By ATSUSHI HARA/ Staff Writer
March 11, 2022 at 07:10 JST
The former building of the Kadonowaki Elementary School is shown to local residents during a preview event on Feb. 27 in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture. (Shigetaka Kodama)
ISHINOMAKI, Miyagi Prefecture—A school building here that was destroyed in a water-fire combination during the 2011 tsunami has been rebuilt into a disaster memorial.
The former Kadonowaki Elementary School is the only structure preserved among buildings razed by tsunami-triggered fires following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011.
The memorial was shown to reporters and residents on Feb. 27. It will be available for public viewing in April.
“We would like to hand down the lesson that fleeing to higher floors during a tsunami does not necessarily work if there is a fire,” said Hiroko Takahashi, 47, a curator who is also a senior official of Ishinomaki city’s disaster commemoration section.
Standing 1 kilometer from the sea, the three-story school building was submerged up to 1.8 meters in height and caught fire after being hit with burning debris carried by the tsunami.
The 224 pupils who were at the school had fled before the fire occurred, but seven others who left earlier died after they were swept away by the tsunami.
The school is now so degraded that an external passageway was set up beside the structure for viewing.
A special room behind the building shows exhibition panels and videos featuring the accounts of children and teachers along with information on the devastation that hit Ishinomaki.
According to surveys, four years after the disaster, half of the people from Ishinomaki wanted the school building torn down. But from 2018 to 2019, most residents wanted it entirely preserved.
The municipality decided to keep only the central part of the 107-meter-long building as a monument, citing maintenance and management costs.
Nine facilities in the three Tohoku region prefectures hardest hit by the earthquake and tsunami applied for the Reconstruction Agency’s memorial preservation support program.
The Kadonowaki Elementary School is the last to open to the public after being refurbished as a monument under the program.
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