Senia Juana Gonzalez Rodriguez receives a certificate of appreciation in Spanish at the Gunma prefectural police’s Oizumi Police Station in Oizumi, Gunma Prefecture, on June 11. (Toshi Yamazaki)

OIZUMI, Gunma Prefecture--Local police went to the trouble of issuing a certificate of appreciation in Spanish to a Peruvian woman here for helping two small brothers who appeared lost on a town street.

Senia Juana Gonzalez Rodriguez was presented with the commendation at the Oizumi Police Station on June 11. She shyly responded in Japanese: “Thank you very much. I love Japan.”

Gonzalez, who is 27 and works as a fixed-term contract employee at a company, was driving home around 6 p.m. on May 30 when she noticed the boys walking in the Sakada 1-chome district.

Worried about their safety, Gonzalez stopped her car and spoke to them.

Although she is not fluent in Japanese, Gonzalez managed to ask them, “Where is your mother?” and “Why are you alone?”

The siblings replied: “We are OK. You are very kind.”

Although the children did not appear to be in any immediate danger, traffic was heavy at the time. So, Gonzalez held their hands and called the police, who had received a panicked phone call from the boys' mother just five minutes earlier saying that her "children aged 6 and 3 have gone missing.”

Although non-Japanese residents account for 18 percent of the total population of Oizumi--a significantly high ratio compared with other municipalities across Japan--it was the first time for the police to issue a certificate of appreciation in a foreign language, records show.

The police station, believing that “using the mother tongue of the recipient would help convey our gratitude more directly,” arranged for an officer to translate it into Spanish.

Kazuo Arafune, head of the Oizumi Police Station, read the letter aloud during the ceremony.

“I repeatedly practiced reading it,” Arafune said. “My hope is that both non-Japanese and Japanese citizens continue to help one another in a spirit of co-existence.”

Gonzalez explained that she felt compelled to do something because a “series of incidents and accidents involving small children have recently been reported.”

As a mother herself, she said she acted out of natural instinct.