Schoolchildren Kento Iguchi and Rena Sato (L), wrote about their experiences for the book "Tsunami", a collection of essays written by children. The young writers not only wrote about the destruction and deaths in the family, but also about the joy of being alive and their hopes for the future.
TOKYO: Remembering Japan’s quake-tsunami disaster, one child writes how the earth rumbled and roared, another recalls that the black wave stank and a third, who lost her friend, calls the tsunami “greedy”.
The stories – simply written, touching and often heart-breaking – are among a collection of children’s essays published in a book titled “Tsunami” that has touched a nerve in the traumatised nation.
The language is often innocent and unpolished, but the stories are so direct and powerful that to many readers they convey the horror of the disaster as deeply as anything else that has been written about March 11.
The man behind the book, journalist Ken Mori, said he decided to chronicle the seismic calamity, which claimed more than 20,000 lives and sparked the Fukushima nuclear emergency, “through the eyes of children”.
In the dark and icy weeks after the quake, he visited evacuation centres in 10 towns and cities and asked about 100 children there, aged between five and 17, to write down their memories of the catastrophe.
“The children struggled to recall what they had felt with their five senses,” Mori, 43, told AFP. “They lacked skill in writing, but I think the readers felt their works were vivid and real.”
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