KAMAISHI, Iwate Prefecture--Members of a brass band at a junior high school here are making beautiful music together again, after being presented with new instruments to replace the ones they lost in the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake.
KAMAISHI, Iwate Prefecture--Members of a brass band at a junior high school here are making beautiful music together again, after being presented with new instruments to replace the ones they lost in the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake.
The gift, presented to Kamaishi-Higashi Junior High School on June 6, is part of 35 million yen ($432,000) worth of new musical instruments given to five elementary, junior and senior high schools in the disaster-stricken Iwate and Miyagi prefectures.
"We lost all our musical instruments (in the disaster), but we will practice with the new instruments while being grateful to (people's goodwill)," said Ako Furukawa, 14, who leads the band at Kamaishi-Higashi Junior High School.
Sixty-six third-year students in the school sang to express their gratitude.
The instruments were purchased with donations and proceeds from a charity concert held in Tokyo on May 20 that featured trumpeter Ruri Sasaki, a third-year student at Ofunato Senior High School in Iwate Prefecture.
The 17-year-old Sasaki was invited to play at the concert after the vernacular Asahi Shimbun carried a story about her playing a song on her trumpet on April 11 dedicated to her mother and grandmother at the ruins of their home after the deadly tsunami swept through Rikuzentakata. Both Sasaki's mother and grandmother were killed in the tsunami.
The concert organizer said it plans to raise further donations to purchase musical instruments to present to other schools in the devastated areas.