RIKUZENTAKATA, Iwate Prefecture--It is one of countless indelible images that came from the March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake.
RIKUZENTAKATA, Iwate Prefecture--It is one of countless indelible images that came from the March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake.
One month after the deadly tsunami swept through Rikuzentakata, The Asahi Shimbun ran a photograph of a high school girl standing alone amid the rubble that was once her home, clutching a golden trumpet.
A gift from her grandparents, Ruri Sasaki played the popular hit song “Makenaide” (Don’t give up), by Zard, as a dedication to her grandparents and mother, who all died in the disaster.
Two years later, the 19-year-old Sasaki does not play the trumpet as much as she used to, as most of her time is devoted to her college studies. She plans to eventually become a nurse.
Sasaki returned to Rikuzentakata on the second anniversary of the disaster. On March 11, at 2:46 p.m., the exact time the temblor struck, she put her palms together and bowed in prayer as light wisps of snow blew in the early spring sky. Sasaki remembered her grandparents, an aunt and a cousin, all of whom perished in the disaster.
But most of all, she remembered her mother, Noriko, 43, who never missed one of Ruri's band concerts and supported her daughter's dream of one day becoming a nurse and helping people.
Last spring, Sasaki enrolled at the School of Nursing at Fukushima Medical University. It was a fresh start after the tragedy a year earlier that changed her life. She tried new things--she lived in an apartment by herself, she obtained a driver’s license, she dyed her hair for the first time and joined a swimming club to build her strength.
“It was so refreshing every day,” she says, recalling her first weeks at school.
One day, when an image of the tsunami was shown during a lecture on post-traumatic stress disorder, Sasaki could not bear to look and fled the classroom.
“I am still scared,” Sasaki says she told her father, Takamichi, 49, in a tearful voice over the phone.
Her father told her that she needed to find a way to get over it if she is determined to become a nurse.
So during a summer break Sasaki returned to her hometown. Although it was off-limits, she sneaked into tsunami-damaged municipal event hall, where her mother's body had been found.
“I wanted to see my mother again, even if she appeared in the form of a ghost,” Sasaki says.
Sasaki was at Ofunato Senior High School when the 9.0-magnitude quake rocked northeast Japan. She received an e-mail from her mother, who worked at the city hall.
Noriko, knowing the school was on high ground, messaged, “Calm down. You should stay there.”
They were the last words the mother had for her daughter.
Noriko was helping with evacuees who fled to the municipal event hall before the tsunami swallowed the building.
During her clandestine visit to the building, Sasaki gazed out a broken window, the sea appearing in the distance beyond the shards of glass.
“I wondered if she (my mother) looked out this window, and what crossed her mind (as the tsunami approached)," Sasaki says she remembered thinking.
She says even today, the smallest and most unexpected of things can jar her memory and make her feel sad. Spotting the same brand of coffee her mother always drank in a convenience store brought her to tears. And even small temblors that still rock Japan frighten her.
“I'm fortunate to have supportive friends,” Sasaki says of her classmates at the nursing school. “I feel a bit better after crying, though. I have to move forward by repeating the process, which I think is the only way for me to get going.”
In her apartment, Sasaki put up a photo of her mother, father and younger brother, Shodo, 17, and herself at a family outing at Tokyo Disney Resort four years ago to a remote locale. It was the family's last trip together. The photo was found unscathed amid the second-floor wreckage of their home.
In the photo, mother and daughter are wearing matching polka-dot scarves. Sasaki says she loves the photo because it reminds her of something her mother always told her: “You have to stick out once you are determined to set a goal.”
Sasaki's trumpet was a gift from her grandmother when she was just a 9-year-old girl who dreamed of playing the instrument. Nowadays, it spends most of the time in her closet. She is afraid she will annoy her neighbors if she practices in her apartment.
But once a month, she brings it out and carefully oils the valves and greases the slides before wiping down the brass to a soft golden luster.
She dreams of playing the trumpet once again.
“I want to soothe my patients’ hearts by playing this trumpet when I become a nurse,” Sasaki says. “Then my mother will appear in my dreams to tell me that I am a full-fledged person.”