Last Thursday, after he and other delegates from Japan reached their lunch site in Tutka Bay, he smiled as familiar Homer faces joined him on the boat dock.

Kuwata and the rest of this year’s 15-person delegation from Teshio, joined Homer residents to celebrate a relationship between the two cities that has lasted more than 20 years.

The cities swap delegates every two years, and Teshio residents are preparing a stone monument to the sister city program, said Kuwata, who is already looking forward to the next exchange.

Teshio residents will unveil the monument the next time a delegation from Homer visits, he said.

The monument will include a history of the sister city relationship and will be dedicated in hopes of continuing the relationship, he said.

The two cities are registered with the nonprofit, “citizen diplomacy” network Sister Cities International. The organization’s purpose is to promote peace through mutual respect, understanding and cooperation.

Homer residents Steve and Noko Yoshida founded the sister city relationship in 1984.

Noko Yoshida, who was born in Japan, said when the couple moved to Homer from Anchorage in 1979 they met a visiting Japanese professor.

They asked him to find a city that would suit Homer, and he recommended a small, rural village in the district of Hokkaido, located on the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands.

The fishing town, Teshio, was similar to Homer in size and climate, Yoshida said. In 1983 the couple approached then- Homer Mayor Earl Cooper about registering with Sister Cities International.

The next year, Cooper and the Yoshidas joined Mike and Diane McBride, Ginger VanWagoner, Margaret Pate and about a dozen other Homer residents as the first delegates from Homer to visit Teshio.

“We really hit it off” with the residents of Teshio, Yoshida said.

The next year, the late Alice Witte, who was at the time Homer’s volleyball coach, took a team of 22 players on a tour of Japan, including a trip to Teshio. One player, Julie Jones, returned the following year, 1986, as Homer’s first exchange student to spend a school semester in Teshio, Yoshida said.

Since then, the cities have exchanged approximately 400 delegates and a dozen students, said Noko Yoshida, who has herself visited Teshio eight times.

The biggest change Kuwata has noticed in Homer over 20 years has been the growth. During the same time, however, the area has not lost its natural beauty, he said.

“I’m so happy to see that has not changed,” Kuwata said, with Vicki Mansell, another Teshio resident, interpreting.

Mansell, an English teacher and Baptist missionary, has lived in Japan for 22 years, the last 20 in Teshio. She is fluent in both Japanese and English.

Mansell said Teshio’s population was about 5,000 people when she moved there with her husband two decades ago. It has dropped to close to 3,800, however, as students have gone off to college and not returned.

The two major economic engines in Teshio remain dairy farms and fishing, and the town is well-known for its “shijimi,” a type of black, freshwater clam, Mansell said.

The clams are found near the mouth of the Teshio River, Japan’s fourth largest — and only north-flowing — river, according to Hisako Kuwata, Kenji Kuwata’s wife.

While the two cities have both actively participated in delegations, Kuwata said he hopes others will want to pick up the torch and keep the cities’ relationship strong.

Kuwata said it seems that participation is all it takes to become interested in the sister city program.

Hirotaka Asada, Teshio’s deputy mayor, said Teshio has plenty of salmon fishing.

“But the view doesn’t come with the salmon,” he said, also speaking through Mansell while gesturing to the hills across Tutka Bay.

Asada said more than 90 percent of Teshio’s 160 dairy farms not only contain milking cows, they also grow enough hay to sell to other farms in Japan.

Yoshida said residents from Homer and Teshio learn the same things that anyone who spends time in other cultures does: while cultures differ, people want essentially the same things — peace, clean air and clean water, for example. By making connections with people in other countries, delegates can act as diplomats, she said.

“The more friends you have around the world, the more chances for peace,” she said.