and bring about the first friendship treaty between the two countries.

Manjiro's descendants hosted us for an entire week without any strings attached. I spent a few days reporting on Japanese components suppliers to the Boeing Co. in Nagoya, and I wrote about Panasonic's first highdefi nition television, which had just been perfected and wowed us in a Tokyo showroom.

I made a short trip to Kyoto. It was around this time of year when the cherry blossoms turned the parks into a spectacle of natural renewal.

I always meant to write about my time there, about this hospitality exchange between our countries, about the ocean we share with other nations along the Pacific Rim, about our common fate at the mercy of the waves.

How small our differences seem in light of these catastrophic events beyond our control. How futile our attempts at isolation. How precious our friends beyond the horizon to the west, how tragic their loss of lives to the restless ocean floor and the giant waves that followed its deep stirring. How profound their needs at this dark hour. How long their terror during months of aftershocks that will follow without respite.

A few years ago, when we were still living on Bainbridge Island, I began a painting inspired by a Japanese woodblock print.

It's a quiet inland river bend at sunset, the light coming in over a hill punctuated by a pagoda, small fishing boats at its foot. I set up my studio in an old boat house with its own Japanese history.

The land our house was built on in the 1970s was once owned by the Japanese consulate in Seattle before the property was divided into two lots: one with the old wooden summer home, the other with the boathouse and tennis court that belonged to it.

Legend has it that Japanese spies used the place to keep an eye on the shipping lanes and naval traffic in Puget Sound before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Of course, Bainbridge has a tragic history with the evacuation of Japanese Americans to internment camps in the Northwest, following the outbreak of war with Japan.

Apologies have been made for that. Japan was defeated and rebuilt. The wounds have healed.

Peace always returns eventually and so it will here - peace reflected in the contemplative scene by the river bend.

The painting is finished, but I haven't signed it yet. I will now and dedicate it to our friends beyond the horizon, along the shores the earth just brought closer.

For those interested in donating to the relief effort in Japan, we recommend World Vission (www.wvi.org) or the American Red Cross (ww. redcross.org)