KAMAISHI, Iwate Prefecture--Hiroko Yokota lived such a solitary life that no one noticed she was missing for nearly four years.
Even after her body, found two days after the 2011 tsunami swept her away, was identified, no one came forward to collect her cremated remains.
Dozens of victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami are still unidentified. Some have been identified but the remains are uncollected.
Authorities are trying to piece together the lives of those victims to find next of kin. The efforts have led to some unexpected family drama.
As the sixth anniversary of the disaster approaches, municipalities keeping the remains are contemplating giving up the search in favor of anonymous burials.
In Yokota’s case, her only next to kin was also killed in the tsunami.
Yokota kept to herself in Kamaishi. She rented the first floor of her house to a shoe shop tenant, and she usually stayed at home on the second floor, declining to participate in local festivals, neighbors said.
She was 63 years old when the tsunami washed away her home. There was nothing on her body that could be used for identification.
Yokota was never reported as missing because her neighbors did not notice her absence.
Almost three-and-a-half years after the disaster, a Kamaishi city official spotted something off with Yokota’s payment records for the national health insurance program. For decades, Yokota had never missed her premium payments. But the payments stopped, as did claims from hospitals or pharmacies for the amount covered for her by the insurance, after March 2011.
The city government reported her case to Iwate prefectural police. Investigators later learned that a male body identified as Yokota’s younger brother had been recovered nearly two months after the tsunami near Yokota’s home. And, an unidentified female body had been discovered earlier in the area.
In April 2015, a cross examination of the DNA of two remains revealed they were siblings, and Hiroko Yokota was finally listed as deceased.
Since the identification, the siblings’ bones and ashes have been kept at Senjuin temple in Kamaishi along with other unidentified or unclaimed remains.
“It was a fortunate thing that their remains were found,” said Enou Shibasaki, chief priest of Senjuin temple, who has been giving daily prayers to the remains. “It is pity that no one is claiming them.”
During World War II, Kamaishi was flattened by U.S. battleships targeting the city’s iron works industry. The city was rebuilt with a more orderly pattern through rezoning.
Yokota’s house was in the central area of the city.
According to a real estate register, the two-story building, with retail space on the ground floor and a residential second floor, was likely passed down from her father to her mother, and then to Yokota in 1999.
A 66-year-old man who used to live two doors down from Yokota’s house recalled playing baseball with her brother. They lost contact with each other after junior high school, and the neighbor did not know that the brother was killed in the 2011 disaster.
Yokota’s younger brother, who was 60 years old and single, had lived in a different part of Iwate Prefecture until he sold his house four-and-a-half years before the disaster.
No records were found on where he ended up living. He could have been staying with his sister, given that his body was discovered near her home.
As of end of January, there were 14 identified and uncollected remains in the care of temples and other establishments in 37 coastal municipalities in the prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima.
The Tagajo city government in Miyagi Prefecture has kept five such remains of men and women from their 40s to 70s in boxes placed in a row at the main hall of Hokokuji temple.
Chief priest Hideyuki Kato, 63, has witnessed some unexpected episodes surrounding the remains.
After one body was identified, his child was summoned to collect the remains. The child refused, saying, “I just found out who my father was when authorities called me to confirm his identity.”
A woman also declined to take home the remains of her father.
“He ran away leaving my mother and myself behind, and we had tough times after that. I don’t want to have (the remains) after all those years,” she said.
Under an agreement with the city government, the temple will keep the identified remains until the sixth anniversary of disaster, which is March 11. After that, the unclaimed remains will be interred in a collective grave.
According to the National Police Agency, the toll from the 2011 disaster is 15,893 dead and 2,556 missing. There are also 69 unidentified victims.