Mar 10, 2021
It’s likely many who were in Japan on March 11, 2011, can recall exactly where they were when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck.
Japan’s pro baseball players were in the midst of spring training, and pitcher Darrell Rasner was gearing up for his third season with the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles. On that particular day, while the Eagles played in Hyogo Prefecture, Rasner was on a shinkansen with Masahiro Tanaka and a few other pitchers who were traveling to Rakuten’s next stop ahead of the rest of the team.
They were somewhere south of Nagoya when the quake hit.
The return of pitcher Masahiro Tanaka has raised hopes in Miyagi Prefecture that the Rakuten Eagles will again rise to glory. But for one young survivor of the 2011 tsunami disaster, an earlier encounter with “Ma-kun” proved more valuable than any baseball championship.
Tatsuki Sakamoto still keeps a dirt-stained baseball from the event that helped to bring him out of despair and erase feelings of survivor guilt.
He was a 12-year-old sixth-grader at Omagari Elementary School in Higashi-Matsushima, Miyagi Prefecture, when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck off the coast on March 11, 2011.
Sakamoto was at the school preparing for the graduation ceremony when the strong shaking sparked panic in the classroom. He returned home and joined his family members, but the entrance was such a cluttered mess that they could not go inside.