YAMADA, Iwate Prefecture--A fisherman who lost his family in the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami three years ago hopes to rejuvenate himself with a ship he named after his loved ones.
YAMADA, Iwate Prefecture--A fisherman who lost his family in the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami three years ago hopes to rejuvenate himself with a ship he named after his loved ones.
Wearing a towel around his neck, Yasuhiro Igarashi seems almost cheerful sitting inside “Fukko-Shokudo Yamada-Eki” (Reconstruction eatery Yamada station), the only pub that stands in the bleak central part of this town.
“Yamada has the best mikoshi (portable shrines). We will revive them in a festival in September,” he says.
Night advances, and customers slowly begin to leave. Three hours have passed since Igarashi started drinking, and the conversation turns to the March 11, 2011, disaster.
“I wanted my children to have many difficult and pleasant experiences,” Igarashi, 50, says.
The pub owner, Hideki Saito, 56, responded: “Igarashi tells me that his family members died in the disaster because he did bad things in his younger days. He says it is like he killed them even though I tell him repeatedly, ‘Don’t say such a stupid thing.’ ”
Hearing what Saito says, the fisherman takes a swig of shochu (traditional Japanese distilled spirit).
Immediately following the magnitude-9 earthquake, Igarashi sailed a 15-ton Pacific cod fishing boat far offshore to prevent it from being destroyed by a tsunami. At that time, he was employed as captain of the vessel.
Two days later, he returned only to learn his seaside house had been swept away, and his parents, wife and two children were missing.
Every morning afterwards, he placed five tea cups on the former site of his house and prayed for the souls of his kin.
He later bought the 15-ton fishing boat and renamed the vessel “Yusei Maru.” The word “yu” came from the names of his daughter, Yuki, then 3, and his son, Yuta, then 2. The “sei” came from his wife’s name, Masako, then 41. The kanji character for “masa” can be also read as “sei.”
For about six months, he continued to search morgues for his wife and two children, but never found their bodies.
Now he keeps photos of his family around the Buddhist altar inside a new house he built high on a hilltop, where it can never be engulfed by a tsunami.
An article about Igarashi, written in 2011, led a movie director to make a documentary film about his efforts to restart Pacific cod fishing.
“My children were 2 and 3 years old. I really feel sorry for them. They died because I was no good,” Igarashi said in the movie.
He sniffled on the sofa in his house while watching that scene on a DVD. But it was the documentary’s final scene showing Igarashi sailing out to sea that gave him strength.
“I will revive myself,” he told himself at the time.
These days it seems he is doing just that. Not only is he looking forward to the town’s matsuri (festival) in the fall, he is also thinking about starting a new family.
“I want to have a child. I cannot forget my children (who died). But I want to work hard, not for myself, but for someone else. It is my only desire,” he says.