FORT WALTON BEACH — More than six decades have passed since Jerry Moore became a pen pal to Keinosuke Yano.
But the Fort Walton Beach man still gets excited when he walks to the mailbox and finds a letter from Japan.
“We’re still traditional, using the snail mail,” said Moore, who is 77. “We’ll keep writing, probably until one of us passes away.”
The two men, who became pen pals in the late 1940s, will meet for the third and probably final time this weekend. Yano and his wife, Yukimi, will arrive Saturday to spend a week with Moore and his wife, Diana.
“He’s probably just like a remote brother,” Moore said of Yano. “I grew up in a single-child family. I guess I’ve always been looking for some kind of companion.”
Moore was about 12 and living in the small town of Lititz, Pa., when he got Yano’s name from a pen pal advertisement in a magazine about stamp trading. Yano was about the same age and growing up in the city of Takamatsu on the island of Shikoku in southern Japan.
It was the late 1940s just after the end of World War II, and Moore was bored and eager to learn about the world. In addition to poring over editions of National Geographic magazine, he began writing to other children in Cuba, Africa, Asia and Europe.
But Yano is the one who became a lifelong friend and confidante.
“It just happened,” Moore said. “We would write back and forth and we’d trade stamps back and forth.”
The boys began sharing more of their lives, trading photos and information about hobbies, sports and school. But Moore and Yano, who lived a couple of hours southeast of Hiroshima, didn’t discuss the war.
“I stayed off that subject because I knew it was a sensitive subject,” Moore added. “We never talked about the atomic bomb or anything.”
Moore said Yano’s father was a Japanese soldier who died in Burma during the war.
Not long after they became pen pals, Moore mailed Yano new filtered cigarettes, thinking they might be valuable in post-war Japan. Yano sent Moore two ancient-looking Samurai sword guards that he still has.
“On this trip, I’m going to ask him about those,” Moore said. “They were really quite a treasure.”
As the years went by, he and Yano kept each other apprised of educational milestones, marriages, deaths and the births of children.
One of the most interesting letters Moore received was one detailing Yano’s use of a marriage broker to help him find three possible candidates to be his wife.
“He was excited about it,” Moore recalled. “He picked the one he was most compatible with and they got married and had three children.”
Yano knows Moore as a world traveler who served in the Air Force Reserve and lived in numerous countries in Central America. To Moore, his Japanese friend is an intelligent “businessman” who has operated shopping malls and other retail ventures in Shikoku.
“He likes green tea, that’s a favorite of his,” Moore said. “He’s big into health and acupuncture.”
Yano first visited to the United States in the early 1990s and met Moore in San Antonio, Texas, where he was working.
“One of the things he loved was the wide open spaces,” Moore said. “It’s very congested over there. … I was taking him to see cowboy stuff. I was taking him to the rodeo. It was quite a trip.”
This time around, Moore hopes to show Yano and his wife everything from the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola to the beaches of Walton County Road 30A in South Walton. He also hopes to take Yano, who is an active Lions Club member, to a local chapter meeting.
Although Yano and Moore occasionally email each other, the pair primarily stick to handwritten letters. Moore said he would like to see more young people discover the joy of having a pen pal.
“When you start writing to people in other cultures, you learn about them and the stereotypes go away,” he said. “You get a different viewpoint of the world and other people.”
Contact Daily News Staff Writer Kari C. Barlow at 850-315-4438 or kbarlow@nwfdailynews.com. Follow her on Twitter @KariBnwfdn.