Renovation work at Tokyo Station has quietly honored Japan's 2011 quake and tsunami victims, with a roof now tiled with slates from the disaster zone.
Renovation work at Tokyo Station has quietly honored Japan's 2011 quake and tsunami victims, with a roof now tiled with slates from the disaster zone.
Roofers restoring the station's Marunouchi building used 15,000 jet-black slates from Ishinomaki and Tome, both in Miyagi Prefecture.
The five-year restoration effort is now complete, and the building reopened Oct. 1. It now resembles how it would have appeared in 1914.
Local manufacturers hope the roof will be considered a symbol of their region's recovery from the devastation wrought on March 11, 2011.
"The stone is 250 million years old," said Toshinari Yotsukura, president of the Yotsukura tile plant in Ishinomaki. "It has beaten a once-in-a-thousand-years massive tsunami."
Yotsukura said he planned to pay a visit to Tokyo. He said he was anxious to see the finished roof with its new tiles.
"I believe they will suit Japan's number-one railway station perfectly," the 65-year-old said.
Slates are cut from rock of clay origins mined in Ogatsu in Ishinomaki and in Tome.
To produce a high-class roofing material, a block of rock is sliced into sheets 5 to 7 millimeters thick, before being cut into squares of 30 centimeters or less.
The station's renovation work was conducted by Kajima Corp. A company official said about 126,000 of the 450,000 natural slates used were Japanese, including some slates originally from Tome taken from the original roof and reused. The rest were from Spain, the official said.
Yotsukura and other Ishinomaki slate manufacturers had spent about three years cutting slates in preparation for the Tokyo project when the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami struck, destroying their plants.
The Yotsukura factory was only 60 meters from the seashore.
One roofer employed there, 65-year-old Shinpei Sasaki, said the damage was such that he felt at that time there was no hope anything could be recovered.
But then he found about 40,000 slates buried in the rubble.
He joined other employees and volunteers in traveling daily from an evacuation center to the factory site, where they pumped water from a well and cleaned dirt off the slates.
Finally, at the end of May 2011, a truck delivered them in a shipment to Tokyo.
Yotsukura and Sasaki recalled that they both shed tears. "It was our first true reconstruction work," they said.
Roofers laid the first slates from Ishinomaki on the triangular roof of the main building.
They used slates from Tome for the roofs of the north and south domes.
"We put all our feeling into those slates," said Akio Kumagai, 48, the president of Kumagai Master Thatchers Co. Also based in Ishinomaki, Kumagai's company was involved in checking and repair work.
The disaster caused partial damage to a warehouse the company used. Of the 65,000 slates stored inside at the time, only 40,000 were usable, Kumagai said.
The contractor in Tokyo began to fear delays and at one point nearly refused to take delivery of slates from Kumagai.
But a citizens’ group involved in the preservation of Tokyo Station rallied to the slate-makers' cause, and helped to ensure that the roof used Miyagi slates after all.
Kumagai visited the restored building in early September.
"It is rare to have such a huge slate roof in Japan," he said, looking up at Tokyo Station's Marunouchi building. "I am very proud that I was part of this renovation project."