After the tragedy of the Ehime Maru, communities from Japan and Hawai'i have tried to build bridges across their grief.

Monuments were erected in Honolulu and the Japanese prefecture of Ehime, and goodwill baseball games played — all with the intent that no one forgets the day, Feb. 9, 2001, when the Pearl Harbor-based submarine Greeneville surfaced beneath the Ehime Maru. The Japanese fisheries training vessel sank in minutes, killing nine people aboard. All the victims were Japanese, including four teenagers.

Today, as the fifth anniversary of the collision nears, comes a kind of musical bridge, as a choral group from Roppongi, Japan, gathers for a memorial performance. Tomorrow, the Honolulu Symphony presents its tribute with new music by Japanese and American composers.

Both composers — Shigeaki Saegusa and Donald Womack — will be on hand when Saegusa's "Cantata Tengai" is performed by the Roppongi Male Chorus Club and Womack's "After" is played by the orchestra, with haunting solos by shakuhachi and koto players. (A shakuhachi is a bamboo flute; a koto, a zither, or harp-like instrument.)

Just how this tribute came to pass is a story of serendipity, said Stephen Bloom, former Honolulu Symphony president.

Bloom had been on a fund-raising trip to Tokyo in the summer of 2004. He visited with symphony supporter Yoshiko Morita, widow of the late Sony founder Akio Morita, who has a home in Honolulu. Bloom also had a brainstorming session with past symphony board member Dick Ohtomo, the local liaison for the Roppongi Male Chorus Club. Bloom was introduced to Saegusa, who had written a piece that memorialized Akio Morita as a young boy.

About the same time, Womack approached Bloom to discuss future projects and, Womack said, the American composer felt something should be done to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the tragedy.

"The stars were aligning," Bloom said from Portland, Ore., where he serves as executive director of the Japanese Garden. "There were all kinds of interconnecting possibilities of a collaboration like this: a Japanese piece, an American composer. We can put this together and really do some healing through music."

Womack, whose second son would be born just four months after the Ehime Maru collision, recalled reading on an anniversary of the tragedy about a survivor who said he wanted to make sure people remembered that fateful day.

"I wondered, 'Are people going to remember it?' " said Womack, acting chair of the department of music for the University of Hawai'i-Manoa. "As (George) Santayana said, 'Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.' "

He went for the emotion in his piece, which he calls "listener-friendly."

"It could have been a political piece, quote, unquote, but that's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to make it a human piece."

Womack tried to imagine the incident as if one of his children had been on board, and titled his finished work, the fourth commissioned by the symphony, simply "After."

"The title refers to the emotional journey people on board went through after the event," Womack said, explaining that grief, like life, is filled with complicated, overlapping sets of emotions.

"There are strange juxtapositions," Womack said. "There's total anguish one moment, then unexplainably the next moment, joy."

Bloom, too, found a range of feelings, recognizing that the Ehime Maru "impacted everyone on both sides (of the ocean) so greatly, so deeply."

"We need to remember we are neighbors in the globe," Bloom said. "We need to do it in a positive way, in a way that moves us forward in this society. It was a tragedy from all sides."

Parents lost their sons; wives, their husbands; and a former captain of a submarine lives with his own horrific memories. And all because a submarine chose to ascend at a specific moment in time.

"When you consider the odds of the entire Pacific Ocean, this sub coming up at this very spot," Bloom said. "It's a mind-blowing thing."