Return to life in Kamaishi

Kenji Sano, 80, in his shop in Kamaishi, the Japan, on March 30, Giulio Di Sturco

By Charles Graeber

Kenji Sano was two years old the first time his house was destroyed. His family had a small house of wood and rice paper of Kamaishi, right on the main street of the city, parallel port and the ancient furnace which produced iron used in all, swords of samurai of rails for high-speed bullet trains. Sano hidden in the Middle tombstones, Buddhist Hill clutches her mother as the tsunami of March 3, 1933, swept his town. Later, on the place where his mother helped help burn the bodies recovered from the wreck, the survivors placed two steel Bodhisattvas, commemorates the high water line. Kenji-san just sitting in front of the Arch of the door of the temple, look at the smoke.

It was different from the next time. The difference of the tsunami, who unpacked wooden houses, leaving scattered - all - things, clean burned American bombing, leaving only ash. Three weeks after the home teen Sano had been cremated, August 8, 1945, bombing began again. An atomic bomb fell on the South of the city of Nagasaki the following day. No there is no bombs after that. Kenji has contributed to his father and his brother rebuild. Their was a small place, any more than a shack, but enough. There was nothing to do than start over.

After the war, Kamaishi flourished. Furniture factories and mills processing of seafood, a granary and farm fish, rows of restaurants and a maze of a tavern room, all giving an international port occupied and protected by a massive breakwater. Tsunami experts from around the world have estimated Kamaishi to have the best harbor protection anywhere; According to the Guinness Book of Records world, 207-foot-deep, breakwater inhabitants feet in length is also the largest in the world. Built at a cost of 165 billion yen ($2 billion), it took 30 years to build and was completed in March 2009.

For decades, Kenji Sano could see the breakwater takes form on his daily in the morning go hiking in the mountains of Rikuchi, which sandwich Kamaishi (of 40 000 inhabitants) against Pacific. Even at 80, Sano took to the foothills in the early hours, sometimes with his wife, often only the point of view of his native city below. If he travelled far enough, he could visit with a God.

The Kannon deity, more than 100 feet high and cradling a fish, was on the ridge overlooking the sea - s Kamaishi unofficial patron saint and a tourist attraction in 41 years. The Bodhisattva of compassion was built on the mountain which overlooks the Bay of Kamaishi, a prayer in reinforced concrete. "Be calm," Kannon implored the Pacific. "Don ' t rage".

March 11, Sano began early as usual, leaving a house occupied with three generations of its manufacture. He slipped past his teenage, Ayumu grandson, who was running a finger in a book for the next University entrance examination; past where the wife of his son, Hiromi, kneeling on the ring of cooking a meal School of rice for his boy, Hiroyuki; and in the stairwell of his shop, where his son aged 44 years, Shigeru, was sweeping the stoop.

For 60 years, Kenji had executed Sano liqueur, a wholesaler, a package store and a bar on the corner of streets Oodori and Aoba, main intersection of Kamaishi, on the ground floor of the House. Sano alcohol was the kind of place of daily meeting vital for any city. He was known to sailors from around the world, too. Kenji shot his surgical mask and exchanged a few quick nods with Shigera and led to Oodori Street and in the light of the morning.

Walking stick carved of Sano clicked on the sidewalk as he signalled his traders neighbours - the mother and the daughter of the bakery nearby; his friend the dentist, whose wife had Parkinson's disease; the old pharmacist, walk quickly in his denim floppy Hat; Yuko Kariya, the woman who owned the café Jazz tidy by Aoba Park. Kamaishi, everyone knew Sano.

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