OFUNATO, Iwate Prefecture--Hitoe Yamazaki still finds a way to smile despite acknowledging that she seems to have been born under a bad sign.
OFUNATO, Iwate Prefecture--Hitoe Yamazaki still finds a way to smile despite acknowledging that she seems to have been born under a bad sign.
The 88-year-old resident of this coastal city has experienced three tsunami, seen two of her homes destroyed and was just an infant in Tokyo when the Great Kanto Earthquake struck in 1923.
She manages to laugh off all the tough times she went through.
"There is nothing I can do. I was born with such a bitter destiny," she says. "Whatever difficulties I would face, I would take them as a challenge."
For generations, Yamazaki's family lived in Ofunato's fishing community of Ryori, 15 kilometers city center along the coast.
The Sanriku coast in Iwate Prefecture has been struck by several tsunami, but the big ones over the past century seem to be drawn toward Yamazaki.
On March 11, when the magnitude-9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake struck, she was coring "wakame" seaweed at a factory on the shore.
She rushed home, picked up an emergency rucksack containing a towel, clothes, her personal seal and other necessities, and fled to higher ground.
There, she saw the waves surging and swallowing houses. After the water receded, no building, including her house, was left standing.
"There was no foundation of the house, either. Indeed, there was nothing left," she says.
The scene was quite different after the tsunami triggered by the magnitude-9.5 Chilean earthquake in 1960 hit the Japanese coast the next day.
At that time, Yamazaki was the mother of four children.
After the tsunami receded, she saw fish flopping around on the shore. The tsunami stopped before it reached her house.
"How does the tsunami come all this way when there was no earthquake in Japan?" Yamazaki wondered at the time.
During the Sanriku Offshore Earthquake and tsunami in 1933, Yamazaki was 10.
"It shook longer than the latest one--in a slow motion," she says.
That quake struck before dawn, forcing Yamazaki to run up a slope in the dark in her pajamas. She saw sparks discharged at a nearby timber mill.
When the sun rose, the survivors saw that the entire community had been submerged.
Yamazaki's house, built by her grandfather after the magnitude-8.2 Meiji Sanriku Earthquake and tsunami in 1896, which killed 21,959 people, had been swept away.
She says she remembers receiving relief goods called "comfort articles" after the 1933 tsunami. They included "kanpan" sea biscuits, which she saw for the first time, and canned food.
Pencils and textbooks arrived later at her elementary school.
Yamazaki says she believes it was her fate to suffer through earthquakes.
As an infant, Yamazaki and her family moved to Tokyo because of her father's job as a carpenter.
Then the Great Kanto Earthquake devastated the Tokyo area, leaving more than 100,000 dead or missing.
Yamazaki now lives in another part of Ofunato with the family of her second daughter, Yuko Yokoishi, 59.
Yamazaki says she cannot finish reading newspaper articles about the damage from the March 11 disaster because she becomes overcome with emotion thinking about her classmate who was orphaned in 1933.
Despite losing her home again, Yamazaki is grateful for the strong support of her family, whose motto over the generations has been: "Escape in any event when an earthquake strikes."
Yamazaki's extended family and relatives, including 10 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren, all safely survived the March 11 quake and tsunami.