Their home was on a hillside and they believed they would be safe because they had escaped a large tsunami that started off Chile in 1960 and caused widespread damage in north-east Japan. His older brother and sister-in-law died in the tsunami. Yet memories of the tragedy are never far away, Haga admits. It gave us courage and made us feel that we were not alone.” “We were very grateful for all the help and aid that we received from all around Japan and across the world. “We still have close ties to Taiwan, with people coming here to volunteer or do homestays, while there is also a young Taiwanese currently working with the town tourism association,” he says. The gesture was much appreciated, Haga says. The hospital that stood in the center of the town was damaged beyond repair, so a new hospital has been constructed, with 22 billion yen of the 52 billion yen total cost donated by the Taiwan Red Cross. Local fishermen have largely resumed their operations, with generous grants from the government enabling them to purchase new boats, nets and other equipment. Haga Choko sits next to a piano retrieved from the 2011 disaster rubble and is now situated inside the Sun-Sun Sanriku shopping center in Minamisanriku, Janu©Ī man-made beach was reopened to the public three years ago, with the tourist authorities working hard to attract people to enjoy activities such as salmon fishing, sea kayaking and accompanying oyster fishermen as they bring in their catches. So we are holding events-even simple things, like drinking tea together-so people can get to know each other.” They are building on higher ground, but that also means that they have to build new communities of people. “Now, homes are being built in other parts of the town that are in less danger if there is another disaster. “I have used a piece of the foundation in the garden of my new house,” he says. But people recover, communities rebuild and life goes on, he insists. “When the water had gone down again, I could not find a single photograph, a dish or a piece of clothing as a memory from before the disaster,” he says. Today, 72-year-old Haga is a volunteer working for the town’s tourism association and giving presentations about the impact of the tragedy on his home town. “My house was close to the hospital in the center of the town, but when I got back there some time later, only the foundations were left,” says Haga Choko, who was a member of the Miyagi fishing cooperative at the time but retired in 2016. The tsunami scoured Minamisanriku from the map and local estimates put the number of dead and missing from this community alone at 1,206. Today, bitterly cold winds tinged with snow are again blowing into the bay where the Suijiri River flows into the Pacific, but the town that stood on this spot in 2011 will not be rebuilt. Minamisanriku: Rebuilding on Higher Ground Residents of towns and villages that were under the plume of radioactivity were evacuated and their homes declared off-limits.Īfter the waves receded, the clear-up and reconstruction began. The quake and tsunami also badly damaged four of the reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, causing meltdowns of three reactors and the release of large amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. Inevitably, there was great loss of life, with nearly 20,000 people killed or still listed as missing. Residents of these communities were in many instances only given a few minutes’ warning to take shelter. In places, experts have calculated that the tsunami reached heights of more than 40 meters and were traveling at speeds up to 700 km an hour when they came ashore, with some traveling as much as 10 km inland. The fourth most powerful earthquake anywhere in the world since accurate records began being kept in 1900, the tremor triggered a series of powerful tsunami that barreled ashore along beaches from Chiba Prefecture in the south to Hokkaido in the far north. on March 11, 2011, a magnitude-9 megathrust event approximately 70 km to the east of the Oshika Peninsula of Miyagi Prefecture. The Great East Japan Earthquake struck shortly before 3 p.m. The bridge connecting the Sun-Sun Sanriku shopping mall and memorial park in Minamisanriku, Janu©Ī decade on from the most devastating natural disaster to strike Japan in recorded history, life in the communities that dot the inlets and bays of the northeast coast is in many ways very different.
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