Iwate and Fukushima Prefectures were ravaged by the 2011 tsunami that precipitated a catastrophic nuclear disaster. Now, this tragic, beguiling region is welcoming travellers back. Hope spiralled tender as a rice shoot along the resurrected Sanriku Railway Rias Line in north-eastern Honshu.
Summer's blooms spilled from pots on station platforms; storybook houses peeped from the forests' folds; a man knelt beside the ice-blue river and cleansed a fistful of spring onions. Rice crops flashing by in the valleys were ripe for the harvest: their imperial yellow shimmer filled the windows as my friend and I rattled along this once-moribund coastline. On 11 March 2011, communities along the north-eastern seaboard of Japan's biggest island, Honshu, were swept from their moorings when an earthquake measuring 9.
1 on the Richter scale precipitated a tsunami of monumental proportion. Seawater barrelled into the saw-toothed shoreline, upturning infrastructure, buckling forests, flushing lives from every crevice. When the oily tide receded, little but splintered flotsam remained.
Such devastation is familiar to this country located atop a fault-line ; the archipelago nation has endured too many natural disasters to remember – most recently, in January 2024, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake in the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture. But remembrance is the ritual whereby the Japanese make sense of their fate.
In Honshu, a purpose-drawn map demarcates the numerous "disaster memorial facilities.