The tenth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

When his alarm clock went off in the early hours of March 11, 2011, the 33-year-old employee Takuya Ueno had no idea that this would be the last time he woke up with his parents alive in the family home. Soon, he dressed, had breakfast, and began a one-hour trek along the scenic Tohoku Coast north from Utsuchi to Miyako.

That afternoon, 2:46 PM, the ground began to shake violently. Being on the Ring of Fire where 10% of all volcanic activity occurs under their island nation, Ueno and his fellow men and women are no strangers to earthquakes. This, however, felt different.

Instead of peaking after a few strong jolts, it kept moving and growing, reaching its magnitude 9.0 and unleashing enough seismic force to shorten the length of Earth days a little and knock the entire world off its axis by more than six inches. Instinctively, Ueno headed for the hills above Miyako, not waiting for the official tsunami warning to tell him what to do. He assumed his parents would do the same even though with the decline in cell service he had no way of making sure of this. Then the waves came. It will take three days and he will feel a lot of anxiety before Ueno can navigate the dead-ends with debris and return to Utsuchi.

On reaching his hometown, he found that the family home near the ocean had disappeared. He immediately went to the elementary school, a designated evacuation center, the place his parents would have run to if they had survived.

His mother, Hiro, was found to have survived the tsunami by running to the roof of a local hospital where she was on a date. From here she had witnessed the horrors of the tidal waves and the ensuing fires devastated their city.

But Ueno’s father Tokushi, who drove her to the hospital that morning, is missing. A month later, the patriarch’s body was found in his car outside a local tire shop. Why was there never going to be known. He might have been on his way back to the hospital to pick up his wife or try to reach higher ground when the tsunami warnings set off and he was stuck in a traffic jam behind many like-minded people. Either way, it’s gone.

The Great East Japan Earthquake, as it is now known, lasted six terrifying minutes, with the first tsunami waves striking the country’s northeastern coast less than an hour later. A deadly 128-foot tsunami swept across Miyako, traveled six miles inland at Sendai, and caused a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima power plant, the worst radiological disaster since Chernobyl.

By the time the waters receded, more than 15,000 people had died, most of them drowned. Now a decade later, several thousand others are still officially missing. In Ueno Township, Ueno’s birthplace – before March 11, 2011, it had a population of about 16,000 – 1 in 10 people lost their lives.

The residents of Utsuchi are left with one of the most surreal and iconic scenes of the disaster, a large ship, Hamayori, resting on top of a building after being stranded there by the receding tsunami waters. The owner of the two-storey building resisted demolishing it despite the ship’s removal years earlier. This impasse has delayed reconstruction in the area where extensive ground clearance work was taking place. Finally, in January of this year, the Destruction Ball is called in to do its job.

The devastating City Hall shell where the mayor, Kohki Kato, and most of his emergency personnel were killed, has also for years been a reminder of what the Japanese often call 3.11. Fierce battles raged over what to do with the building, which was turned into an unofficial memorial. It is now an empty space.

But many rays of hope emerged from the devastation. Miu Kamitani, a Nagoya native and former nurse, watched the incoming waves towards Sendai live while working with a Japanese NGO in Vietnam. Within a few weeks, she was on the ground in Otsushi as part of an aid team distributing supplies and providing psychological care.

The two fell in love with Takuya Ueno, got married and found a home in a makeshift prefab complex for those who had lost their homes. Yino’s widowed mother became their neighbor. Simple decorations in the newlyweds’ home included a memorial to Senior Ueno who was lost by the waves. The family has since given birth to a boy named Sue, who is now 5 years old, and the multi-generational family moved into their home four years ago.

Kamitani’s non-governmental organization Oraga-Otsuchi Yume Hiroba (The Field of Our Dreams) focuses on rebuilding her adopted home including running a state-of-the-art modern community center. She and her team are now lobbying the local government on behalf of the town’s remaining 13,000 residents to create a large stadium. For now, Otsuchi children are limited to their school facilities. Seo, son of Mio and Takuya, seems to be satisfied at the moment with his dinosaurs and Lego.

Tomoko, one of Sue’s former teachers at day nursery, is the daughter of Masahiko Haga, a retired mechanic who searches for bodies from sunrise to sunset in the following days 3.11. They were so successful in their efforts that they found countless victims, some of them as described, “cut in half completely,” leaving them in recurring nightmares.

After recovery efforts, he joined the forestry department in Iwate Prefecture to cut down trees destroyed by sea water to make way for a new forest. Some seedlings will take years to reveal themselves. At the age of 73 it will be a distant memory when trees such as hinoki (cypress) reach maturity. These, he indicates, are for future generations.

For now, he, his daughter, Owenus, Kamitani, and other Otsushi residents are even more excited about the arrival of cherry blossoms next month in Tohoku, the ultimate symbol of the cycle of life.

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