The IRIDeS Public Relations Office features a special issue of photographs and a video of disaster areas of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. We will continue to introduce how affected areas are today, occasionally from here on.

In late April, 2016, we visited Rikuzentakata City, Iwate Prefecture, and Kesennumua City and Minamisanriku Town, Miyagi Prefecture, all of which were heavily affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. Engineering works to reconstruct these places are ongoing everywhere. It is difficult to imagine the original townscapes before the disaster.

Rikuzentakata

©2016 IRIDeS (Click to enlarge)

According to Urban Development and Improvement Division of the Reconstruction Bureau, Rikuzentakata City, the first coastal levee in contact with the sea has already been finished (3 meters above sea level, which is measured from T.P. (Tokyo Peil) in Japan), and approximately 95% of work has been completed to construct the second levee that stands landward (T.P. + 12.5m). The photo is of the second levee. The city has a plan to plant pine trees between the two levees, so that they can reconstruct their renowned pine forest. Land raising sites for proposed urban districts have been almost completed.

Click here to see a video (YouTube)

Shishiori District, Kesennuma City

©2016 IRIDeS (Click to enlarge)

Shishiori District, Kesennuma is located on the deepest part of Kesennuma Bay. Construction of disaster recovery public housing is proceeding in the district that was completely burnt down by a fire that followed the tsunami. New gas stations and convenience stores will open one after another alongside the arterial roadway that was newly rebuilt on a different route after the disaster. Many marine product processing factories have been rebuilt on the coastal land in Shishiori District, just as the old days, and some of them started operating already.

Shizugawa District, Minamisanriku Town

©2016 IRIDeS (Click to enlarge)

Most of the city districts have been raised. The frame of the public disaster prevention office of Minamisanriku Town stands as if it was buried in these raised lands. “Sun sun shopping village,” the town’s largest temporary shopping arcade located in Shizugawa District, is planning to move to the raised land area in front of the disaster prevention office, with some new businesses. They are preparing for its new opening on March 3, 2017, after “sun sun” (meaning “sun-soaked,” but “sun” is also a homonym of “three” in Japanese)

For other photographs, click The fifth spring after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (PDF, 3MB).

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