Yoshimi Shika looks out at the calm sea from her parents’ house on a coastal area of Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, where only the foundations of some buildings remain.
Yoshimi Shika looks out at the calm sea from her parents’ house on a coastal area of Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, where only the foundations of some buildings remain.
It was around here a year ago that Shika found herself trapped in debris, able to move only her hands and one leg, as sleet from the gray sky hit her face. It would be the start of a year of emergency operations and painful rehabilitation to repair the broken body of the 47-year-old.
At 2:46 p.m., when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck on March 11 last year, Shika was doing paperwork in a warehouse of a recycling company 2 kilometers inland from the Toyoma coast. A refrigerator and bookshelves fell like dominos in the shaking.
Shika feared for the lives of the two daughters she had been raising alone since her divorce.
Ruka, 19, should be at home 4 km from the shore, and Mizuki, 15, should be at her grandparents’ home in a town on the coast, Shika thought at the time.
Shortly after 3 p.m., her call finally reached Ruka.
Shika told Ruka, “I will pick Mizuki up at grandpa’s house,” and drove toward the coast. The risk of a tsunami did not occur to her.
The mother arrived at the Toyoma coast within 15 minutes and noticed that the sea was deep blue and calm, as if it were a lake.
At her parents’ home, she saw that the shutters had been closed and the doors were locked.
“Everybody fled safely,” she said to herself.
Relieved, she returned to her car in a parking lot behind the house. Just as she was about to start the engine, a wave higher than the one-story house crashed in and swallowed the car. Then, a much bigger wave struck.
For some reason, Shika said, she was not scared; she kept holding the steering wheel without trying to fight the flow.
She left the vehicle when the water crashed through the windshield and the right-side window. As her car sank in the water, she heard its horn, and soon, debris covered the surface of the water where her car once floated.
Shika swam in spaces she could find between the debris. Twice, she swallowed water that smelled of heavy oil. She doesn’t recall how much time had passed before she found herself buried in debris.
She quickly checked for blood on her arms and legs, and then heard a man from a house nearby yelling at her, “Ganbare! (Hang in there!)”
Somebody was removing the debris around her. She doesn’t remember what happened next.
At 4:47 p.m., the Iwaki Fire Department received an emergency call about Shika from a man she did not know.
Kunitaka Sato, a firefighter from the Taira Fire Department in the same prefecture who came to help, said he saw Shika lying on a sofa covered with a blanket at a transport company office.
Sato checked her condition with a help of a paramedic. She had rapid breathing and a racing pulse. Her blood oxygen level was low, at 88 percent.
After an ambulance took her to Iwaki Kyouritsu Hospital, a tomographic scan found that Shika’s right lung was collapsed, four ribs on her right side were broken, her liver was bleeding and her body temperature was lower than 35 degrees.
Shika’s family members were searching for her, but they were close to giving up hope.
The next day, Shika’s brother-in-law and nephew visited her home and heard a phone message from the hospital. They saw her in the hospital at 1 p.m.
Although Shika was using an oxygen mask in the intensive care unit, she responded to the relatives’ call.
“Yoshimi-chan is all right! She is alive!” the family members cried.
Two days later, a second CT scan found a potentially fatal rupture in her pancreas. She underwent two hours of emergency surgery to remove her spleen and half the pancreas.
Her father, Kiichi, a 77-year-old fisherman, kept crying by the bed, thinking she would not recover.
“Her eyes look like those of a dead fish,” he said. “My poor daughter, who is leaving two children … .”
The problems continued to pile up for Shika. She felt a sharp pain in her right knee, but the doctors were so busy dealing with her internal injuries that they had no time to treat her leg.
Ten days later, her knee was found to be broken. But she had to recover from the first surgery before an operation could be done on her knee.
Her daughters and parents commuted to the hospital from an evacuation center and a relative’s home.
It was April 4 when she was finally freed from the ventilator. She had not spoken for 20 days and had difficulty talking.
On April 6, Ruka left to attend a nursing school in Saitama Prefecture.
“I will be all right, mother,” Ruka said.
On April 11, one month after the earthquake and tsunami, a tremor with an intensity of lower 6 on the Japanese scale struck eastern Fukushima Prefecture. Shika hyperventilated, as memories of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami returned. She realized she had suffered psychological scars, as well.
While she was recovering from the first operation, a new bone was forming in her shattered knee.
On April 21, orthopedic surgeon Toru Yasunaga, 46, removed the newly created bone and used six screws to put her knee back together.
Her full-fledged rehabilitation started in May, starting with knee movements and strengthening her muscles.
“When you can go up and down stairs with your crutches, you will be discharged from the hospital,” Yasunaga told her.
After one to two hours of stair exercises every day, she left the hospital on May 28.
Without a car, she couldn’t go to the hospital to continue her rehabilitation. But living with her parents and younger daughter Mizuki, Shika trained herself step by step.
After one month, she could stand up on her right leg. She bought a car and practiced pressing on the accelerator and the brake using her right foot in July. It was not easy because she could not fully bend her right knee and her strength had weakened. She tried with her left foot, but in vain.
In September, she was able to walk without a prosthetic device, and she returned to her work place in October, where she is now mainly involved in accounting.
Shika is gradually restoring her former life. But she still must to depend on her 76-year-old mother to prepare her meals.
Her older sister and brother-in-law built a house near Shika’s because her nephews asked to live “near Yoshimi-chan’s house.”
After witnessing what their mother went through, Ruka says she wants to work in the orthopedic field while Mizuki is contemplating a career in the medical profession. Shika says she will have to recover and stay healthy to support their ambitions.
More than 100 people in the area were killed in the tsunami, and some of the bodies have yet to be recovered.
Shika says she often feels uncomfortable wondering why she was the only one rescued.