Mar 11, 2021
A school bell rings and excited giggles and the patter of rubber-soled shoes echo down the corridor as Shinichiro Hiratsuka, principal of Midoridai Junior High School in the city of Natori, Miyagi Prefecture, sits in his office picking over memories of the past decade.
They start on March 11, 2011, when he was stranded at his then-workplace in nearby Ishinomaki, unable to contact his wife, Naomi, or return to his home, normally a 20-minute drive away, due to the havoc caused by the earthquake and tsunami that struck earlier in the afternoon.
Four days would pass before he learned that the eldest of their three children, 12-year-old Koharu, was missing, and another five months until they found her. She was one of 74 pupils at Okawa Elementary School who perished during the 3/11 disasters.
The scars remain: Tohoku communities still struggling to rebuild, 10 years on japantimes.co.jp - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from japantimes.co.jp Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Returning to the scene of Japan’s worst disaster a decade on
Credit: Rob Gilhooly
Ten years ago Shinichiro Hiratsuka watched as, under a gunmetal-grey sky, the first, small, tarpaulin-wrapped bodies were brought up the embankment from Okawa Elementary School and laid gently on the road. Singly, or in small knots, the waiting parents stepped forward, pulling back the makeshift shrouds to reveal the faces of the dead children. Even in utter grief, they were restrained. On more than one occasion, the only indication that a mother had found her child was her buckling at the knees and being held up by her husband. There were tears, but the crying was inaudible over the wind and the sound of the digging that continued in the mud and the wreckage of the school and a couple of hundred homes that had made up this village.