Ten years after Japan’s 2011 tsunami, grief haunts the living

Before tsunami: View of the buildings in Ishinomaki before the 2011 incident, taken in 2006. — Reuters

RIKUZENTAKATA (Japan): When the tide finally receded, the world had changed after the 2011 tsunami. Trucks and houses had been swept aside like children’s toys, leaving the living to comb through a wasteland of mud and debris for their dead. Ten years on, the living are still searching, their grief never subsiding.

A father lives alone in a house at the end of a long driveway lined with cherry trees. He surrounds himself with books on the disorder that isolated his younger son in his room, unable to flee even when his mother begged him to evacuate as the tsunami roared toward them.

Just after: A view of the destroyed homes and buildings in Ishinomaki, taken following the tsunami, in 2011. — Reuters

A mother is haunted still by the cries of stranded children, maybe even her own, calling out for help in the darkness. Even now she carries around a laminated schedule of her daughter’s kindergarten bus, as if to prove that her six-year-old should still be alive.