ISHINOMAKI, Miyagi Prefecture--Parco Kinoshita has worn down the blade of his chisel by a centimeter and cracked three hammers in his efforts to console the souls of the dead.
The 52-year-old modern artist is building wooden statues for each of the 3,977 people who were killed here in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami.
Kinoshita works in a classroom in a wooden building that was once the Oginohama Elementary School on the Oshika Peninsula in Ishinomaki.
The school has been closed since the disaster. The blackboard in the classroom remains partly whitish from the tsunami that inundated the school.
After the disaster, Kinoshita visited temporary housing facilities in Miyagi Prefecture almost every month to engage in volunteer activities, including teaching residents how to paint.
“I cannot bear it when people lump all of the 4,000 victims together,” he said. “I want to squarely face the importance and preciousness of life by creating the same number of wooden statues.”
Kinoshita moved to the Miyagi prefectural capital of Sendai in April from Tokyo, where he had lived for 30 years, to join the Reborn Art Festival that started in July and continued through Sept. 10 in the Oshika Peninsula and elsewhere.
He brought with him seven chisels and a wooden hammer.
Kinoshita has been carving the statues from locally produced Japanese cedar and placing them on the classroom’s floor.
They each stand about 10 centimeters tall, and he gives them eyes, noses and mouths.
While he makes 40 statues daily, they are all different.
On some days, nearly 100 people visit the building to see Kinoshita’s work.
An elderly woman whose friend died in the disaster came to the site with another acquaintance. They held hands, viewed the wooden statues and did not speak a word.
Tears welled up in the eyes of another visitor who viewed the statues for more than an hour.
“I felt relieved that all the wooden statues are smiling,” said a mother who visited the classroom with two children of elementary school age.
Kinoshita said he has lost count of how many bereaved family members have visited the former school.
“Six years and six months have passed since the disaster, and there are just as many forms of recovery as there are victims,” he said. “Many people still cannot move forward and simply feel as if time is standing still.”
Kinoshita said he has decided to move to the Oshika Peninsula.
“I will continue working until finishing the last statue,” he said. “I also want to make wooden statues to commemorate the nearly 20,000 victims killed in the disaster.”