Correspondent The Great East Japan Disaster hasn’t ended,” said innkeeper Sakawaki Tadao on Sunday as he surveyed the damage a magnitude 7.3 temblor (six-plus on the Japanese scale of zero to seven) did to his hostelry in Soma City, Fukushima Prefecture, the previous night. Seismologists say the quake was an aftershock of the one almost exactly ten years ago that devastated the region, triggered a tsunami and nuclear disaster, and upended Sakawaki’s life.
In March 2011, water from the tsunami came gushing into Sakawaki’s inn and flooded the first floor. The damage was so severe that it forced him to close. It took him nine and a half years to rebuild and reopen, this time on land elevated ten meters to protect him in the event of another tsunami. It took just four more months for an aftershock to put cracks in his walls, damage the boiler and knock out some of the lights.