OTSUCHI, Iwate Prefecture--Mieko Onodera is largely credited with protecting so many children at Otsuchi Elementary School from the March 11 tsunami.
OTSUCHI, Iwate Prefecture--Mieko Onodera is largely credited with protecting so many children at Otsuchi Elementary School from the March 11 tsunami.
Yet Onodera, the school's principal, still laments over the ones she couldn't save who had left with their mothers after the Great East Japan Earthquake hit.
"I should have forced all the children to evacuate, even though their parents came to take them home," said Onodera, holding back tears.
Eight days before the quake, this fishing town held its annual tsunami drill on March 3, the day in 1933 when Otsuchi was flattened by the Showa Sanriku Tsunami, which claimed 3,064 lives across northeastern Japan.
People of all ages attended. And elders of the town, which had a pre-quake population of about 15,300, handed down their accounts of how devastating a tsunami could be.
With the tsunami drill still fresh in her mind, Onodera tried to turn on the school address system to order all pupils and staff to evacuate the building when the magnitude-9.0 quake struck at 2:46 p.m. on March 11.
The system failed to work, and the swaying was so intense, she could hardly stand.
"We have to get all the pupils to evacuate outside," Onodera told a teacher and a clerk in the office. They split up and went from classroom to classroom ordering the children to go outdoors.
The quake struck as the early elementary grade pupils were about to leave for home. Second-grader Hirari Sasaki, 8, was among them.
Hirari and her classmates had crawled under the desks wearing their school satchels amid the screams of terrified children, according to one 8-year-old boy.
When the strong shakes ended, the teachers gathered the roughly 280 pupils in the schoolyard to confirm that everybody was safe.
By that time, some relatives of the children had shown up. A few children ran to their mothers, crying.
But the disaster was far from over.
"A warning has been issued that a huge tsunami is coming," Onodera told the pupils. "Go to higher ground immediately."
Most children appeared relatively calm, according to a 34-year-old mother who had come to pick up her child.
The children were just a five-minute walk from higher ground on a nearby mountain.
However, Hirari's mother, Ayumi, put her daughter in her car and drove away.
In all, about 30 pupils left the school group with their relatives. The remainder headed toward the elevated land with teachers and staff.
By then, it was just past 3 p.m.
Around that time, Hirari's grandmother, Emiko Miura, was cleaning up broken liquor bottles that had fallen from shelves in the bar and coffee shop she ran near JR Otsuchi Station.
She recalled thinking what a waste it was that all that expensive liquor had been lost.
She briefly thought that a tsunami could follow the temblor, but Miura, 70, figured she would be OK this time, too.
When a tsunami swamped northeastern Japan almost a day after one of the world's strongest earthquakes jolted Chile on May 22, 1960, the water reached only about the first floor level in her bar.
In that tsunami, which climbed to 6 meters in some locations, 142 died in Japan.
Ayumi came into the bar with Hirari and Miura's two grandsons, Jo, 6, and Dan, 4.
Surprised to see them, Miura told them to flee quickly to higher ground.
"Yeah, we will," Ayumi replied. But she did not seem very serious about evacuating. Hirari, ducking under the bar counter, told her brothers jokingly, "They say a 6-meter wall of water is closing in on us."
Miura responded: "That is massive, isn't it? It is scary. You should flee with your mom."
As the four left, Miura turned to run upstairs to grab her cellphone. But after just a few steps, she felt like something was shoving her from behind.
When she turned, she looked out a window and saw a wave of dark water rolling into view that half-swallowed Ayumi's car just several meters from the bar.
Miura fainted in horror.
When she came to, she was buried in rubble. She has no idea how long she lay there.
Soaked from the chest down, she saw a ray of light through a gap in the wreckage. Miura crawled out of the rubble, twisting her body to avoid the sharp nails sticking out from a pillar.
Atop a 5-meter mountain of debris, Miura looked around, but the whole town was gone.
Her next thought was of her grandchildren.
"Hirari!" Miura cried.
But the entire town was deadly quiet. Far off, eerie flames floated on the water.
She spent that night on the second floor of an unfamiliar building, haunted by repeated flashbacks of when her daughter and three grandchildren were swallowed by the tsunami.
In Miyako, about 40 kilometers north of Otsuchi Elementary School, Shigeki Kimura, vice principal at Taro No. 1 Elementary School, was trying to organize an evacuation after the quake hit.
He and others called back several pupils who had started out the school gate. When all 217 children were assembled in the schoolyard after the shaking was over, parents began arriving.
With little information available, Kimura turned on a radio to get updates.
He saw that some relatives were trying to take the children home. "Please wait," he told them. "Stay here. We have no information about a tsunami yet."
The school was less than 500 meters from the shore.
But the adults appeared eager to leave with the children.
"The roads will be closed off," one person protested. "We won't be able to join our other family members if we stay here any longer."
After one impatient person left with a child, about 50 others followed suit, including Emiko Sasaki, 53, who worked in a factory at the Taro fisheries cooperative. She had arrived at the school by bicycle and left with her 7-year-old grandson, Futa.
By that time, the community wireless system began issuing a warning about a huge tsunami. When Kimura looked toward the sea, he spotted a cloud of dirt rising in the distance. The tsunami was rolling over the coastal seawall to assault the Taro district of Miyako.
"Run!" one person shouted. The children in the yard raced to the hill behind the school.
Futa's father, Hiroshi, was shopping downtown when the quake struck.
He abandoned his car after the road leading to the Taro district was sealed off and rushed to his family's home.
Although he heard from a fellow volunteer firefighter that all the children at Taro No. 1 Elementary School were at the school, Hiroshi, 29, was desperately worried about Futa.
Hiroshi was also disturbed that Futa did not say "Bye bye," as he usually did, when he had dropped off his son at school that morning.
Instead, Futa dashed straight into the school without a backward glance.
While Hiroshi feared for his son's safety, Atsuko Sasaki, a colleague of Emiko Sasaki at the fisheries cooperative, passed the grandmother and the boy about 100 meters from the school.
The two looked happy as usual, according to Sasaki, 54.
Several minutes later, the tsunami inundated the Taro district.
Futa's body was found under wreckage near the school three days after the quake. His grandmother's body was discovered in the vicinity of the school on March 25.
Futa was the only pupil from Taro No. 1 Elementary School who died in the disaster.
At Otsuchi Elementary School, most of the students survived, but not all.
Hirari's body was found in a storehouse about 100 meters from her school on March 30. The body of Jo was discovered under rubble in the schoolyard about a week earlier.
Dan and mother Ayumi have yet to be found.
Two other pupils--a fourth-grader and a fifth-grader--from the school are still missing. They had also been taken home by their mothers.
Miura goes to the morgue every day to look for the bodies of Ayumi and Dan.
The bar where she last saw her daughter and grandchildren was destroyed. A few snapshots of her grandchildren provided by an acquaintance are all she has left to remember them by.
"I am afraid my daughter should have been more alert," Miura said. "But I, too, should have told them again and again to evacuate. I just wish my grandchildren would have been spared instead of me."
Principal Onodera remains anguished over thoughts that she could have done more after gathering the children in the schoolyard when the worst of the shaking had subsided.
"I will have to live with this feeling," she said.
(This article was written by Takeo Yoshinaga and Masahiro Yuchi.)