Soma City Memorial Center

On the last day of the Fukushima tour we visited the city of Soma. Soma is on the eastern coast of Japan, and so it was severely damaged by the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor damage. In Soma, we visited a memorial center by the ocean.

At the memorial center we watched a presentation telling the story of one of the local fishermen. The story was very sad. It told how when the fishermen heard about the tsunami they were concerned about their boats, and they left their homes to bring the boats away from shore.

After the tsunami had passed, some boats were saved, but many of the fishermen lost their families. The title of the presentation was "The most important thing", and told how after the Tsunami the surviving fishermen realized how much more important their families had been than their boats.

The memorial center had copies of newspapers and photographs of the deceased. Before I went on this trip I was only aware of the damage from the Fukushima reactor, but to the people of Soma, the tsunami was the most devastating part of the disaster.

On the memorial below there is a beer, a bottle of coke, and three cans of coffee.

These are some photographs of small playground that I took by the memorial center. I didn't get to ask, but it looks like they were damaged in the Tsunami 5 years ago, and have been untouched since.

This may not be a traditional memorial, but it tells of the destruction of the tsunami and how some parts of Japan are still rebuilding from the disaster.

Study Tour Day 2

During the second day of the tour we did another craft activity. These egg-shaped faces are called Shirakawa Daruma. They are made to represent wishes. In the photo below you can see that the yellow Daruma has only one eye. If you are waiting for the wish then the Daruma has only one eye. If the wish is for your whole life, then you will paint both eyes.

In the morning after we left the hotel, we went to a park in the Shirakawa area. Nanoko Park. Dango is the snack pictured below. We had dango that was prepared in the local style. In the spring this park is a popular location for cherry blossom viewing.

Hanami (花見, literally "flower viewing") is an interesting tradition in Japan. In the spring when the cherry trees blossom and I experience it myself, I will be sure to make a post about it.

After we ate lunch we went on a boat tour of the Iwaki harbor. It was enjoyable to see the ocean, and we went on a very pretty day.

In the background of this photo you can see a giant glass structure. That is Aquamarine Fukushima, and it was the next stop on our tour.

When we were getting our tickets, I had a long conversation with a Taiwanese friend about the pronunciation of aquamarine. He found the pronunciations of aquamarine, aquarium, and aqua all difficult.

One really neat part of this aquarium was a demonstration of two major ocean currents that met near Fukushima. There are two tanks with the different fish from each current, and you can walk between them and see the fish on either side.

This aquarium was hit very severely by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Because it is on the coast, when the tsunami came all of the employees in the building had to take shelter on the highest floor of the building. In the aftermath, there was no water or electricity with which to maintain the tanks. When employees were evacuated to shelters because of the nuclear reactor, some of them went so far as to take fish with them to the shelters. Below you can see a what the ocean current exhibit looked like some time after the disaster.

From the hard work of the employees, the aquarium was able to reopen just four months after the disaster. I found it to be a very pretty aquarium.

Study Tour First Day

On the first day of the tour, we saw several attractions. The first place that we went was Oyasuba Historical Park. This is a recently discovered tomb and a museum.

We were permitted to touch the pot in the photo above.

Below you can see a bracelet. The museum curator told us that this was the most precious item in the whole mound, and that it had been found in the coffin at the top of the mound.

After seeing the bracelet I noticed that there were visual references to it everywhere in the museum. In the photo above you can see that a photo to the left of me has the bracelet in it.

There was a projector set up so that you could pretend to hold the bracelet. What impressed me the most about it though was that the whole museum building was constructed in the shape of the bracelet. In a satellite photo you can see this especially well. link: here .

For lunch we got to go to a neat buffet restaurant. Fun Fact: レストラン means "Restaurant" in Japanese, and it is said レ(re) ス(su) ト(to) ラ(ra) ン(n).

Next we went to Abukuma Cave . This was a big limestone cave that had festive lights in some parts of the cave. Something that surprised me coming here was that you were allowed to touch everything.

The tour also featured racks of wine that were grown with Fukushima grapes and were being aged in the cave.

Finally we did some stencil assisted drawings (ラーソン is a way to write my family name using Katakana, one of the Japanese forms of writing) before we arrived at a small inn to spend the night.

We slept on futons at the end of the day.

Fukushima Study Tour Overview

For the past three days I was a part of the Fukushima study tour. My university is in the Fukushima Prefecture and so I was eligible to apply for the trip. From Saturday morning until Monday night we traveled around Fukushima stopping at different locations, eating local food, and staying in inns at night.

Because we visited so many places, and there were so many things to see, I'll make posts to this blog in the next few days highlighting some of the things that we did.

One place that we stopped was an aquarium on the east coast of Japan that was damaged severely in the 2011 disaster.

We also saw a strawberry farm and a limestone cave with Christmas decorations.

One of the mornings, we woke up to see snow on the ground. This year has had very little snow so far, and so we were all excited to see it. Some of the students from Sri Lanka still haven't gotten to see a proper snowfall yet.

The trip was a lot of fun. I went on it with 5 other students from The University of Aizu, and so we got to do a lot of things together, as well as get to meet other Fukushima students. In the photo below are three other students from my university.