When Hisato Yamamoto left her home to go to her senior high school on March 11, 2011, she was seen off by her grandfather Tomiya in front of the entrance. Her father Sachio drove her to the train station in his car.
The “byes” to them both were the last words she would ever have with them.
The body of her grandfather Tomiya, 81, was found several days later. The body of her father Sachio, then 49, remains unaccounted for.
Immediately after the Great East Japan Earthquake and the tsunami, Hisato vented her anger at her mother Hide, crying out, “Why did he (Sachio) have to go to close the floodgate of a sea wall when the situation was so dangerous?”
Now, however, Hisato, 22, says, “I am very proud of my father, a voluntary firefighter, who tried to protect the lives of residents.”
Hisato, from Miyako, Iwate Prefecture, talked about those dark days as a representative of the prefecture’s bereaved families in a memorial ceremony held by the government in the National Theater in Tokyo on March 11 to mark the fifth anniversary of the disaster.
After the family's tragedy, Hide, now 50, kept busy working in an evacuation center as a nurse. Thinking about her parents, who selflessly worked on behalf of local residents at the time of the disaster, Hisato set her sights on becoming a nurse.
After enrolling in a university, however, she often became despondent and missed her father terribly. She found it difficult to adjust to new life at the university and repeatedly thought about quitting halfway through her course.
Eventually, she took a leave of absence while still a junior and returned to her hometown in Miyako, where she watched her mother caring for patients in a temporary clinic. “I wanted to become like this,” Hisato thought at that time.
After a year-long break, she returned to the university in April 2015.
“These five years helped me grow in all sorts of ways,” Hisato said in her speech at the memorial ceremony.
“I have come to believe that being useful to other people is what would please my late father the most,” she added.
Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko were among the 1,000 or so people who took part in the memorial service. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged in his address “to realize reconstruction that will lead to local revitalization.”
Emperor Akihito also said in his address, “I am concerned that there may be many people who are still suffering unknown to us in places that tend to escape our notice.”
He added, “It is important that everyone’s hearts continue to be with the afflicted.”
As representatives of bereaved families in Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures, Masakiyo Kimura, 52, and Kuniyuki Sakuma, 66, also delivered memorial messages.
On the anniversary this year, people offered prayers looking out to sea from sea walls in Iwate Prefecture. In Miyagi Prefecture, the names of disaster victims were aired on the radio. In Kobe and Hiroshima, candles were lit to mourn for the dead.
(This article was written by Hiroaki Abe and Takahiro Sasaki.)