A Buddhist monk’s longtime ritual of honoring American airmen in downed planes in the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor has since become a staple at the Hawaii landmark.

Earlier this month, the enactment of the Blackened Canteen took place for the 46th time as a way of healing two enemies, the United States and Japan.

“Everyone here knows about the ceremony,” says Richard Rovsek as he attended Pearl Harbor events. “It has a very deep meaning.”

The ritual involves American and Japanese delegates pouring whiskey from a fire-charred World War II canteen into the waters surrounding the USS Arizona memorial. Retired Lt. Col. Gary Meyers, of the Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbor, explained that the ceremony is “conciliation at its finest.”

In June of 1945, as a direct response to the Pearl Harbor attack, American B-29 Superfortress aircraft conducted bombing runs over Shizuoka, Japan. Over 2,000 Japanese died in the bombings, and U.S. Air Force records state that two B-29s collided in midair during the raid, killing the entire crews of both.

Fukumatsu Itoh, a resident of Shizuoka, went through the wreckage of the planes and pulled out two badly injured crew members, who later passed away. Itoh was a devout Buddhist who later became a monk, and he buried both Japanese and American servicemen who were killed in the Shizuoka bombings.

As he went through the plane wreckage, Itoh found a blackened canteen that had been partially crushed and deformed by heat. It also appeared to have the seared-in imprints from a human hand on it.

Itoh secretly put up a cross to honor the Americans who had been killed, and each year, he poured whiskey from the blackened canteen onto the cross on the June 20th anniversary of the crash. In 1972, Itoh asked Americans from the nearby Yokota Air Base if they would like to come and partake in the ceremony.

He later gave the canteen to Dr. Hiroya Sugano, who had been just 12 when the Shizuoka raids took place. In 1992, he brought the canteen to Pearl Harbor, where he has been performing the simple ritual ever since.

“The Blackened Canteen ceremony is more than appropriate,” said Rovsek. “Our two countries need to be role models during these difficult times in this turbulent and even dangerous world.”

It’s incredibly powerful to see a ceremony that is all about unity, as this one is. Watch the Blackened Canteen ceremony from 2017 yourself in the video below.