A professional diver who survived the horrendous tsunami after drifting for 7 kilometers on top of a floorboard from his office along with his wife shared his sketches and his experiences with college students in Tokyo, in what he hopes could save their lives someday.
A professional diver who survived the horrendous tsunami after drifting for 7 kilometers on top of a floorboard from his office along with his wife shared his sketches and his experiences with college students in Tokyo, in what he hopes could save their lives someday.
Jun Abe, 52, related what he experienced and gave survival tips to spellbound students at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology during a water drill at the university's facility in Chiba Prefecture on July 16-19.
"I want to teach them something that will be ingrained in their body because a drill for the sake of conducting a drill will not work," he said.
Abe drew pictures of what he experienced in the March 11 calamity while he was hospitalized and his memories were still fresh.
"I have to pass on to them how I was able to make it," he said. "I could not afford any time to think and judge. My body just responded."
When the tsunami unleashed by the Great East Japan Earthquake struck, he was in his office in Higashi-Matsuyama, a coastal city in Miyagi Prefecture. He runs a company that tackles underwater jobs for harbor works projects.
He rushed upstairs as soon as he saw the wall of waves approaching. Within seconds, only the second floor was above water, and the entire building started drifting away.
Abe noticed his home, which was situated in Osaki in the prefecture about 30 meters from his office, drifting in his direction.
Spotting his wife, Shimako, in their house, he shouted, "Our house will eventually be submerged because its roof is tiled."
He was able to grab her hand and pull her over to his side while both structures were being swept along.
Abe then put on watertight clothing and lifesaving equipment he stored in his office's second floor. The building was used as the venue for a diving workshop.
Some time later, he felt a huge jolt as if being struck hard in the head and heard the sound of something being torn off. Their building had smashed into a bridge, shearing off the roof and walls.
They found themselves on the floorboard -- only three meters square -- as if on a raft.
Despite their precarious situation, Shimako kept calm and sent a text message from her cellphone to their son.
"We are being swept by tsunami but your father and I are alive. We are on a floorboard like being aboard a ship. It is cold, but we will be OK."
After passing under five bridges and being washed upstream for about 40 minutes in the freezing cold, the tide finally slowed. He had an intuition that the waters would ebb and retreat and pull them out to sea. So he shouted to his wife to dive in, and the couple made their way to the embankment.
"I was happy about making it, but the sense of relief was just momentary," he said.
He has since been torn occasionally by a sense of guilt, he said, because he felt that he could have saved lives, given the number of emergency training sessions he had presented to prepare for water accidents.
Shimako said she also regrets not having fled immediately after the magnitude-9.0 quake struck.
During visits to local elementary schools to share accounts of past tsunami survivors, she used to tell children to evacuate immediately when a powerful temblor hit.
But she didn't think that a tsunami would occur at the time of the big quake on March 11, despite her teachings to the children.