KESENNUMA, Miyagi Prefecture--Koki Yoshida's third birthday party was a bittersweet affair. Although he and a number of family members survived the disaster that ravaged this city in northeastern Japan, one remains missing.
KESENNUMA, Miyagi Prefecture--Koki Yoshida's third birthday party was a bittersweet affair. Although he and a number of family members survived the disaster that ravaged this city in northeastern Japan, one remains missing.
The experience has left the child terrified of the dark. And the venue of his birthday party was a cramped evacuation center where curried rice replaced birthday cake as a luxury.
Koki and seven other members of the Yoshida family were in different places when the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami struck on March 11.
Koki's mother, Michina Yoshida, and her 5-month-old son, Keigo, were visiting her grandfather Kiyomi, 82, at his liquor shop in the city's Kogoshio district when the magnitude-9.0 quake struck.
Unable to stand, Michina, 26, held her son tightly as the house went dark and bottles began crashing to the floor.
"A tsunami is coming! Go up the hill in the back," shouted Kiyomi, who experienced the tsunami spawned by the 1960 Chilean earthquake that hit the Sanriku coast where they live.
Although the hill was a designated evacuation center, no facility existed there to take refuge. Michina feared they would become isolated on the hill with no means to protect her baby boy.
"We will go to Urashima Elementary School," Michina said, as she fled with her son and a part-time sales clerk at the store. She grabbed a milk container, diapers, a thermos of hot water and a blanket. But Kiyomi broke away from the group and went up the hill near his shop.
It was the last time Michina saw her grandfather.
On her way, Michina said she saw houses "shaking like pudding."
When her car was 2 kilometers from the elementary school, the clerk said: "There are cracks on the road. We cannot drive further."
After abandoning the car, Michina, carrying Keigo, and the sales clerk ran for higher ground as the water started to close in on them.
The search for Koki
Michina's husband Takayuki, 36, a construction company worker, was at an office near Toryo High School on the northern high ground in the inner bay when the quake hit.
After the shaking subsided, he rushed outside and saw the mass of water washing away people trying to get out of their cars.
In a surreal scene, he saw a large ship being pushed up to the hill.
Takayuki called his loved ones on his cellphone. After several unsuccessful attempts, he finally reached his mother-in-law, Miyako, 56.
"How is Koki's kindergarten?" Takayuki asked, but the call was cut off before Miyako could answer.
Miyako at the time was in a municipal hospital room where her 81-year-old mother, Kazue, was staying. Immediately after the earthquake, the nurses carried Miyako's mother and five other patients in the room to the second floor.
Tsunami swallows buildings
Michina's father, Michinori, 53, held onto a locker at the office of a Kesennuma fisheries cooperative when the ground started shaking.
A computer on the desk fell, and he heard the tsunami warning. He scrambled to the roof of the building.
Before the tsunami from the 1960 Chilean earthquake arrived on Japanese shores, the water in the bay slowly receded, leaving the bottom visible. On March 11, the waves arrived before the water receded, swallowing up buildings.
As a 33-year veteran at the co-op, Michinori directed evacuees to safe areas. In the evening, he saw oil tanks in the inner bay on fire.
Arrival at school buildings
Michina, covered in the blanket, had made her way to Urashima Elementary School. The frequent aftershocks made the school seem dangerous, and the building was dark with smoke, as if covered by black curtains, despite it being daytime.
When she saw Keigo's nose, she noticed that he had been breathing in soot from the wreckage.
Husband Takayuki, meanwhile, started searching for family members at evacuation centers after the water receded.
At 9 p.m., an acquaintance told him that children at Minami-Kesennuma Kindergarten, where Koki attended, were evacuated to nearby Minami-Kesennuma Elementary School.
Takayuki waded through the waist-deep water at the school building and heard a groan and faint cry for help. But it was too dark to find them. He ended up spending the cold night in his car.
At 5:30 a.m., he rushed into the school building and was told the children were on the third floor.
He found the teachers at the window looking out at the sea. The children were sleeping soundly. And then he saw Koki.
As he embraced Koki, the child started bawling.
Converging on hospital
Michina was later rescued by a helicopter of the Self-Defense Forces and brought to Kesennuma Elementary School.
Michina and Keigo headed for the municipal hospital where her mother, Miyako, and her grandmother had been staying. Separately, Takayuki, Koki and Michinori were making their way to the same destination.
But Miyako and the grandmother had been moved to the K-Wave municipal gymnasium to make room at the hospital for seriously sick or injured people.
On March 15, four days after the disaster struck, seven family members were reunited at K-Wave. The grandmother, who had broken her thigh bone a month earlier, was taken to the family of Michina's uncle.
The houses of Michina and Takayuki, her parents and her grandfather were all destroyed in the tsunami.
Struggling in evacuation center
Despite the relief that so many family members could be reunited after such chaos, life in the evacuation center is straining their lives.
The six members of the family sleep in the lobby outside the gymnasium.
Koki gets scared when darkness descends on the building, and Keigo often cries at night.
Michinori continues to look for Kiyomi every day, although his search now includes morgues.
"We are almost at our limits living here," Michinori said. "I want the authorities to let us live in temporary housing."
On Koki's third birthday on Saturday, curried rice was provided for dinner for the first time at the evacuation center. The family members put their six plates together in a shape of a birthday cake for the boy.