Late post

Oct 29 2007

A postcard sent by a Japanese soldier to a friend in the Second World War has reached its destination 64 years late.

Nobuchika Yamashita posted the card from the battlefront in Burma in 1943, a year before he died aged 23, to a former work colleague Shizuo Nagano in Nagasaki. The postcard was found by an American soldier stationed in the city who then took it back to his Arizona home.

It was eventually inherited by his son who moved to the Hawaiian island of Maui, and he gave it to a Japanese exchange student.

"I never would have guessed I could see (Yamashita) again this way ... I'm overwhelmed," Nagano, now 80 and living in Kochi, said as he was handed the postcard by the student, who spent two years after her return from Maui trying to find Nagano through the government.