IWANUMA, Miyagi Prefecture--About 12,500 runners took part in a race event here along an elevated road being built as a "wall" against a future monster tsunami.
The Tohoku-Miyagi Revive Marathon, which featured four races, was held Oct. 1 along a coastline devastated by the 2011 tsunami.
“I was running, thinking that the tsunami reached here,” said Masaya Ozawa, 19, a university student from Saitama Prefecture. “I was heartened when people on the roadside cheered me, saying, ‘Thank you.’”
Miyagi was one of the three prefectures hardest hit by the tsunami spawned by the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011.
The full marathon, which covered Iwanuma and two neighboring municipalities, and one of the other races used the artificially elevated road that is designed to serve as a “second breakwater” in the event of a major tsunami.
The first line of defense, also being introduced after the 2011 disaster, is a 7.2-meter-high coastal levee, which has been almost completed.
The elevated road is being built on a 4- to 6-meter high embankment that runs through rural areas 1 kilometer inland from the southern part of Sendai Bay.
The 40-km road is scheduled to be completed in fiscal 2020, eventually connecting Sendai’s Miyagino Ward with the town of Yamamoto.