Traditionally, messages inside floating bottles carry the sos of shipwrecked sailors.
These tragic and usually hopeless calls for help have, on occasion, uncannily made their way to a sailor's home port.
One of the most dramatic coincidences on record concerns a Japanese seaman called Matsuyama.
In 1784 he and forty four companions set sail in search of treasure but met disaster instead.
Dying on starvation on a coral reef in the Pacific, he carved his story on a piece of bark ard sealed it in a bottle which he tossed into the ocean.
In 1935, a century and a hal later, this sturdy bottle bobbed upon the shore of Hiratutemura, the very place where Matsuyama was born