Takatamatsubara Tsunami Memorial Park Tour

June 18, 2024

Today I joined a guided tour of the Takatamatsubara Tsunami Memorial Park. The guide was the same person who helped organize my internship, and we walked through several preserved sites across the park while he explained what each place once was, what it became after the tsunami, and why it matters today.

The tour began near the roadside station by the Iwate Tsunami Memorial Museum. Before 2011, this area had been the city’s downtown. Around 4,000 people lived here, but almost half of them either lost their lives or went missing during the disaster. I looked out across the park, trying to picture what used to stand in the empty spaces. 

One thing I hadn’t known before was that buildings are only preserved if no one died inside them, demonstrating how carefully the city thinks about memory and loss. For example, the roadside station still stands because three people were able to evacuate to the top and survive. There are still evacuation stairs and poles attached to the outside of the building- evidence of how tsunami risk had already been considered even before 2011.

We walked by a bent streetlamp, twisted all the way from its base due to the backrush of the tsunami. The new seawall now stands at 12.5 meters, more than twice the height of the previous one. Even so, it still wouldn’t have been enough to stop the waves that came thirteen years ago. In addition to the seawall, the entire city was raised by ten meters using soil from nearby mountains. 

The guide pointed out several other preserved buildings, including a hotel that had been closed at the time of the earthquake. Its windows were missing, and parts of the building were now covered in plants, visualizing how much time had passed since the disaster.

Nearby stood the “Miracle Pine Tree”- the only tree left standing out of the original 70,000 that has been preserved as a monument. The guide explained that the hotel may have blocked the waves just enough to spare it.