Syahri Rochmat is a 24-year-old railway worker living in Depok, in the suburbs of Jakarta. Shota Noda is a 21-year-old student studying in Yokohama, Japan, about 5,800 km away.
Rochmat and Noda did not know each other, but a missing cellphone led to a cross-cultural friendship between the two young men.
The story began in December last year when Rochmat, who has been a maintenance worker at Indonesia's state-owned railway company for more than four years, was cleaning the interior of a used train car imported from Japan for use in the capital and its surrounding areas.