RIKUZEN-TAKATA, Iwate Prefecture--Seven new names were engraved last summer on memorials in this northeastern city dedicated to those who perished in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami.

The 1,716 names on the monument serve as a reminder that the victims died here on that tragic day.

The city will again be mourning for the victims on the upcoming 12th anniversary of the disaster on March 11. 

The inscriptions on the memorial were completed on March 11 last year in downtown Rikuzen-Takata, Iwate Prefecture, where the ground has been raised about 10 meters. They comprise name engravings on two black granite blocks, each measuring 1.2 meters high and 20 meters long.

SO OTHERS MAY MOURN

Keiko Masuda’s name was added to the memorial last August near the center of the left block facing the sea. Masuda, who was 71, ran a barbershop near the monument site.

The city authorities of Rikuzen-Takata began preparing in 2019 to install the memorial inscriptions to coincide with repairs of a memorial facility that they had built two years after the disaster.

Government officials approached Keiko’s second son, Hidefumi, 52, asking him if he wanted his mother’s name on the monument.

“Our family probably doesn’t really need that,” he said he thought at the time.

The earthquake and tsunami left 1,761 people dead or missing in Rikuzen-Takata, more than in any other municipality in the prefecture.

So many were killed that funerals were held every tens of minutes at funeral halls here following the disaster. Most of the rites were attended only by close family members.

Everyone here had lost someone in their family.

Thus, Hidefumi preferred the deceased to be mourned for separately and quietly. He also thought that his mother could be “seen in the collective light” as just one of the more than 1,700 casualties, rather than as the individual that she was, if her name were to be engraved along with so many others.

After the memorial inscriptions were completed last year, however, Hidefumi was approached by several of his relatives, who asked him why Keiko’s name was not on there. One said it was tragic that Keiko was the only person whose name was missing.

Hidefumi consulted his younger sister and decided to have Keiko’s name added. He hoped that doing so would allow Keiko to be mourned for by people outside her family.

Keiko was a friendly face in her neighborhood. She was also good friends with customers of her barbershop. She liked going to karaoke parlors with her friends.

Hidefumi’s younger sister hoped, on her part, that having Keiko’s name engraved would provide moral support to those who knew her when she had been alive.

He visited the memorial inscriptions with his family members when they held a memorial service for Keiko on Feb. 11, slightly ahead of the 12th anniversary of her death. He saw how people who seemed to have no connection to the deceased were following the names on the monument and saying, “Oh, there were so many victims!”

That was when he realized that one of the roles of the memorial is to inform those without firsthand knowledge of the disaster about the sheer number of casualties.

KNOWING THEY WERE THERE

Yoshiko Baba, a 56-year-old resident of Tono in the prefecture, learned about the memorial inscriptions when she visited Rikuzen-Takata on March 11 last year to mourn for her husband, who perished there in the tsunami. Baba looked at all the names on the monument but could not find her husband’s anywhere.

The city authorities of Rikuzen-Takata had tracked down family members of victims to the extent they could to ask them if they wanted the names of those they lost on the monument.

Their effort, however, mostly only covered victims who lived in the city, and apparently, they never got around to Baba’s husband, who had commuted there from Tono.

Baba’s husband was a drugstore manager. His colleagues and customers loved him; he often brought home presents he had received from them.

His hobby was ham radio, which he liked so much that he even had Yoshiko obtain a corresponding license because he wanted to be in touch with her.

Her husband, who was so friendly and always smiling, was swept up in the tsunami while he was at work. He was 43.

Yoshiko talked to Satomi, her 82-year-old father-in-law, and decided to have her husband’s name added to the monument. After the name was added last August, she immediately visited the memorial inscriptions and saw the name of Hisanori Baba at the very end of a monument block.

She found herself feeling happy that his name was there.

Yoshiko would drive a car, on March 11 every year, from her Tono home for about an hour to visit the former drugstore site. With large-scale rebuilding work under way, the neighborhood of the site is now home to expanses of farmland and unoccupied land plots.

Few vestiges, if any, have survived of the community that was once there.

“When I saw his name there, however, it really drove home the point that my husband had been there in that city,” Yoshiko said.

The name Hisanori, written using the kanji for “commerce” and “accomplishment,” was the brainchild of Satomi, who hoped that his son would be successful in commerce and live a sensible life.

“Seeing his name revived so many memories in my mind,” Satomi said. “It felt like I was seeing Hisanori in the flesh.”

The 1,716 names are here in this renovated downtown area, watched over by so many people, including those who have no firsthand knowledge of the earthquake and tsunami.