Once night falls in Yamada, Iwate Prefecture, dim light glows from a few windows at a town-operated apartment complex.
Once night falls in Yamada, Iwate Prefecture, dim light glows from a few windows at a town-operated apartment complex.
All the ground floors of the three apartment buildings of three to four floors were destroyed by the tsunami following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11. Most of the second-floor units were flooded.
There is no telling when, if ever, electricity, water supply and gas will be restored.
Ten households make up a total of 22 people now living in units above the ground floor.
Nobuyoshi Fukushi, 66, lives by himself.
His room has buckets full of water from a nearby well that he uses for laundry as well as a tank with drinking water that he carried over from a nearby evacuation center.
At night, he lights candles for the Buddhist altar and turns on a battery-operated lantern to eat box lunches distributed by an evacuation center.
Fukushi has taken on the role of leader of the households that continue to live in the complex. As such, he goes to the evacuation center by car to pick up the meals set aside for the complex.
Fukushi is the only one who has not applied for a move to temporary housing.
"We would have to leave the temporary housing after two years," Fukushi explained. "There are only a few apartments around here and I heard the rent for a single-family home is 90,000 yen."
He receives a monthly pension of about 75,000 yen ($910). Before the twin disasters, he had some additional income from part-time construction work, but he is unsure if he can continue with that in the future.
Apartment complex residents who win the lottery for temporary housing will move out. Eventually, the meals from the evacuation center will also likely run out.
Still, Fukushi said, "The only thing I can do is remain here."
Shoji Takano, 70, of Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, often thinks, "It would have been better if I had died."
He now lives by himself on the second floor of his home, which is surrounded by rubble. The windows of the first floor which was flooded by the tsunami have no glass and only curtains keep out the light.
On the night of May 12, he awoke when he heard the stairs creaking.
He grabbed a knife with a 30-centimeter blade that he kept by his pillow and opened the door of the room.
He saw two people wearing balaclavas looking back at him. They were thieves.
He told them, "My life died once with the tsunami. Do you want to die too?"
He waved the knife at the two and they tumbled down the stairs and fled.
Ever since, Takano has had difficulty sleeping. He becomes afraid at the sound of the wind or waves at night when silence descends on the neighborhood.
Every day at 4:30 p.m., he walks for about 10 minutes to the home of a neighborhood official and receives a daily ration of a box lunch, rice balls and two pieces of bread. While the rice balls and bread are for the next day's breakfast and lunch, he often eats them at night when he becomes hungry.
He has lost about 10 kilograms since the natural disasters and he now weighs about 50 kilograms.
His wife died of cancer 12 years ago. His only son lives in Chiba. He still has 18 years of monthly loan payments of 100,000 yen on his home.
Takano gets up at 3:30 a.m. and immerses himself in repairing the first floor of the home and clearing rubble from the yard until about 7 at night. He feels he cannot die and leave the home loan for his son to pay.
Eiko Shibuya, 72, lives in Ishinomaki. Since the natural disasters, she has attempted suicide three times.
She lives in a one-story home, which was flooded by the tsunami. However, she lost a friend she had known for 40 years.
She finds herself thinking, "Why did I survive and that person have to die?"
After the quake and tsunami, she lived for short periods of time at an evacuation center, at her daughter's home as well as at relatives.
Eventually, though, she returned to her two-room home.
"I have lived by myself for so long that I am never comfortable no matter where else I go," she said.
She has had surgery on both legs due to osteoporosis, forcing her to walk by dragging her legs. Still, she continues to walk to wherever people may be gathered.
"Unless I talk to someone, I will only think about my situation," she said. "I walk in search of conversation."
A nonprofit organization in Ishinomaki, Fair Trade Tohoku, conducted a survey in May of people 51 years and older living in homes damaged by the quake and tsunami. Of the 290 or so respondents, close to half said their health was "bad" or "unable to say either way."
Of those, there was a tendency for the elderly to eat unbalanced meals and not be able to take regular baths.
The organization's leader, Ryuichi Fuse, 35, said, "There will be a need to grasp the actual situation that isolated senior citizens face and provide some kind of support."
(This article was written by Akemi Kanda and Kosuke So.)