The grief of losing a child can be nearly impossible to express in words. But a musician has written a song that bereaved parents say encapsulates their feelings about their children who died in the 2011 tsunami.
Chiaki Arisaka, 36, a singer-songwriter who survived the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, wrote “Aitakute” (I really want to see you) in memory of the four pupils at the Hiyori private kindergarten who died in a school bus that was engulfed by the tsunami eight years ago.
In April, Arisaka sang the song in front of a memorial monument in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture. The families of the four children, whose names are carved into the monument, were in attendance.
The lyrics include the lines:
If I knew that was to be the last moment
I wouldn’t have let your small hands go
I really want to see you
And your smile again
Etsuko Saijo’s second daughter, Harune, was 6 years old when she died in the bus.
“(Arisaka) sensed our feelings for our children and expressed them in the lyrics,” the 44-year-old mother said.
Arisaka had deepened her exchanges with the parents and was touched by their continued love and thoughts for their children, so she wrote the song to pray for the repose of their souls.
Arisaka works mainly in Tokyo, but she is from Tamba-Sasayama, Hyogo Prefecture. When she was a sixth-grader at elementary school, the Great Hanshin Earthquake struck, rocking her house and reducing areas of Kobe into heaps of rubble.
She helped her grandmother provide hot meals to disaster victims as a volunteer.
Arisaka made her music debut when she was 26 years old and later moved to Tokyo.
When she was writing songs at her management agency’s office, the Great East Japan Earthquake hit on March 11, 2011, spawning the tsunami that wiped out coastal communities along the Tohoku coast.
Arisaka wanted to do something for the victims because she had received tremendous help after the Great Hanshin Earthquake. So she visited temporary homes for evacuees in Ishinomaki and Sendai.
When she sang “enka” ballads, such as “Tsugaru Kaikyo Fuyugeshiki” (Tsugaru Strait winter scene) at gatherings, smiling elderly women clapped their hands.
She later heard that many older male survivors of the disaster didn’t show up to the gatherings because they remained in their rooms in grief of having lost all of their family members.
For Arisaka, music was her only salvation in dealing with relationships that had gone bad. She said she wanted to make a song for the forgotten victims in Tohoku.
Once a month, she hosts a radio program on the community FM station in Kawasaki that promotes reconstruction efforts in the disaster areas of the earthquake and tsunami.
Through the program, she became acquainted with the families of the four children who attended Hiyori kindergarten.
One of the families has left the daughter’s room untouched.
And while Arisaka feels that the lost children will always be in the minds of their parents, she thinks that others around Japan are starting to forget about the disaster.
She finished writing “Aitakute” in March to convey the bereaved families’ feelings and lessons learned from the disaster.
“While staying close to the bereaved families, I want to continue singing about preventing a repeat of the great suffering from disasters,” she said.