Iwaki, Fukushima, Japan – Graduation day dawned sunny and beautiful at Toyoma Junior High, and the 47 members of the senior class were in a good mood. Being at Toyoma Junior High was a beach day: the school overlooked Usuiso, one of Japan’s most popular coastal strips, and the dizzying mood was captured in a message scrawled on the blackboard: “Thanks for the past three years! It was fun ! ”
In the gym, under the observation of teachers, family and colleagues, the students in marine uniforms sang the school music for the last time, accompanied, as always, by Toyoma’s beautiful grand piano.
Instead of the cheaper pillars usually bought by schools and parents, Toyoma was blessed with a high-performance Yamaha “C5” grand piano, offered by a local seafood tycoon, whose granddaughter was a former student.
For more than a decade, the piano provided the soundtrack for Toyoma Jr High, serenading new students in April, accompanying school choirs and dispatching graduates every March.
After a morning of speeches and diplomas, the class of 2011 went out into the world. They never imagined that it was about to be turned upside down.
Disaster attacks
According to a local nonprofit group, it took two months for a Ground Self-Defense Force unit to dig the gym, whose location by the sea left him exposed to the fury of the devastating tsunami that hit Japan’s east coast that year.
Courtesy of Hiroshi Endo
Fortunately the school had it emptied a few hours before the 8 meter waves arrived, leaving the gym clock frozen at 3:28; but more than 100 other residents of the Usuiso district would lose their lives.
As the rescuers passed through the knee-high rubble, their commander suddenly noticed the grand piano in a corner of the stage, sadly tipped over to the side. Deciding that the instrument may have sentimental value to local residents, field officer Isamu Yamaguchi he ordered his men to carefully carry the sad wreckage to the middle of the gym floor, where they used their drinking water bottles to carefully clean up the mud.
Courtesy of Hiroshi Endo
Later, at an exciting meeting organized by the PTA, several hundred residents of the Usuiso district gathered around the now silent piano to sing the school’s cappella music. The gym would be destroyed shortly thereafter.
But before that happened, Hiroshi Endo appeared.
“There is no time for me to stay away”
If he had succeeded, Endo would not be anywhere near Fukushima at the moment.
His Iwaki home and piano shop escaped the earthquake and tsunami unscathed, but radiation levels skyrocketed after the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant plant 30 miles to the north.
Terrified, he and his family fled 150 miles south, to Chiba Prefecture. But then his phone started ringing off the hook.
“Many customers contacted me, saying that their pianos had fallen (in the earthquake). I thought: this is no time for me to leave,” he told CBS News in his store. Despite serious doubts, Endo returned.
He heard about the ruined piano sitting in the Toyoma Junior High gym, and curiosity got the better of him.
“The outside was very clean, but inside it was full of dirt.” Tireless, he thought.
Courtesy of Hiroshi Endo
But an inscription on the right flank of the piano caught his eye: “Donated by Hiromatsu Shike, September 1999.” This was not a standard school acquisition, he realized, but tangible evidence of the spirit that united this community.
Pursued by the discovery, after 10 days he decided: he would try to make the piano sing again. After several months of bureaucratic disputes with the school board, finally, ownership of the £ 770 instrument was transferred to Endo.
You never wash a piano
“At that time, the smell was horrible,” he recalls. “Rot has set in.” The strings were rusty. Most of the keyboard had been ripped off and the few remaining keys were making a strangled sound.
Inside, the piano was so filled with sand that it looked like a sandbox. Endo’s two sons, also tuners and piano technicians, declared that the instrument cannot be saved.
Without knowing where to start, Endo started by dismantling the 10,000 components of the piano. Most hammers, dampers and other parts, he quickly determined, would have to be replaced, at the cost of thousands of dollars – out of his own pocket.
Then he had to figure out how to wash the instrument, a prospect that left him shaking. “Water is usually the enemy of the piano,” he said. “You must Never wash one! “But there was no choice.
The salt deposits had to be removed with a special cleaner. Throughout the fall of 2011, the Endo family worked hard on the restoration.
Courtesy of Hiroshi Endo
“We had no confidence,” he said. “We had never tried to repair a tsunami-damaged piano before.”
“A ray of hope”
But as word of his painstaking restoration spread, the weight of expectation grew. After all, it was still 2011 and the country was still deeply traumatized. A Tokyo TV network, TBS, told Endo that they wanted what was now dubbed the “Miraculous Piano” to star in their Christmas Eve show, so the team rushed to finish.
“People needed a ray of hope,” said the soft-spoken piano technician.
Endo cannot say whether the sound is the same as before, but the musicians praised the smooth and smooth quality of the piano and its “warm” keyboard. In the past decade, Toyoma piano has traveled to dozens of cities, has been played by pop stars as well as school children, and has been heard in distant places like Taiwan and Singapore.
Courtesy of Hiroshi Endo
In a key aspect, the instrument remains unrepaired: the scratches and cuts caused by the tsunami that spoil the piano’s shiny onyx finish have been deliberately left untouched – scars that bring viewers to tears.
“A lot of people played on the piano and said to me, ‘Endo-san, you worked a lot on the restoration, but this piano – same went through a lot, and endured. ‘”
Looking around his small piano-filled shop, evidence of his 40-year career making them whole again, the 62-year-old restorer seems to have a thing for sick instruments.
But in this case, the piano was almost out of the question. Endo was really trying to fix broken hearts.
“The students lost everything. The school left, their relatives were killed or injured. The children were emotionally affected much more profoundly by the disaster than the adults,” he told CSB News. “We wanted to show them, ‘Look! We fixed it! ‘ Despite all the tragedy, there was one small thing that we made normal again. ”