For thirty-one years, Mrs. Uno's job at our town's city hall was sending Japanese people to Mississippi. Our town is a small fishing town on the coast of Mie. It has a sister city on the Gulf Coast. Every two years, Mrs. Uno put a group on a plane. Students. Farmers. The mayor. Whoever could get the week off. When they came home, she made every one of them write a report. One page. What did you see? She kept every single page. When she retired last spring, she let me read the box. High school girl, 16. 2004. "At the Friday football game, the man on the loudspeaker said my name. Five thousand people turned around and waved at me. I had been in America for nineteen hours." Our mayor, 61. 1999. "Their mayor answered his own phone. Then he cooked us breakfast. That night, he directed traffic after the football game. I asked him where his staff was. He pointed at his wife." Firefighter, 44. 2008. "Their fire chief put us on the truck for the Fourth of July parade. Every child on that street waved at us like we were their own firemen. I waved back for two miles. My arm hurt for three days. Best three days of my career." Retired teacher, 70. 2016. "I lost my reading glasses at the airport. Before we reached the hotel, three strangers had offered me theirs. I wore a stranger's glasses for five days. Wrong prescription. I saw Mississippi beautifully anyway." Junior high boy, 14. 2012. "My host father let me drive his truck in a field. I am fourteen. In Japan, this is a crime. In Mississippi, it is Tuesday." The shortest report in the box is one sentence long. Fisherman, 72. 2009. Mr. Koda had never been on a plane. He only went because his wife made him. He spoke no English. His host was a shrimper named Clayton, also 72, who spoke no Japanese. For five days, nobody translated anything. At four every morning, they went out on Clayton's boat. They mended nets. Clayton's wife fed them both like she'd been feeding them for forty years. In the evenings, they sat on the dock and watched the water without saying a word, because neither of them had a word the other could use. Mr. Koda's report, in its entirety: "He is the same as me. I did not know there was another one." On his last morning, he gave Clayton the only thing he had brought from home. His big-catch flag. Japanese fishermen fly them when they come home with a full boat. Bright red. Gold letters. A sea bream leaping out of the waves. Every spring since, at the Blessing of the Fleet, when the priest stands on the dock and blesses the shrimp boats one by one, Clayton's boat has flown that flag. The whole town calls it "the Japanese boat." Nobody there can read the flag. Everybody knows what it means. Mr. Koda died last year. He was 86. Mrs. Uno called Mississippi. She didn't expect anything. She just thought Clayton should know. Four days later, an old man in a faded feed-store cap walked out of the arrivals gate at Nagoya airport. He was 86. It was his first passport. He had the flag folded under his arm. He sat through a Buddhist funeral where he didn't understand one word. He bowed when everyone bowed, half a second late, every time. The next morning at dawn, when the boats went out, he stood on the harbor wall and held that flag over his head with both arms until the last boat was past the breakwater. Eighty-six years old. The wind tried to take it from him the whole time. He didn't let it. Mrs. Uno asked him why he'd come all that way. Clayton said, "Somebody had to come see his water." Japan and America have almost 460 sister partnerships. Neither country has that many with anyone else on Earth. The very first one was signed in 1955. St. Paul, Minnesota, and Nagasaki. Ten years after the war. On paper, they're agreements between city halls. They're not. They're two old men who never shared a single word, standing on each other's docks.