Victims search for memories

In a devastated landscape of splintered homes, rotting bodies and twisted cars, an elderly man walks with stooped shoulders, searching for any object that can bring back memories of his daughter.

"Her home used to be there, but that is gone," said the man who gave his name only as Kikuchi, pointing at a spot in the town of Rikuzentakata, leveled by a tsunami days ago.

"My daughter is missing. She is gone. I was up in the hills above town and couldn't get to her in time," Kikuchi said in a steady voice.

"I am looking for something that can remind me of her. There must be something here," Kikuchi said, before resuming his wandering through the mudstrewn debris in the town of broken buildings erased by a giant wall of water.

The tsunami took almost everything from those in its path. They escaped with just the clothes on their backs, as the wall of water destroyed homes, pictures, keepsakes and objects that are touchstones of memories.

People who have spent decades in these northeastern coastal towns now find themselves disoriented when they return, because streets have vanished and landmarks have disappeared.

In Ofunato, a middleaged couple looked shellshocked as they walked around for the first time since the quake in what used to be their neighborhood now a flat stretch of overturned trucks, splintered wood pieces from houses and crushed roofs.

"There is absolutely nothing left. I got in my car after the tsunami warning, thinking I would come back. I didn't have my wallet or my insurance card," the wife said.

She was clutching a wine opener she found where her home used to be. "This was the only thing I could find in there."

Almost all survivors are at evacuation shelters near their former homes, sleeping in places such as cramped school gymnasiums, not far from message boards covered with requests seeking information on the missing and with schedules for buses running to the morgue for body identification.

During the day, some venture back to where they once lived to survey the damage and perhaps salvage a few items.

"We are nestled in the mountains with the sea nearby and a river that flowed through town. The fishing was wonderful, and it was peaceful," said Yasuo Koshita in the flattened town of Otsuchi. "This used to be such a beautiful place."

Reuters