Handing Memory Over

Mayor of Ishinomaki City, Miyagi, Hiroshi Kameyama, on Saturday announced that the city would preserve the former building of Okawa Elementary School, which was devastated by great tsunami five years ago. In East Japan Great Earthquake, 74 students and 10 teachers was killed by huge stream of seawater. There has been an argument against the preservation among the families, because they would not like to have depressive sentiment when they see the building. However, the mayor realized his responsibility for the future generation to hand the tragic memory over.

In the afternoon of March 11^th, 2011, Okawa Elementary School was violently shaken by a hard quake. Predicting great tsunami coming, the teachers led their students to evacuate, heading to a hill in the neighborhood. But, they spent certain time to begin the evacuation, calculating the size of coming tsunami and hesitating whether they should stay or go. While they were walking on the road around the school, a great tsunami washed them away. The school was fully soaked.

The parents were deeply disappointed to commanding of the teachers. Although the city government made efforts to verify what was going on, the parents were not satisfied with the result, which did not recognize full responsibility of the teachers. Nineteen parents indicted local and national government with a suspicion that the teachers could take other safer measures for evacuation.

Not only for the parents, but for the people in the city, rusted building of Okawa Elementary cannot be seen without sad and regretful feeling. In the midst of argument between one that would require dismantlement of the building to avoid further cruelty of remembering missing children and another that the event was too tragic to forget, the building remained on the devastated land.

Mayor Kameyama took the choice of memorizing the tragedy. “The mission of Ishinomaki City is to succeed reflections and lessons of the great disaster. To minimize the impact of great disaster, we will take responsibility of succeeding to next generation,” told Kameyama in his press conference on Saturday. While it will take ¥670 million for basic construction and ¥23 million for annual maintenance, Kameyama is requesting subsidy from national government for preservation of disaster monument.

While parents have been reluctant to see the building, the graduate of Okawa Elementary hoped the building to remain. “I hope our school to be preserved for memorizing that there were lives to be rescued,” told one student in sixth grade at the time of the disaster. They might have realized that the disaster has already been forgotten by the people in Japan in these five years.