Sixty-five years ago, US soldier Franklin Hobbs pulled an unlikely souvenir from the breast pocket of a dead Japanese soldier on the blood-soaked island of Iwo Jima.
The simple drawing, obviously by a child's hand, must have moved the 21-year-old Hobbs, plucked from his studies at Harvard University to go to war in a far-off land, because for 60 years it would hang on the wall of his own son's room.
Now Hobbs has met Chie Takekawa, who as a little girl drew the picture of an air-raid drill outside her home for Matsuji Takekawa, the father she barely knew.
Chie Takekawa is now 73. She travelled on Thursday from her hometown of Sanjo, in rural Niigata prefecture, to Tokyo to meet Hobbs, 86, who served in the US Army Signal Corps during the invasion of Iwo Jima in early 1945 but was paying his first visit to mainland Japan.
Although they were meeting face to face for the first time, they did so as firm friends, having corresponded since Chie Takekawa learned 18 months ago that the memento had been discovered in the Boston suburb of Chestnut Hill.
'I must admit that I do not remember drawing this picture, but when I look at it I can clearly recognise our house and the women are wearing their home-made air-raid hats,' she said. 'All the women are passing buckets of water in a drill, which is what we did every day.'