Time and distance have doomed many a friendship, but Gary Yoshida of Honolulu and Shoji Kamikubo of Hiroshima have maintained theirs for more than 40 years and across thousands of miles. For that, they have the YMCA to thank.

The two met in 1967 when, as a teenager, Yoshida traveled to Japan as part of a YMCA program called Let’s Get Together. The program celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and is the organization’s longest-running student exchange program. Yoshida, who remains active with the YMCA, is chairing a reunion dinner for the event, and Kamikubo, who now heads the Hiroshima YMCA, will lead a delegation from Japan.

"My friendship with Gary over the years has been a treasure and I am so grateful to have met Gary and been able to maintain this friendship over the years," said Kamikubo in a translated email. "I have many great memories of friendship and exchanges with Gary and look forward to making many more."

In buddy movies, friendships are often forged over some common goal, like solving a crime, winning a competition, even pursuing romance. Yoshida and Kamikubo, who are now both 60, bonded over events related to the World War II nuclear attack on Hiroshima. The two youths and their fellow delegates performed the hula and sang at hospitals for bomb survivors and visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

"When we went to the hospital and performed, it was pretty heavy," Yoshida said. "These people were there because they were exposed to the bomb, so you knew that their life- span was going to be fairly short. … I’ve been through the Holocaust museum (in Washington, D.C.), but when you go through something like the Hiroshima museum with people who were affected by (the bomb), it’s really different, and more so because I have Hiroshima roots."

Sharing that experience with Kamikubo made them "really close friends," he said. "That shows in how Shoji and I kept in touch over the years."

Kamikubo’s family did not live in Hiroshima on Aug, 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb, but moved there in the late 1950s. He has clear memories of those days, when the long-term impact of the bomb on survivors was beginning to surface.

"What especially struck me was that the A-bomb disease had such a miserable effect on the survivors and caused many of them to remain and suffer in hospitals for decades until their lives come to an end," he said. "I was also deeply moved by the paintings that many of the hibakusha (bomb survivors) drew, oftentimes because they found it difficult to convey in words what they experienced."

THE LET’S GET Together program started in 1960 as part of the sister city relationship between Honolulu and Hiroshima established the previous year. The idea was for YMCAs to exchange delegates for two-week sojourns in the host country.

Yoshida grew up in Kalihi and had been "brought up in the Y," regularly attending its summer activity programs. A third-generation Japanese-American who watched Japanese movies as a boy and attended Japanese school on weekends, Yoshida had grandparents living on the outskirts of Hiroshima, and the program represented a rare opportunity.

"In those days you really didn’t get to travel too much, especially in high school," said Yoshida, who remembers the trip "felt like coming home."

"I even picked up the Hiroshima dialect, which is a country dialect," he said. "When I use certain words now, people laugh because it’s so colloquial. They think it’s unusual for somebody to use that."

The trip had a major influence on Yoshida’s life. He attended Lewis & Clark College in Oregon largely because of its study-abroad program, which allowed him to return to Japan and stay with Kamikubo’s family again. He travels to Japan almost every year in his post as a development officer for the East-West Center Foundation, the fundraising arm of the East-West Center.

Kamikubo became involved in the YMCA as a junior high school student, joining one of its study programs to prepare for high school exams. His involvement with the YMCA has continued, even extending to his now-adult daughters, who have hosted YMCA students.

The Let’s Get Together program still functions in much the same way it did in the 1960s, said current program adviser David Lau. About eight to 15 students are chosen annually for the program. The students and their families must make a two-year commitment to the program, with the youths playing host one year and guests the next. But over the years, the students’ interests have changed.

"They used to have conferences where they’d talk about political issues and concerns," said Lau, who is also teen coordinator for the Kalihi YMCA. "Now, the youth from Japan want to find out what the youth from Hawaii actually do on their days off. … When we go over there, it’s the same."

Lau went to Japan while in the program in 1996 and said he gained perspectives that have guided his life ever since. "It was just an eye-opener that there was all this going on, that you can benefit from other cultures," he said. "It gave me that overall sense of self-importance, that I was important, too."