A drone flies over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Iwate until it makes its descent over the vermilion-coloured lighthouse of Otsuchi, a town that almost ceased to exist ten years ago. Overlooking it are the verdant mountains of the Sanriku National Park. An imposing sea wall, 14.5 metres high, stretches along the coastline, shielding the 12,531 inhabitants from the sea. The remote-controlled device makes its way through monumental floodgates. In the event of a tsunami warning – the locals know for sure that “it will happen again” – 200 tonnes of engineering will come down within four minutes and block the sea from entering the ria that runs through its centre. Behind this new concrete wall, between the station and the rebuilt homes, lie many empty spaces. One, unforgettable and immense, is the void left by the town hall where the mayor and dozens of civil servants perished under the waters of the worst disaster in Japanese history.

Back at the inn run by the Ogawa family, the owner eagerly shows the images taken by his drone. His establishment has re-emerged as both a draw for tourism and a symbol of resilience. On 11 March, the town lost 1,284 people (10 per cent of the population), half the houses and practically all the businesses. The traditional Japanese-style inn disappeared beneath the waves and in the fires that consumed the old centre. Re-opened in 2012 in a temporary building away from its original site, it has accommodated hundreds of volunteers and reconstruction workers. In late 2019, a typhoon prevented the arrival of visitors coming for the Rugby World Cup being held in the region to give a boost to the affected areas. It is now trying to stay afloat in the midst of a pandemic. Ogawa is not optimistic, but he does not plan to give up now. A wall full of supportive messages, white chrysanthemums and a photograph accompany him at the reception desk. The photo, damaged by water and fire and later recovered thanks to image restoration technology, is a portrait of the previous owner, Mrs Ogawa’s mother, who died in 2012, before the ryokan reopened.

No survival manual

A mountain separates the town of Otsuchi, in Iwate Prefecture, from Kirikiri, a small fishing community of 1,800 people. Its inhabitants consider themselves “heirs to the memory of the Great East Japan Earthquake” and have carved in stone the lessons learned from the tsunami: “flee at all cost”, “evacuate to high ground” and “protect life”. They lost 100 members of their community to the disaster and many others have since left for good. They have raised a memorial so as not to forget and to warn future generations. They have also created a space dedicated to hope. “We made a circle in the stone for the children to play in. We didn’t want it to be a sad thing or something that would make them afraid of the sea,” explains Toshiaki Fujimoto.

On this November morning, the 70-year-old Shinto priest walks with purpose through the streets of Kirikiri with a folder under his arm. Every few steps, he points to a spot, opens the folder and pulls out a picture of the devastation and subsequent transformation. He has been documenting the reconstruction of his beloved community for a decade. At the school where 400 people took shelter, the pictures also show the survivors’ resilience.

At 2.46 pm on that fateful 11 March, a magnitude nine earthquake shook eastern Japan for five harrowing minutes. A tsunami warning immediately rang out in every one of its coastal towns. During the 20 minutes that followed, calls to evacuate were made one after another, strong and determined voices racing against time whilst keeping a constant eye on the sea. Many were saved by this insistence. Others were trapped: the 20,000 people who were not able to escape. At 3.13 pm, some, who had climbed up the nearest hills and taken refuge in schools, watched the water recede, signalling the arrival of a tsunami.

Forty-six-year-old Yukiko Kikuchi was driving towards Otsuchi when she saw it: “It wasn’t a wave, it was a deep blue wall, quite beautiful even. I had heard about tsunamis since I was a child, but this was the first time I had seen one. You have to see it to believe it. I’ll never forget it now.” Kikuchi jumped out of her car and ran for her life to the hills. The fishermen also ran, but in the opposite direction. They ran to the beach to take their boats out to sea, something routinely done to try to save them from the impact of the wave.

This time, however, the tsunami “surpassed all expectations”. Only two out of the 250 boats in the bay of Kirikiri remained after the five poundings they were given by the sea.

The waves were over 10 metres high and swept over 560 km² of land along 650 km of Japanese coastline, mainly in the north eastern provinces of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima. At 4.15 pm a helicopter confirmed that the Fukushima nuclear power plant had been affected. The tsunami had triggered a third disaster, a nuclear catastrophe, with radiation and an evacuation that would change the future of the region’s children and youngsters forever. It was also, to some extent, the disaster that overshadowed the tsunami itself and the regions ‘only’ affected by that.

Japan deployed 50,000 members of its armed forces. “On this sad and uncertain night, let us be kind and take care of each other,” was the appeal heard on television sets across the country. But in Kirikiri, they were oblivious to all of this. Each community was facing the disaster alone, incommunicado and unable to ask for help from the neighbouring village: all of them had been hit, and in Otsuchi, the municipal council had been erased.

Left without light or water, hundreds of people crowded into the school gymnasium. In the car park, fires made from wood gathered from the nearby forests provided the evacuees with warmth and light. Information was scarce, and patience was urged. Adding to the fear of what had happened were the constant aftershocks, which complicated the rescue effort and made it impossible to rest: magnitude five tremors were recorded every six minutes in one day.

For Fujimoto, the priest who led the evacuation in Kirikiri together with other villagers, the priority was survival:

“We had an action manual, but we weren’t prepared. We decided who was best for what tasks and resources. By the 12th [24 hours after the tsunami], we were organised. We knew help would come, but that it would take time. We are used to fending for ourselves.”

They used the water from the school’s rooftop swimming pool. They divided up the space according to the various needs: the elderly near the bathroom, the sick separate, and the library as a play area for the children. The kitchen classroom became a temporary kitchen where they rationed out the 30 kilos of rice stored in a shrine. “Everyone had to eat, even if it was just one small ball of rice,” says Fujimoto. They managed to provide light using the battery of a bus with the motor running. When the fuel ran out, they took a chance, taking more from the damaged petrol station.

Seventy-five-year-old Sachiko Azumaya and 73-year-old Masae Maekawa lost their homes. “There was no time to think about our houses. We had to act fast,” they recount. They left with the clothes on their backs and went on to manage the shelter for months. Maekawa, a retired nurse, had never been so grateful for her choice of career. She took care of the dead, the sick, and the information, a very precious and sensitive commodity in times of uncertainty. “Having leaders you can trust in is essential,” she says. Azumaya took care of the various areas and the food at the shelter: “Good leadership, knowing who does what, communication and trusting people are crucial.”

When the scale of the disaster became clear, the community fell to pieces. “The pain kept us from moving forward.” Fujimoto thought they should keep fighting for the living and celebrate their acclaimed summer festival together, just like before: “We had to do it, to bring us some joy.” They threw themselves into bringing the community back to life. Masahiko Haga, a 73-year-old pensioner, had always looked to the sea, but after that, he turned around and saw the mountains: “There were all that was left, and they saved me.” He founded an NGO to provide work for fishermen and the unemployed, using the only resource available. Retrained as woodcutters, they took care of the centuries-old forests.

When Kikuchi managed to reach Otsuchi on foot, she was shocked at how poor the coverage of the disaster was: “We were not receiving enough basic local information, and the little news we were receiving was coming from Tokyo.” Although she had studied veterinary medicine, she decided to redirect her energy towards starting a local newspaper, the Otsuchi Shimbun, and she is now sharing disaster prevention knowledge all over Japan and even in Turkey. Azumaya says: “The lessons learned from the tsunami are universal,” she says. “There was almost no memory of the 1928 tsunami in Kirikiri, and those who experienced the 1960 tsunami were overly complacent because it wasn’t that big, so some communities didn’t do enough to evacuate. It changes the impact and the disaster.” Fujimoto insists, “The dangers should never be underestimated. There are ever more disasters to consider: landslides, heavy rains and now the coronavirus.”

How to rebuild after a disaster?

The word ‘rebuilding’ is everywhere: in the thousands of temporary dwellings stretching out over time; it is on the lips of the 42,000 evacuees, in government plans and budgets, in the 2.1 per cent additional income tax the Japanese are paying (and will continue to pay until 2037) to cover the costs of the “most expensive disaster in history”, as the World Bank put it, in the decontamination efforts and the future of nuclear power plants.

The tsunami took away loved ones, homes, infrastructure and jobs, as well as the sense of belonging in communities already suffering from depopulation. For the affected villages in rural Japan, rebuilding is a matter of survival:

“It had to be done quickly, otherwise people get discouraged, leave and never come back. First, we rebuilt the homes, then, the public areas, and now we’re working on the protective sea wall,” explain the people of Kirikiri, proud of what they have achieved.

Professor Tatsuto Asakawa, an expert in urban sociology, was coordinating the Volunteer Centre at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo when the disaster struck. He accompanied dozens of students to Kirikiri to provide support and recalls how difficult it was to access. They took three weeks. “It was as if a bomb had been dropped. How do you rebuild a world that has disappeared? I wanted to record that process. Ten years on, and he is still involved in the community. He does not speak of ‘rebuilding’, but of “creating a sustainable society”. “There is no going back to the society that existed before the disaster. A new one emerges. The infrastructure may be finished, but if no one lives there, it’s a ghost town,” he says.

“It’s too early to say that Kirikiri has been rebuilt. There are not many children, but those who are here are doing well. If these children grow up to become a Fujimoto or an Azumaya, if they sustain their community, then we’ll be able to say that a sustainable society has been successfully built,” concludes the expert. Survivors like Kikuchi say the same thing in a different way: “We have rebuilt the impossible, but the real rebuilding effort starts now.”