OTSUCHI, Iwate Prefecture—Over the past 13 years, Ryota Haga has seen three “stages” of messages from his friends.

At first, the messages were reassurances that they were alive.

The second stage involved announcements that they were leaving Otsuchi.

Now, Haga is reading the long-awaited third phase of messages--and a key reason he stayed in this small coastal town despite losing nearly everything.

MOVING OUT

Haga, now 29, was a first-year high school student when his family’s house was swept away by the tsunami triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011.

Haga spent the post-disaster days at an evacuation center in the town’s Kirikiri district. When cellphone services were restored, he saw emails sent by his classmates.

“I’m alive,” one read. “I’m at my relative’s place,” read another.

The tsunami killed about 100 residents in the Kirikiri district and reduced the town to debris and rubble.

As Otsuchi tried to recover, many of Haga’s classmates decided to leave the disaster zone.

“I’m moving out of the prefecture,” one said.

“I’m transferring to a new school. Goodbye,” another said.

Some of them moved to inland areas and other prefectures as far away as Hyogo and Saitama.

Disaster aside, many of Haga’s classmates described Otsuchi as “inconvenient” and “in the middle of nowhere.”

Haga could not tell them to stay. All he could write back was, “Take care, and I’ll see you again somewhere.”

When his school reopened a month after the disaster, 40 of his approximately 120 classmates had already left town.

Haga thought that he would also eventually leave.

He had planned to attend a culinary school in the Iwate prefectural capital of Morioka after graduating from high school and then look for a job.

However, his feelings started changing when he watched Otsuchi residents working hard to remove the tsunami debris.

He heard one of them say, “It’ll take five to 10 years to clean up this mess.”

But they managed to get a generator running and gained a water supply from a well. Heavy machinery was brought in to remove the rubble.

Haga helped out. He started filling portable toilets with water, distributed relief supplies and even looked for edible food among the debris.

The process made him realize that 10 years from then, his generation would have to bear the rebuilding burden. It also raised his hopes that through the rebuilding effort, he could one day bring his friends back to the town.

Hoping to stay in Otsuchi and witness the reconstruction process, Haga decided to attend a prefectural university that was within commuting distance from his new home in the town.

TRAUMATIZED BY TSUNAMI

Only a few of his classmates at university had experienced the disaster, and Haga was increasingly asked to speak about what he had gone through.

He explained that he had returned home from high school on that day, changed into casual clothes, and then felt the huge shaking from the offshore quake.

He and his mother decided to check on his younger sister who was attending a nearby elementary school on higher ground. His grandfather stayed at the home.

When Haga turned around on the way to the elementary school, he saw black waves smashing into the houses.

He always became at a loss for words around this part of his explanation.

His grandfather was rescued by neighbors and narrowly escaped the tsunami.

But it was still hard for Haga to talk about what he saw. He said the trauma initially made him feel that he would be unable to help in the town’s recovery effort.

The hesitation ended after Haga interacted with other survivors at school classes and club activities.

In 2015, he started working at the Otsuchi town hall. He currently works in the industrial promotion division of the town government and is involved in efforts to revitalize seaweed beds for tourism and education purposes.

The work is very rewarding, he said, but prospects for the town are not very bright.

Of the 36 students in his high school class, only five or six have remained in Otsuchi. Haga is the only one of the stayers who went on to higher education.

According to the Iwate prefectural government, the population of the 12 coastal municipalities in the prefecture decreased by an average of 21.3 percent from pre-disaster levels to the end of fiscal 2022.

Otsuchi had the highest rate of decline, at 31.4 percent. The town has 4,779 fewer people than its population on March 1, 2011.

WANT TO RETURN

Haga has recently received messages from some of his friends, saying they are thinking about returning to Otsuchi.

Dai Sekiya, 29, is one of them.

Both Haga and Sekiya were born in the Kirikiri district and attended the same schools, from nursery to senior high school.

After graduating from high school, Sekiya started working at a luxury hotel in Nikko, Tochigi Prefecture. He married a woman from the prefecture, and they had a daughter two years ago.

Sekiya said his life in Nikko involves shuttling back and forth between work and home. But whenever he returns to Otsuchi, he is welcomed by all his relatives, and neighbors call out to him when he walks around town.

Sekiya said that whenever he is in his hometown, he wonders, “If only I could raise my daughter here.”

These feelings have grown stronger.

On March 3, about a week before the 13th anniversary of the disaster, Haga and Sekiya were reunited in Otsuchi.

The two walked together along the coast of Kirikiri, where they played as children.

The coastal area had been a rubble dump after the disaster. But it has been restored.

“I dove down there the other day and planted kelp seedlings,” Haga said passionately to Sekiya.

Children in the area now learn about seaweed bed restoration while divers engage in seaweed bed preservation activities.

On the stroll, Sekiya told Haga, “I’m seriously thinking about coming back.”

Sekiya explained that his wife is drawn by the warm atmosphere of Otsuchi, and that they plan to relocate to the town before their daughter enters elementary school.

He said he will look for a job in Otsuchi where he can make use of his experience in Nikko.

Haga’s face immediately brightened at the words of his childhood friend.

Although he is happy that Sekiya and other friends are considering a return, Haga is also aware of the limited number of places for young people to work in the town.

“I want to make the town a place where I can confidently say to my friends who have left, ‘Come back anytime,’” he said. “It’s a big part of my purpose for working in town hall.”