ISHINOMAKI, Miyagi Prefecture--Fujio Sato lost his wife, grandson and granddaughter in the Great East Japan Earthquake, but sleeps with their photographs every night.
ISHINOMAKI, Miyagi Prefecture--Fujio Sato lost his wife, grandson and granddaughter in the Great East Japan Earthquake, but sleeps with their photographs every night.
The 63-year-old, who heads the residents’ association of a temporary housing complex in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, says memories of Seiko, 58, his grandson Hodaka, 10, and his granddaughter Anji, 7, come flooding back when he sits alone in his six-tatami-mat room in the evenings.
They are often just reminders of an ordinary, now utterly unobtainable, existence: Seiko’s homemade food, Hodaka standing in his baseball uniform and Anji’s smiling face.
“I cannot help thinking that I would die if only I could meet them in another world,” he said.
Instead, he holds their portraits at night. He said he closes his eyes, saying, “Let's go to bed?”
For many in the Tohoku region, a photograph is all that is left. Survivors’ relationships with the images differ. Some hold them very close as parts of their daily life, while others keep them tucked away in closets.
An image can be a way of managing feelings, and it can also be a measure of how far its owner has come in the grieving process. One 53-year-old woman in Iwate Prefecture said in a telephone call, in a very detached voice: “No longer crying so much even if seeing pictures. It can be a sign of being settled down.”
Tsutayo Osaki and her husband, Kikuo, spread photograph albums featuring their granddaughter Midori, who died in the tsunami, on the “kotatsu” heater at their home on Oshima island in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, on Feb. 27. They raised Midori after their daughter left the island two months after giving birth.
“Look! Here she is, too,” said Tsutayo, 60, pointing to an image of Midori. Tsutayo says the photographs have helped her with her pain. She feels she would be lonely without an image of the lost girl.
In a graduation photograph from Midori’s nursery school taken just before the earthquake, she has a ruddy glow in her cheeks and sits politely on a chair, tightly holding a rolled certificate.
“One day on our way from the nursery,” Tsutayo said, smiling, “Midori asked to stop the car at the corner of the elementary school (she was going to). She said she wanted to practice walking home alone.”
She recalled a girl who was not picky about her food and was growing strong. “She was 121 centimeters tall and weighed 26 kilograms. She was often mistaken for an elementary schoolgirl,” Tsutayo said. “She liked reading and was good at calculations. She would ask, ‘Grandma, give me questions.’ So I said, ‘What does 7 plus 8 make?’ She answered, ‘Umm, 15, isn’t it?’ See, she was already capable of doing such an addition.”
Kikuo said: “She would have grown to become a wonderful woman. I feel she had her chances to grow nipped in the bud.”
Midori was swept away by the tsunami in front of the couple.
“What was she thinking? Maybe she was thinking her grandpa would come to her rescue,” Kikuo said. “But I could do nothing. I had no way to save her at all.”
The couple’s old home was destroyed in the tsunami and they now live in a borrowed house.
“Living alone as just the two of us, we tend to quarrel,” Kikuo said.
On the wall behind him was a picture of Midori taken at the Shichi Go San festival, a traditional event to celebrate the growth of children.
“You know, that’s why we put up the picture. If we know Midori is watching us, we cannot squabble. That’s a shame,” he said. “I did not put it up to show others.”