Okawa Elementary School, located about 30 minutes away from Sendai, was our last stop during the second leg of the trip. We traveled almost clear across the country from Hakata to Sendai in a day using a Shinkansen, and then used a bus to head to the school. We all had background on Okawa Elementary, of course, and I had managed to find a multiple-page survivor account during my background research. The account described drowning in alarming detail; as if the immense water pressure and terror wasn’t enough, the students also described the whirling debris clashing against their body, the smell of stale fish choking their lungs. I carried these vague sensory details with me as I peered out the window, expecting something similar—old debris, perhaps, or a lingering smell. The houses grew sparser and older as we drew closer, writing a grim memoir of the aftermath.
Okawa Elementary School stood broken, smaller than I had expected. A tall hill loomed right behind the school, and fields stretched out in every other direction. A river flowed further away, and I knew that one of the tsunami waves that had hit the school had come from there. When we got down the bus, a man led us to a plaque in front of the school. He held a small booklet of words and pictures—a makeshift presentation. “Forgive my English,” he told us. “I didn’t know it before the tsunami, but I am learning. I want to make sure everyone can understand my message.”
Four of his family died in the tsunami, he said. His daughter was one of them. As the tsunami hit the school, he was stranded on the other side of a bridge between the school and his house, unable to get to his daughter. He led us closer to the broken remanent of the school, where we could peer inside. Chairs and chalkboards stood still, frozen at 3:37 PM. This is the first grade classroom, he said. This is the second grade classroom. Third grade, fourth grade. I watched him and the makeshift presentation in vague horror, abruptly realizing how young the children were. He didn’t cry, and his voice hardly wavered, but when he looked at the school, he might as well have been looking through it. I wondered briefly what he was looking for, and then our professor’s words from Hiroshima rang in my head. This is a graveyard, he had told us. Walk respectfully. Okawa was no different. There were souls interwoven in the atoms in the air, tangible if you closed your eyes.
We walked to where the children had been trying to evacuate—directly into the path of the tsunami, away from the hill, and far too late. This was where many of the bodies had been found. I stared at the ground by my feet and imagined what the storyteller told us, rescuers arriving days too late and finding children in the mud. There must have been broken, sharp, debris, I thought. It must have smelled like rotten seaweed and fish.
The storyteller then announced that we would hike to the point that the students would have needed to be safe. I anticipated a long climb, but we had hardly walked for half a minute when he stopped us to show us a sign, nestled barely a fourth of the way up the hill. TSUNAMI ARRIVAL POINT, it read. I blinked. We were led onto a large platform, above the safety point. If the students could have gotten here, we were told, they would have been safe. The platform was large enough to hold all the students and teachers.
Disaster preparation and prevention is important, the storyteller, the museum, the brochures, the makeshift presentation told us. We hope this never happens again to anyone’s children. 74 out of the 78 children at the elementary school, and 10 of the 11 teachers died unnecessarily. Authorities had knowledge of the tsunami; they knew the importance of safety drills. There were hours to evacuate. We hope you heed our message, learn from our mistakes, they told us.
As I walked back to the bus, I listened to the crunch of gravel beneath me, the wind swirling the empty classrooms, silence where the laughter of children should be. Listen carefully, the storyteller had told us as we walked down the hill. You can still hear them.