“I felt that the ocean was around me. The water was so cold that it froze me to the bone, ”he recalls.
When the water reached his knees, Kurosawa saw people in cars holding their steering wheels as their vehicles were dragged along the road. Others that were hanging from trees felled by the waves were swept away. For hours, Kurosawa endured temperatures below freezing. He thought of his wife – he reached for her on his cell phone for 15 seconds while he was on the tree, before the line went dead.
As the night turned to day, he heard someone in the distance calling for help with what appeared to be his last drop of energy. He says he doesn’t know the fate of that person – but Kurosawa had just survived the most deadly natural disaster in Japanese history.
More than 20,000 people died or disappeared in the earthquake and subsequent tsunami. But the devastation was more profound than a natural disaster. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in this part of Japan has become a catastrophe of its own.
This year, the ceremonies to mark the tenth anniversary of the disaster will be discreet and socially distant amid the coronavirus pandemic. In Tokyo, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako will attend a memorial, stopping for a moment of silence at 2:46 pm, the exact time the earthquake occurred 10 years ago.
Despite the destruction caused, many survivors have rebuilt their lives and communities, but for many the legacy of the disaster will remain forever.
The power of a tsunami
The tsunami destroyed more than 50,000 houses and buildings in Ishinomaki alone, destroying the vibrant city center and most of its 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 city when the earthquake happened. He called his wife, who was sheltered in a bank, and told her to meet him at his home.
Minutes later, a tsunami warning was issued. He tried to call his wife again, but the phone lines were dead. Concerned about her safety, Kurosawa jumped in his car and ran home to find her so they could go to higher ground together. Cars ran past him in the opposite direction, paving the way for established evacuation zones in the earthquake-prone country.
As he approached his home, he spotted what appeared to be a tsunami barrier in the distance. As he approached, he realized they were cars – swept by the waves, rocking up and down.
As he made a desperate U-turn, he caught a glimpse of a man trying to escape the incoming water on foot. “I pulled him into the car through the window and we ran out of water. But at that point, the tsunami was also ahead of us,” said Kurosawa.
Soon impacted by the waves, the pair abandoned the car and ran to find shelter.
When Kurosawa climbed the tree, a branch broke and he fell on the landfill. Kurosawa hoisted himself back up onto the tree as soon as the waves started to come. The man he rescued did the same. “I almost thought I couldn’t,” he says.
“It is difficult to imagine the power of a tsunami unless you have experienced it – it is a destructive force that swallows everything and obliterates everything in its path.”
Nuclear disaster
As the tsunami spread further inland, in neighboring Fukushima prefecture, the Daiichi nuclear plant was melting.
In the months and years that followed, parts of the area around Fukushima became ghost towns, visited only by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) employees, security inspectors and tourists looking for a dark thrill. Since the disaster, TEPCO has been pumping hundreds of tons of water into the nuclear plant to cool the reactors and interrupt the flow of radiation.
Disaster cleanup is expected to take decades and cost billions of dollars. More than 35,000 people remain displaced, 10 years after the original collapse, according to the Fukushima authorities.
Hajime Matsukubo, a spokesman for the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo, an anti-nuclear public interest organization, said that most of the regions hit by the earthquake and tsunami have recovered. However, the recovery work around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has remained paralyzed since the collapse, because despite the large amount of money spent, the population around the area has halved since 2010. “After 10 years, what have we learned is that once a nuclear accident occurs, cleaning up is tremendously difficult, “he said.
In March 2020, only 2.4% of the prefecture remained off-limits to residents, even with parts of that area accessible for short visits, according to Japan’s Ministry of Environment.
However, despite decontamination efforts, a 2020 survey conducted by Kwansei Gakuin University found that 65% of evacuees no longer wanted to return to Fukushima prefecture – 46% said they fear residual contamination of the environment and 45% they said they had settled elsewhere.
This ended on May 5, 2012, when the country’s last operational reactor, in Hokkaido, was shut down for inspection, leaving Japan without nuclear power for the first time in more than 45 years. (Two units at Oi’s nuclear power plant were briefly restarted in 2012, but were shut down again a year later.)
Passage of time
On the morning of May 12, Kurosawa jumped out of the pine tree. It looked like a bomb had destroyed his city.
As he returned home, he passed through the rubble, dodging parts of the wrecked boats that had reached the shore. Half-collapsed buildings were submerged in water, and he struggled to breathe the smoke-laden air.
Kurosawa’s wife was alive, having been evacuated to a school on high ground. But overnight, they lost the friends and physical markers that made up their lives.
For the next six months, Kurosawa and his wife lived in rented houses and in the offices of friends. In August 2011, they moved into temporary disaster accommodation, a prefabricated building that they called home for more than three years. Kurosawa put his plumbing skills into practice, offering to help his local community with odd jobs. He still lives in Ishinomaki.
“I went from a normal routine to an abnormal routine that became the new norm. One year, two years have passed – the abnormal reality has returned to normal, ”says Kurosawa. For five years, he dreamed at night of walking through the wreckage of his hometown.
Today, in Ishinomaki, Kurosawa says that people’s feelings about nuclear energy in the region remain as confused as each person’s experience on the tenth anniversary of the disaster.
“People ask me how I feel now that 10 years have passed. I still feel like I’m living in that extended timeline and doing my best, ”he says.
Over the years, Kurosawa has struggled to rebuild his life, business and community. Today, coastal embankments almost 10 meters (33 feet) high extend about 56 kilometers (34 miles) along the coast to protect your city from the ocean. New public residences have emerged on the outskirts of the city, while others are still being rebuilt.
Kurosawa says that people’s emotional scars take as long to heal as their built environment. But, he says, there is no point in living in the past. Today, Kurosawa plays an active role in teaching others about disaster preparedness and moves on.
“One thing I learned from this disaster is that people need to live with each other. I think the hope is in us, ”he says.
Sometimes he drives past the tree that saved his life. He even tried to rehabilitate him once.
CNN’s James Griffiths, Angus Watson and Chie Kobayashi contributed to this report from Hong Kong and Tokyo