Best night so far – a futon on a tatami mat. Good preparation for the day. We visited the elementary school in Yuriage where several of the evacuees we talked to yesterday had waited out the tsunami. It looked almost as if it had been designed with tsunami evacuation in mind – a sturdy three-story reinforced concrete structure with multiple exterior staircases and a large accessible roof. The gymnasium of the school has now been turned into a “memory hall”, where photographs and other belongings retrieved from the demolished Yuriage homes have been posted on walls, stashed in boxes, and hung on lines. Then out to the hardest hit area of Yuriage – the extremely flat land within a half-mile of the coast. It also provided our first (and so far only) contact with police attempting to control access. The scale of the event is so large, there are so many ways to access the area, and personnel are stretched so thin that it would be very difficult to establish effective roadblocks. This was the most devastated area we’ve seen yet. Water heights in this region exceeded 30 feet and more than 1000 people died. Whole blocks were leveled with an occasional structure partially standing. The highest points were two mountains fo removed debris. A mix of activities were going on – body searches still in progress, debris removal, people looking for belongings, and other people just looking on. One woman commented while picking through the debris at her home site – isn’t this interesting, but it isn’t ours so we shouldn’t take it.

In the midst of the devastation was an artificial hill with monuments on the top. It was about 20 feet high with one large stone marker and several other flat stone bases. People were using the hill as a viewing point and had established an informal memorial to the victims. From gouges in the bark of a pine tree growing on the top, it looked like the tsunami reached at least eight feet above the top of the hill. We were trying to figure out the purpose of the hill. The riddle was solved when we went down to the back where the three other stone monuments had ended up after being overtopped by the tsunami. The largest was a tsunami stone – noting the 1933 Showa tsunami that had killed a number of people in Yuriage. It was written in old calligraphy with characters not used today and Megumi wasn’t sure of all of the details but it described the tsunami and explained that this was a safe place. Well it may have been safe in 1933, but it certainly wasn’t safe in 2011.