By Calum MacLeod
USA Today
ISHINOMAKI, Japan — At 2:46 p.m. Sunday, a year to the minute since Japan’s strongest recorded earthquake, Toshiyuki Momma heard the siren’s wail, turned toward the sea and bowed in prayer for all its victims.
He loaded his family into the car and drove from home to the river island where he worked with his father, arriving 40 minutes later — the same amount of time, Momma said, that the quake-triggered tsunami took to race in from the Pacific Ocean and devastate this port city.
At their wrecked boat repair yard, Momma, 37, lit incense and prayed again, this time for his father, Kenichi, 69, whose corpse Momma himself uncovered there three months after the tsunami. “I don’t feel any better now, but I’m not alone in my grief,” he said.
On Sunday, the entire nation of 127 million shared his sorrow.
From the emperor in Tokyo to ordinary citizens nationwide, Japanese paused for a minute’s silence to remember the 19,000 killed a year ago. Along the battered northeast coast, people held memorial services public and private, secular and religious. There were protests, too, against nuclear power, for this remains a triple-headed disaster after damage to the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant triggered an ongoing crisis.
In Ishinomaki, the single worst-hit municipality, residents Sunday mourned the 3,576 dead and missing people, recalled the luck that let them live, and thanked all who supported their recovery.
After the quake, Tomizawa Hitomi and seven colleagues had fled their fish processing plant in a van, only to become stuck in a traffic jam of desperate drivers. Then the waters hit.
“The van was rolling, and I tasted seawater and gasoline,” said Hitomi, 47. “I thought I would die, but I just swam toward the light.”
Only two of the eight survived, she said, and she struggles with “complicated feelings” about her own good fortune. “Something saved me, so I must keep going, and Ishinomaki must recover,” Hitomi said. She has been unemployed ever since the tsunami destroyed the city’s fishing industry.
Ikurou Okuda, 65, had abandoned his car on a gridlocked bridge and headed home on foot. As the waves swept over his head, he held onto a power pole, Okuda said, until he was rescued, unconscious, by firefighters.
On Sunday, Okuda and others joined a Buddhist memorial service at the Minato elementary school where 1,200 evacuees spent several months sleeping on classroom floors before moving to temporary housing.
“The pace of reconstruction is too slow,” Okuda complained, but he looks back with pride to what he sees as the Japanese people’s orderly and cooperative response to the crisis.
Sachi Saijyo, 10, eating rice crackers and giggling with former classmates, was happy to return for the day to her old school. Evacuated to the third floor, they had watched in fear as the tsunami reached the second. She didn’t cry until three days later, Sachi said, when her mother finally reached her.
Phone service was out, recalled her mother, Mie Saijyo, 38, and “neither of us knew if the other was alive.” Sachi wants to be back in her old class, but the school may never reopen, Saijyo said. “She has nightmares and finds it hard to make friends at her new school.”
Momma, the boat repairman, is trying to revive the family business “in my father’s memory,” working in a prefabricated unit next to the old workshop. His wife worries when he is there, he said, because the ground sank by a meter and now floods at high tide. Her father, a fisherman, survived by taking his boat out to sea and over the tsunami, Momma said.
His father had left by car but later made the fateful decision to return, perhaps to recover some property, said Momma, who was inland last March 11.
“He was a working man. Even the tools were important to him,” he said.
Days turned to weeks, and official searches declined.
“I am glad it was me who found him,” under a refrigerator and buried in mud, Momma said.
Only one other business still functions on the islet dubbed “Mangattan” for its Manga Museum, dedicated to Japan’s famous animated characters, and a replica Statue of Liberty partly damaged by the tsunami.
“I hope it is kept as a memorial for the city,” said Momma, who planned to take his three children to light candles Sunday evening at one of several open-air events. “It’s a symbol of perseverance.”
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