How one man’s determination to resurrect a ‘miracle piano’ helped cure Japanese tsunami scars

Iwaki, Fukushima, Japan The graduation day arrived sunny and beautiful at Toyoma Junior High, and the 47 members of the senior class were in a lively mood. Just being at Toyoma Junior High was a day at the beach: the school looked like Usuiso, one of Japan’s most popular strips of beach, and the gloomy mood was captured in a scratchy board message: “Thank you for the past three years! It was fun! ”

While teachers, families and classmates looked up in the gym, the students in their dark-colored uniforms sang the school song for the last time, as always accompanied by Toyoma’s fine grand piano.

Instead of the cheaper stand usually bought by schools and parents, Toyoma was blessed with a Yamaha “C5” grand piano passed by a local seafood magnate whose granddaughter was an alumna.

The piano provided the soundtrack for Toyoma Jr High for more than a decade, serving new students in April, accompanying school choirs and sending graduates every March.

After a morning of speeches and diplomas, the 2011 class stepped into the world. They never thought it would be about to reverse.

Disaster strike

According to a local non-profit organization, it took a unit of the Ground Self-Defense Force two months to dig out the gym, and the beach exposed it to the full rage of the devastating tsunami that struck off Japan’s east coast has. year.

Fortunately, the school emptied a few hours before the 28-foot waves hit, and the gym clock was frozen at 3:28; but more than 100 other residents of Usuiso district would lose their lives.

While the rescue workers were rumbling through knee-high, their commander suddenly noticed the grand piano in a corner of the stage and unfortunately fell on his side. The decision of the instrument could have sentimental value for locals, is field official Isamu Yamaguchi ordered his men to gently carry the sad wreck to the center of the gym floor, where they used their bottles of drinking water to gently wipe off the mud.

Later, during an emotional gathering organized by the PTA, several hundred residents of the Usuiso district gathered around the piano, which is now dumb, to sing the a capella of the school song. The gym will be leveled shortly thereafter.

But before that happened, Hiroshi Endo showed up.

“No time for me to be away”

If he had his sense, Endo would not have been near Fukushima at the time.

His home and piano store in Iwaki escaped the earthquake and tsunami intact, but then the radiation levels to the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant plant 30 miles north.

Terrified, he and his family fled 150 kilometers south, to Chiba Prefecture. But then his phone started ringing off the hook.

‘Many customers contacted me and said that their pianos had collapsed (in the earthquake). I thought it was not time for me to be away,” he told CBS News in his shop. Despite serious doubts, Endo returned.

He heard about the devastated piano sitting in the Toyoma Junior High Gymnasium, and curiosity prevailed.

“The outside was clean, but inside it was full of rubbish.” Unsavable, he thinks.

But an inscription on the right flank of the piano caught his attention: “Gift by Hiromatsu Shike, September 1999.” These were not standard purchases from schools, he realized, but tangible proof of the spirit that bound this community together.

After ten days, he decided: he would try to get the piano to sing again. After a few months of red tape with the school board, ownership of the 770-pound instrument was finally transferred to Endo.

You were never a piano

“Then it smelled awful,” he recalls. “Rat stepped in.” The strings were rusted. Most of the keyboard was snatched away, and the few remaining keys made a strangled sound.

Inside, the piano was so full of grain that it looked like a sandbox. Endo’s two sons, also piano tuners and technicians, declared the instrument reckless.

With no idea where to start first, Endo began to break down the piano’s 10,000 components. Most hammers, dampers and other parts, he quickly determined, would have to be replaced at thousands of dollars out of his own pocket.

Then he had to figure out how to wash the instrument, a prospect that gave him agita. “Normally, water is a piano’s enemy,” he said. “You should never was one! “But there was no choice.

The salt deposits had to be removed with a special cleaner. During the fall of 2011, the Endo family struggled with recovery.

“We had no confidence,” he said. “We have never before tried to repair a tsunami-destroyed piano.”

A ray of hope

But as their careful recovery spread, the weight of expectation increased. It was 2011 after all, and the country remained deeply traumatized. A Tokyo TV network, TBS, told Endo that they want what is now called the ‘Miracle Piano’ to appear in their Christmas Eve program, and the team is rushing to finish.

“People needed a ray of hope,” the gentle piano technician said.

Endo can not say if it sounds the same as before, but musicians praised the soft, gentle quality of the piano and its ‘warm’ keyboard. Over the past decade, the Toyoma piano has traveled to dozens of cities, played by pop stars as well as school children, and heard as far away as Taiwan and Singapore.

In one important aspect, the instrument remains unrepaired: the tsunami scratches and stains that subdue the piano’s otherwise glossy onyx finish have been deliberately left untouched – scars that move viewers to tears.

“A lot of people touched the piano and said to me, ‘Endo-san, you worked hard on the restoration, but this piano – it’s really went through a lot, and endure. ‘”

When he looks at his small shop with pianos, he proves that his 40-year career makes them whole again, it seems that the 62-year-old restorer has a soft spot for sick instruments.

But in this case, the piano was almost irrelevant. Endo really tried to repair broken hearts.

“The students lost everything. Their school was gone, their relatives killed or injured. The children were emotionally very deeply affected by the disaster as adults,” he told CSB News. “We wanted to show them, ‘Look! We fixed it!’ Despite all the tragedies, there was this little thing that made us normal again. ‘