Museums devoted to preserving memories of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster have turned to online activities to make up for plummeting visitor numbers due to the sixth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

March 11 will mark the 11th anniversary of the magnitude-9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake that spawned towering tsunami and devastated Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures, claiming nearly 20,000 lives.

Museums in the three northeastern Japan prefectures made it their mission to share and pass down lessons and stories from the disaster for future generations.

“When it’s busy, the venue bustles with group visitors even from the morning,” said Tadaei Kikuta, 72, who works as a guide at the Ruins of the Great East Japan Earthquake Kesennuma City Memorial Museum in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture. Part of Kikuta’s job is to recount his own 3/11 experiences to visitors.

“But the novel coronavirus pandemic has stopped everything,” he added. “I just pray it settles down soon."

These days, visitors are thin on the ground. Shortly before noon on Feb. 17, for example, barely a handful of people turned up.

The facility opened in March 2019 at the restored Kesennuma Koyo High School building, which even though it is situated 500 meters from the coast was flooded to the fourth floor by the tsunami. The building still bears scars from the disaster, including an overturned car that washed up on the third floor.

Last October and November, during a lull in the pandemic, students on field trips and other visitors came in force. Nearly 7,000 people visited on each of those months.

SCHOOL TRIPS SHELVED

However, numbers drastically declined after the Omicron variant triggered a sixth wave of infections in January.

Only 957 visitors went to the museum in January, a 70-percent decrease from December.

The museum had 68 group bookings between January and March. Of them, 1,890 people in 39 groups, including students on school trips, had canceled their reservations as of Feb. 17, museum officials said.

With the 11th anniversary of the disaster fast approaching, the museum fears there will be more cancellations in March. But it realizes that cancellations are inevitable as COVID-19 cases still remain high.

“March is the month we want everyone to think anew about disasters. We hope as many people as possible will come, but it is frustrating,” said deputy director Shin Kumagai, 39.

Tomioka-machi 3.11 o Kataru-kai, a nonprofit organization set up to share experiences of the 3/11 disaster, has also been hit by a wave of cancellations concerning field trips and excursions made by educational institutions since late January.

In February, the group based in Tomioka, Fukushima Prefecture, said it had 13 cancellations involving elementary schools to colleges.

“Visitors can become immersed in learning about (the disaster) when they actually see the town and the scars of the tsunami while listening to our stories,” said Ryo Munakata, 23, who serves as a storyteller at the secretariat.

Thirty similar facilities in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures attracted about 780,000 visitors in 2021, representing a 10-percent decrease from the pre-pandemic year of 2019, according to 3.11 Future Support Association, a public interest organization based in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture.

But as nine of them opened in or after 2020, “the pandemic has had a huge impact,” said Executive Director Masaharu Nakagawa, 45.

The association said 21 groups it contacted that offer storytelling sessions and other disaster education programs reported a 40-percent decline in the number of annual participants from 2019.

Those who joined the programs in the three months from October to December last year after the state of emergency was lifted accounted for 56 percent.

ONLINE OPTION

Faced with such a sharp decline in visitor numbers, memorial museums turned to online content to pass down memories of the disaster.

The switch in strategy quickly paid off as the number of participants who accessed storytelling sessions and other online activities increased about 10-fold from 5,189 in 2020 to 51,352 in 2021.

The number of groups offering sessions along these lines grew from eight to 14.

The storytelling group in Tomioka has held online activities once or twice a month since fall 2020, and the Kesennuma museum organized an online tour of its facility in late February.

The Tsunami Memorial Hall in Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture, has also thrown its energies into online storytelling activities.

After opening in March 2019, the facility attracted nearly 70,000 visitors in its first fiscal year. This was largely due to pool matches of the Rugby World Cup held in the city that year.

But visitor numbers declined drastically to a little less than 30,000 in fiscal 2020 as the pandemic took hold.

It began offering online sessions in June that year. A total of 7,532 people in 52 groups have taken part to date.

“Schools and companies use our online sessions for their ‘integrated studies’ and skill-training programs,” said Manabu Sasa, 42, who works at the facility. “We can deliver our stories to those living far away irrespective of whether or not the pandemic is raging.

The Tsunami Memorial Hall held a storytelling session on March 6 as part of an online event hosted jointly by the prefectural governments of Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima, as well as the Tokyo metropolitan government, ahead of the March 11 anniversary.

From Miyagi Prefecture, 3.11 Future Support Association joined the event on Feb. 26.

The storytelling group in Tomioka participated in the project on March 5 to represent Fukushima Prefecture.