“I felt the sea was all around me. The water was so cold that it cooled me to the bone,” he recalls.
When the water reached his knees, Kurosawa saw people in cars grabbing their steering wheels as their vehicles washed up in the road. Others hanging from trees cut down by the waves were swept away. For hours, Kurosawa endured temperatures below zero. He thinks of his wife – he reached her with her cellphone for 15 seconds while he was in the tree, before the line died.
When night falls, he hears someone in the distance calling for help with their last bit of energy. He says he does not know the person’s fate – but Kurosawa has just survived the deadliest natural disaster in Japanese history.
More than 20,000 people died or went missing during the earthquake and the ensuing tsunami. But the devastation went deeper than a natural disaster. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, in this part of Japan, has become a disaster of its own.
This year there are ceremonies to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the disaster low key and socially removed amid the coronavirus pandemic. In Tokyo, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako will attend a memorial service, for a moment of silence at 14:46, the exact time the earthquake occurred ten years ago.
Despite the devastation, many survivors have rebuilt their lives and communities, but for many, the legacy of the disaster will remain forever.
A tsunami’s power
The tsunami more than destroyed 50,000 homes and buildings in Ishinomaki alone, destroying a vibrant downtown and most of the seaport and infrastructure. Nearly 3,100 people in the city lost their lives.
Kurosawa, a plumber, worked in a neighboring town 12 kilometers from his hometown when the earthquake struck. He called his wife, who was hiding in a couch, and told her to meet him at their house.
Minutes later, a tsunami alert was issued. He tried to call his wife again, but the phone lines were dead. Concerned about her safety, Kurosawa jumped into his car and drove home to meet her so they could go to higher ground together. Cars raced past him in the opposite direction and on their way to established evacuation zones in the earthquake country.
When he got close to his house, he saw in the distance what looked like tsunami barriers. As he approached, he realized that it was cars – swung away by waves bouncing up and down.
As he makes a desperate turn, he sees a man trying to escape the incoming water on foot. “I pulled him through the window in the car, and we drove away from the water. But then the tsunami was also in front of us,” says Kurosawa.
The couple entered the car and quickly ran to find shelter.
When Kurosawa scratched up the tree, a branch broke and he fell on the shore. Kurosawa hoisted himself up against the tree again when the waves blew. The man he saved did the same. “I almost thought I would not make it,” he says.
“It’s hard to imagine the power of a tsunami unless you’ve experienced it – it’s a destructive force that swallows everything and wipes out everything in its path.”
Kernramp
While the tsunami swept further inland to neighboring Fukushima Prefecture, the Daiichi nuclear plant was melted.
In the following months and years, parts of the area around Fukushima became ghost towns, visited only by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) officials, security inspectors and tourists looking for a dark thrill. Since the disaster, TEPCO has pumped hundreds of tons of water into the nuclear power plant to cool the reactors and stop the outflow of radiation.
Clearing up the disaster is expected to take decades and cost billions of dollars. More than 35,000 people remain displaced, ten years after the original collapse, according to the Fukushima authorities.
Hajime Matsukubo, a spokeswoman for the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo, an organization at the core of the public interest, says the regions affected by the earthquake and tsunami have mostly recovered. However, repairs around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have come to a standstill since the collapse, as the population in the area has halved despite the large amount of money since 2010. “After ten years, we have learned that once a nuclear accident occurs, cleanup is extremely difficult,” he said.
As of March 2020, only 2.4% of the prefecture for residents is unlimited, and even parts of the area are accessible for short visits, according to the Japanese Ministry of Environment.
Despite the disinfection efforts, a survey by Kwansei Gakuin University in 2020 found that 65% of the evacuees no longer wanted to return to Fukushima Prefecture – 46% said they were afraid of the remaining pollution of the environment and 45% said they had settled elsewhere.
It ended on May 5, 2012, when the country’s last industrial reactor in Hokkaido went on inspection and left Japan without nuclear power for the first time in more than 45 years. (Two units of the Oi nuclear power plant were briefly restarted in 2012, but offline again a year later.)
Time lapse
On the morning of May 12, Kurosawa climbed out of the pine tree. It looked like a bomb had destroyed his city.
While on his way home, he walks through the rubble and evades parts of wrecked boats that have washed ashore. Semi-collapsed buildings are submerged in water and he struggles to breathe in the smoke-laden air.
The wife of Kurosawa lived after being evacuated to a high school school. But overnight they lost the friends and physical markers of which they are composed.
For the next six months, Kurosawa and his wife lived in rented houses and their friends’ offices. In August 2011, they moved to temporary disaster housing, a prefabricated building they have been calling home for more than three years. Kurosawa used his plumbing skills to volunteer to help his local community with loose work. He still lives in Ishinomaki.
“I went from a normal routine to an abnormal one that became the new norm. One year, two years passed – the abnormal reality became normal again,” says Kurosawa. For five years he had dreams at night of walking through the wreckage of his hometown.
Today in Ishinomaki, Kurosawa says people’s feelings about nuclear power in the region remain as mixed as the experience of the tenth anniversary of the disaster.
“People ask me how I feel now that it’s ten years old. I still feel like I’m living on the extended timeline and trying my best,” he says.
Over the years, Kurosawa has fought to rebuild his life, business and community. Today, nearly 10 meters (33 feet) of coastline stretches approximately 56 kilometers (34 miles) along the coast to protect its city from the ocean. New public dwellings have sprung up on the outskirts of the city, while others are still being rebuilt.
Kurosawa says people’s emotional scars take just as much time to heal as their built-in environment. But, he says, there is no sense in the past. Today, Kurosawa plays an active role in teaching others about disaster preparedness and continues to do so.
“One thing I learned from this disaster is that people have to live among each other. I think the hope lies in us,” he says.
Sometimes he drives past the tree that saved his life. He even tried once to get it back.
CNN’s James Griffiths, Angus Watson and Chie Kobayashi contributed to this report from Hong Kong and Tokyo