MINAMI-SANRIKU, Miyagi Prefecture--Carved display boards are delivering messages of hope and bringing back memories of a once-bustling shopping street that was wiped out by the 2011 tsunami.
MINAMI-SANRIKU, Miyagi Prefecture--Carved display boards are delivering messages of hope and bringing back memories of a once-bustling shopping street that was wiped out by the 2011 tsunami.
The white signs near the coast of this town in northeastern Japan are designed to look like “kiriko” cutout paper art, which is traditionally made by shrines and is provided to parishioners during the New Year period.
Kiriko art is used in the Tohoku region to decorate household altars to pray for a good catch of fish and the safety of the families.
Each display board shows words or a design, or both.
Organizers said the boards represent prayers for tomorrow, although some read like advertisements from the businesses that were lost.
“We liked to give gifts of handmade ear picks to customers,” one board reads.
Another says: “Noritaro (seaweed store) has reopened for business. The sisters are doing well, too.”
In 2010, a group of women visited homes and stores in Minami-Sanriku to collect interesting stories that could later serve as themes for kiriko designs.
The town held an event to display these paper works in an effort to revitalize the local economy. It wanted to hold another event in 2011, but the tsunami struck during the planning stage.
Yumi Yoshikawa, a 54-year-old art producer from Sendai and the chief organizer of the event, recalled the sorrow she felt when she saw that the shopping street had been reduced to rubble.
She said she feared the “lives of the residents will be forgotten.” So last summer, she proposed that the town exhibit kiriko-shaped display boards.
The boards now appear at 27 sites of former houses and stores.
Masafumi Yamauchi, 63-year-old president of the Yamauchi fish store, used a label of new brand of sake as a kiriko motif for his sign. Yamauchi began selling the sake last year as part of the town's reconstruction efforts.
The exhibition was originally scheduled to run for two and a half weeks. It is now almost in its seventh month.