TOMIOKA, Fukushima Prefecture--A school principal was touched while hearing former students singing their alma mater's song while retrieving their belongings years after the evacuation order following the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Yoshiko Aoki, a former Fukushima Prefectural Tomioka High School principal who accompanied the former pupils, heard some singing to themselves as they walked about the corridors and elsewhere on the campus. 

About 200 former students were allowed to return to the school for a two-hour visit in August 2015.

“The schoolhouse was there and the schoolyard was also there, but the singing voices of students alone were gone,” said Aoki, 77, in recalling the time.

Aoki thereupon decided the school song should continue being sung on the campus.

She approached Tomioka High’s alumni with the proposal, and somewhere between 10 and 20 of them came to the inaugural get-together in October 2015.

“Singing the song continues to breathe new life into the schoolhouse every month,” Aoki said. “That also helps connect the hearts of those who have affection for their alma mater.”

BIRTH OF A MONTHLY GATHERING

Since then, graduates of Tomioka High School, which was closed “temporarily” amid the consequences of the nuclear disaster, have been meeting in the schoolyard monthly over the next 10 years to sing the school song in front of the long-closed school.

The graduates say they believe that their beloved Tomioka High will live on as long as they continue singing their school song, even as the building is showing signs of decay.

All residents of Tomioka were evacuated after the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant succumbed to a triple meltdown in March 2011. The school has not been used since.

The Fukushima Prefectural Board of Education subsequently opened a new Futaba Future School, an integrated junior and senior high school, in the town of Hirono and suspended the operations of five senior high schools in the Futaba-gun county, including Tomioka High.

The “last” batch of students who attended the former Tomioka High graduated in 2017, even though the high school had yet to be officially closed.

The school’s song continues to be sung by members of a group called “Boko de Koka wo Utai-Tai!,” which roughly translates as “Choir of those who are eager to sing the school song on their alma mater campus.”

The group’s officials said that anyone who has participated in its monthly meetings at least once is counted as a member.

The get-togethers have had a total of 500 or so attendees, the officials said.

OFFERS EMOTIONAL SUPPORT

Eiko Nishiyama, who graduated from Tomioka High 54 years ago and was head of the alumni association at the time, was one of the first to answer Aoki’s call.

Nishiyama, 73, traveled to the venue from Koriyama, also in Fukushima Prefecture, where she lived in evacuation. She has since attended the monthly meetings without missing even once.

Nishiyama said she loves the passage “Nozomi ni ikin, hiroku yasashiku” (We will live in hope, broad-minded and kindhearted) in the second stanza of the school song.

She said she worked for the Tomioka town office for 38 years.

“The part where the kanji for 'hope' is pronounced 'nozomi' (instead of the more common 'kibo') gave me emotional support many times when I was on the verge of losing heart at work,” Nishiyama said. “I would also tell myself that I should be ‘broad-minded and kindhearted’ to the town’s residents (whom I served).”

She said she was exhausted from caring for her mother when she lived in evacuation.

Even during that time, however, going to her alma mater once a month to sing the school song allowed her to refresh her feelings and to continue on with her life, Nishiyama said.

The evacuation order was lifted in 2017 for an area containing the Tomioka High campus.

Nishiyama returned to Tomioka four years ago after the death of her mother and now lives with her husband in a refurbished barn at her home.

She said she is feeling that a turbulent phase of her life, which incessantly persisted following the nuclear disaster, has finally all but settled down.

“The get-togethers are so much fun because they give me an opportunity to see my classmates who are evacuating far away,” Nishiyama said. “I can’t believe we have been doing this for 10 years. The meetings bring back memories of my high school days, when I would cheerlead at sports events. I would cheer loudly in a school uniform blazer and jersey pants.”

Participation varies from one month to the next. Nearly 30 attendees gathered for one meeting, whereas Nishiyama was the only one at another.

The participants range in age from the 20s through the 70s and live in diverse places. But “Tomioka High is linking us all,” Nishiyama said.

BORN FROM THE COMMUNITY

Tomioka High School opened in 1950. A local belief has it that a resident of Tomioka offered the land plot and residents donated the labor to help prepare the building site to host the high school in their town.

Nishiyama’s mother also pitched in to develop the schoolyard, with the young Nishiyama on her back.

The school is now deserted and pieces are beginning to fall off the outer walls.

The gymnasium’s floor is beginning to rot from rainwater and mushrooms are growing in there, Nishiyama said.

“But I will continue going there to sing the song as long as I live,” she vowed.

The singing get-together for the 10th anniversary of the start took place on Oct. 19.

A chorus of the school song on that day was followed, among other things, by a screening of a film that shows the current state of Tomioka High’s schoolhouse and scenes of interviews with its graduates.

The event was held with the support of “Tomioka-machi 3.11 wo Kataru Kai” (Tomioka town association for telling accounts of the 3/11 disaster), a nonprofit group.