午夜剧场

Three years old, three years old, and one year old. At the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, our household had three infants. Due to the accident at TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, items like powdered milk, drinking water, and disposable diapers were in short supply. My wife and children temporarily moved to the Kansai region.

In the fall of the same year, my grandmother, who had evacuated from her hometown of Iwaki City in Fukushima Prefecture to Yokohama City, passed away at the age of 99. Her death was classified as a disaster-related death, and she is included in the figures announced every March as a subject of memorial services.

Panic buying and refraining from purchasing. Planned power outages and voluntary evacuations. Even without direct damage, many people likely remember the vivid contemporary events that occurred around them.

However, even events that many people experienced and remembered, and which attracted public attention, cannot resist the passage of time. Memories fade, and the number of people from generations with no memory or experience of the event increases. Who will pass on the story of the earthquake, which grows more distant every year, and how?

This is not a general theory. My eldest children, who will be high school seniors in the spring, still remember the shaking of the earthquake and the sight of their grandmother. On the other hand, my youngest child, who starts high school in the spring, has no memory of it. Can I pass on the earthquake to these children as a "family event"?

In 2014, I made an "internal career change" from a magazine editor to a newspaper reporter. Since returning to work in Tokyo in 2018, the distance to the disaster-affected areas has shortened. Around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, ahead of the 10th anniversary of the earthquake, I began tentatively driving through the disaster areas. At first, I went alone. Then, I brought family and friends. I went to the tsunami-affected areas in Iwaki City. I headed north to Futaba District and Soma District. I went to the coastal areas of Miyagi and Iwate.

In various places, transportation networks were being restored, and disaster ruins and public facilities were beginning to appear. In Fukushima Prefecture, Route 6 was fully restored in 2014, allowing cars to pass (and in 2022, it became accessible by bicycle or on foot). In 2015, the Joban Expressway fully opened. I was also encouraged by the 2016 official prefecture poster "Come." In 2020, the entire JR Joban Line resumed operations. The disaster-affected areas were no longer difficult places to visit.

How to pass on the family story? How to observe and record contemporary history as it unfolds? While continuing a journey carrying these two questions, a book was born that calls on young readers in their teens, such as junior high and high school students, to travel to the disaster-affected areas.

It is not just a place for sightseeing or study. It would be a waste to forget. I feel that the disaster-affected areas are places of deep learning worth facing for a lifetime.

Satoshi Ouchi

Chikuma Q Books

128 pages, 1,340 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are those at the time of publication.