Photo/Illutration Naoko Tamura, right, plays piano with a student in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, on Jan. 23. (Shigetaka Kodama)

Editor’s note: This is the third installment of a five-part series in which Japanese from all walks of life recall their experiences and backgrounds in the context of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami disaster of March 11, 2011. Each person recounts what they touched that day or on those that followed to offer a perspective on touching the lives of others.

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RIKUZENTAKATA, Iwate Prefecture--As a piano teacher, Naoko Tamura sees her goal as helping her students to create what she calls joyous “rainbow color” music when they hit the ivory keys.

Tamura explained that the 3/11 disaster left her feeling her world had turned black and white, with only tinges of gray rubble and debris, but no color.

“I couldn’t find any flowers, such as yellow or pink ones,” she said.

Tamura lost everything in the towering tsunami that devastated this coastal city in northeastern Japan following the magnitude-9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake.

She felt starved of color and found inspiration in piano sounds that conjure up the hues of a rainbow.

“If there are no rainbows, we can create them,” she recalled thinking.

Her home, the piano school she had operated for nearly 30 years and her treasured grand piano were all swept away in the tsunami.

Later that year, Tamura picked up the threads of her life and took up teaching again.

She believes that “the rainbow” can be created in the hands of each of her students, such as Miyuki Takahashi, 18.

“After the disaster, I came to love anything that I can touch with my hands,” she said. “I really love rainbow color music.”

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