RIKUZENTAKATA, Iwate Prefecture--A shopkeeper here who survived the 3/11 tsunami but lost his home and livelihood has become a published author and star of a documentary after channeling his trauma into moving prose written in self-taught English.
Teiichi Sato, 62, struck upon the realization that English could serve as a vehicle to convey his thoughts and experiences when articulating them in his native Japanese proved to be too traumatic.
“The language felt just too evocative,” Sato said.
Sato’s passion for expression has come to fruition in the form of his self-penned book, and the documentary film he stars in that chronicles his journey has just been released.
The book is called “The Seed of Hope in the Heart,” a fitting title, as Sato’s shop in this northeastern city sells seeds and seedlings.
The original shop, which also doubled as Sato’s home, stood in an urbanized area not far from the coast. He escaped being swept up in the tsunami triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, because he went to see his mother, who lives inland, immediately after the tremors.
The waves, however, washed away the building containing his shop-cum-home, along with the lives of more than 100 people he knew, including an uncle and his wife, friends and customers.
Sato went back to selling goods from his truck only one month after the disaster, and by June 2011 he had bought a secondhand prefab building and reopened his shop on the same site.
It was around that time that non-Japanese reporters and volunteer workers came to see him. He had accounts of experiences to tell, but he spoke no English, and he found himself at a loss for words when he attempted to describe in Japanese what he wanted to say.
But Sato still wanted to leave records of what he had lived through. He found he could write slowly when he used English phrases that he looked up in online dictionaries. That led him to realize that he could express himself more calmly in English, so he jotted down his experiences on one A4-size sheet’s worth of text.
When Sato asked a volunteer worker who taught English to edit his text, the teacher encouraged him to show his work to a larger audience, so he wrote a 37-page first edition and published it at his own expense in 2012.
He wrote in the book about how his shop was carried away by the tsunami, the conversations he had with people he came across on the very day of the disaster, and how he got around to rebuilding his shop.
A fifth edition, which is more than 300 pages long, is due to be published in mid-March.
The film adaptation was first mooted in 2013, when Haruka Komori, then a graduate student with the Tokyo University of the Arts, was filming scenes of disaster-hit areas as a volunteer and began shooting footage of Sato.
Komori, 27, paid visits to Sato from her residence in the neighboring town of Sumita and asked him to tell her why he was writing the memoir in English and what hopes he had in mind in trying to rebuild his outlet exactly where it had been washed away by the tsunami.
“I would go mad if I didn’t write this,” Sato muttered one day to Komori, who spent about three years documenting his story.
It was then that Komori realized that Sato, as a survivor, was suffering agony of the sort that only those who had been through similar experiences could understand.
“I learned that leaving records of those who perished was Sato’s way of mourning for their deaths and was something he needed to do to go on living,” Komori said.
In the finished film, “Trace of Breath,” Sato is shown reciting a passage from his English-language memoir.
“Many people left regret in this world and went into another world,” he reads aloud, and joins his hands in prayer when he is finished.
The movie is being shown from Feb. 18 at Theater Pole-Pole Higashi-Nakano in Tokyo’s Nakano Ward. It will be released in theaters around Japan from March.