RIKUZENTAKATA, Iwate Prefecture--Sachiko Kumagai takes a deep breath at her home here and then begins the ritual: writing a letter to her husband, who will never receive it.
“Good morning, Migaku. I rose early this morning. The biting cold in February does cut through me. How are you doing over there?” one such letter read.
Migaku, whom she was married to for almost 50 years, disappeared in the tsunami that was spawned by the magnitude-9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011.
The walls of the room are covered with more than 200 letters the 75-year-old has written to him, surrounding photographs of the couple together.
Her husband officially remains unaccounted for, making him one of Rikuzentakata’s 1,759 people who either died or went missing in the disaster.
He is also among 44 long-lost people whose death has not been officially registered in the three hardest-hit prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima six years later.
When the tsunami wrecked this coastal city, Kumagai was in Ofunato, a neighboring city, on an outing.
She managed to make her way back home the following day. The home, situated on elevated land, was intact, but her husband was nowhere to be seen. Neighbors said they saw him going down the hill from the house shortly before the tsunami swallowed up many parts of the city.
Kumagai was devastated. The tragedy struck just as the couple was planning a trip around Japan as Migaku had retired from his company a year earlier.
About three months after the tsunami hit, she thought she heard her husband speaking to her as she was walking on the hill where he was last seen.
“Mama-chan, hang in there. You are with our children. You should not spend the day crying all the time,” he said, referring to her nickname.
She hurried back home and jotted down what she had heard on the back of her calendar. Heartened by the incident, she began writing to Migaku, who was two years older than she.
In 2014, Kumagai drove to Mori no Koya (Cottage in the wood), a cafe about a 10-minute drive from her home, after reading about it in a newspaper.
The cafe has a red postbox out front, set up in the spring of 2014. The owner, Yuji Akagawa, put it up for survivors to pour out their feelings in letters to their beloved relatives who were lost in the tsunami.
Akagawa, 67, came up with the idea when one of his customers said, “I cannot bring myself to share the sorrow of losing a family member with others.”
The postbox was named Hyoryu Post 3/11 (Drifting post 3/11) because the contents cannot be delivered.
When Akagawa learned that Kumagai’s husband remained missing, he encouraged her to pop letters into the red box.
But she did not jump at Akagawa’s suggestion. She wrote to her husband at home. Still, the act did not seem to help her much. She lost her appetite, and she needed sleeping pills to get a night's rest. On some days, Kumagai even contemplated suicide, finding life without her husband unlivable.
More than anything, it bothered her that Akagawa said the postbox was for letters written to the deceased.
“I still do not want to accept that Migaku is dead,” she told Akagawa. And she left the cafe.
Kumagai has, in fact, not registered the death with local authorities.
A catalyst for change came when her granddaughter was born in the spring of 2016. When she rushed to her son’s house to celebrate the birth, the baby’s 9-year-old brother, Ryo, said, “She is the reincarnation of my grandfather.”
In reply, Kumagai said, “She sure is. She is just the spitting image of him.”
The words came naturally, and she then realized that she is slowly accepting Migaku’s death.
A few days later, she dropped a letter into the postbox. On the envelope, she wrote her husband’s name. She felt like it would actually reach him.
“Our granddaughter’s name is Mio. Everybody says she has a large, bright pair of eyes and also a mouth, just like yours. ... I have accepted that you are gone. But I still cannot believe it and cannot come to terms with it,” the letter read.
Last summer, Kumagai attended a gathering for people whose family members are still missing. She tossed a letter she wrote with Ryo into the sea.
“With your power you gained in heaven, please write us back,” the letter read.
When she called her grandson about the letter afterward, he said to her, “My grandfather has been with us, turning into an invisible man.”
As she was gradually pulling herself together, she wondered what Migaku would say to her when he saw her. So, she wrote what would be his reply, which she posted in the Hyoryu Post 3/11 last autumn.
The letter said: “I can see that you are becoming cheerful and positive. That is just the way you were. Keep going. Fight.”
Still, Kumagai said she is not ready to register her husband’s death just yet.
“Because I want to spend the rest of my life hearing his encouraging words,” she said.
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