SENDAI--World-renowned musician Ryuichi Sakamoto felt an irresistible pull to a damaged piano at a school building in the northeastern prefecture of Miyagi.

The building was rendered unusable by the tsunami spawned by the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011. 

Ten months later, Sakamoto visited the Miyagi Prefecture Agriculture High School in the city of Natori.

He asked for an opportunity to repair the tsunami-stricken piano, an offer that surprised the school’s personnel.

The grand piano, which had been used on occasions including graduation ceremonies, remained buried in rubble and driftwood in a warehouse in the school’s gymnasium.

The school staff somehow managed to haul the piano out onto the stage.

Sakamoto clasped the hands of people including Atsuko Mochida, a music teacher who came to meet him, and told them, “Oh, your hands are so cold! You did so much to prepare for our visit!”

He faced and played the mud-stained piano, which, however, only produced a muffled sound.

A technician who accompanied Sakamoto decided the piano, which had been soaked in saltwater, was difficult to repair. Mochida, 59, said she remembers the disappointment on Sakamoto's face.

But she still felt she was being encouraged anew by the musician.

The school resumed its classes in a temporary school building following the disaster.

Many students, however, were facing an inner struggle, wondering if it was appropriate to be dabbling in music at a difficult time like that.

“Oh no, you need music precisely at a time like this,” Mochida thought, as she continued coaching them in wind music and choral singing.

‘PHYSICALLY TORMENTED’

Sakamoto had been troubled about how so many musical instruments had been damaged in the quake and tsunami.

“I am a musician, so it feels like as if I were physically tormented,” he said. “It’s so hard for me.”

Sakamoto set up a School Music Revival fund in July 2011 to offer to repair musical instruments for free for schools in disaster-affected areas. He visited Agriculture High School as part of that effort.

The activities proceeded to take on a different shape.

A Tohoku Youth Orchestra, headed and supervised by Sakamoto, was founded in 2014 to offer opportunities that would allow children of the Tohoku region to grow and develop through music.

Some 100 members, ranging in age from elementary school pupils to university students, were recruited in the following year through an open competition from the three prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima, which were the hardest hit by the quake, tsunami and the ensuing nuclear disaster.

Leading musicians coached the young orchestra members during practice sessions once a month, with Sakamoto sometimes taking part himself.

Yuto Nakamura played the trumpet in the orchestra as one of the first batch of its members. He was a university student in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi Prefecture.

Nakamura, 27, said he was attracted by the possibility of performing with first-rate musicians. However, he had little determination to face up to the 2011 disaster and the massive rebuilding efforts required.

Perhaps he was simply shying away from the enormous task, he said.

Nakamura was a third-year junior high school student when the disaster struck on March 11, 2011.

The tsunami swept away the house of an aunt who lives in Ishinomaki, also in the prefecture. It took the life of her grandchild, who attended Okawa Elementary School, where 74 pupils and 10 staff members were killed or went missing.

Nakamura was in an inland part of Sendai when the disaster struck. His family did not lose its dwelling, nor did he lose any immediate family members.

He was seized by a sense of helplessness, not knowing what he could say to his aunt.

The discomfiture stayed with him even after he joined the Tohoku Youth Orchestra.

“Are we really entitled to pose as representatives of the disaster areas and perform music in the name of the Tohoku region?” he asked himself at the time.

He talked to fellow orchestra members and accompanied them to disaster-hit areas along the coast. He visited the former site of Okawa Elementary School, interviewed residents of public housing who were disaster survivors and organized several concerts with fellow volunteers.

And his tireless efforts, apparently, were not in vain.

“We cannot take the place of those who suffered serious damage but, with our energy and vigor, we can still stay close to them,” he came to think in the course of his activities.

And as Nakamura was experiencing all that, Sakamoto was there to watch over him and encourage him.

Nakamura chose the orchestra as the subject of his university graduation thesis. He wanted to learn what Sakamoto meant when he said he hoped that the orchestra would “try its hand, out of this Tohoku region, at creating a new form of music.”

Sakamoto agreed to set aside time for an interview with him in October 2018.

DEFYING SOCIAL TRENDS FOR TOHOKU

Sakamoto talked, among other things, about the musical quality he wanted the orchestra’s members to exude and about tearing down preconceptions about music.

“I wish to give expression to a music setup that would better represent the musical and human characteristics of individual beings,” Nakamura recalled Sakamoto telling him.

The musician also answered his questions about why the Tohoku region continued to mean so much to him.

“I certainly have the desire to defy the social trends for a gradual loss of memory and for oblivion,” he told Nakamura.

The legacy that Sakamoto left in Tohoku remains an open question 12 years on from the disaster.

“I think Mr. Sakamoto hated phrases like ‘helping disaster areas,’” said Mochida, who is now teaching a different high school. “He simply did his best to improve the music environment for children so they could have genuine experiences in music. Just the way he did so taught me so much.”

Sakamoto later took the piano, destined for disposal, from the Agriculture High School. What is now known as the “Tsunami Piano” has since been reborn into an artwork for keeping memories alive of the 2011 disaster.

Nakamura graduated both from his university and from the orchestra in the spring last year.

“Thank you for the youth you gave me,” Nakamura said in an Instagram post on the night he learned about the news of Sakamoto’s passing at age 71 on March 28.

He said that every single word of the musician, which changed Nakamura’s attitude toward music and his thinking toward the quake and tsunami, is his “life’s treasure.”

“The way Mr. Sakamoto faced up so sincerely to Tohoku’s children has lit a ‘hope’ in us,” Nakamura said. “I hope we will be the ones, in the years to come, to pass on that hope to the next generation.”

Nakamura has been teaching, since last year, at an elementary school in Tokyo.