Ishinomaki Shi

We went to the Ishinomaki City Kadonowaki Elementary School Ruins to see the effect of the Great east Japan Earthquake which occurred at 14.46 on 11 March 2011 and created a tsunami which hit the 500km coastline about one hour later, the waves at Ishinomaki, opposite the epicentre of the quake, being 7m high. Japan has quakes every day, especially along the Pacific Coast, but this was one of the most powerful ever experienced in the world. The Richter Scale is exponential, not linear.
The ground floor of the school was flooded but all three levels of the front of the building were damaged by fire. None of the staff or children died, having moved to higher ground when the warning was received.
The English former lecturer in English Conversation at the University gave a very good explanation of the aftermath, including the flooding of the ground floor of the Grand Hotel where we were staying and which became an evacuation centre where he stayed. Staff from the British Embassy counselled him about the risk of a nuclear explosion at Fukushima further down the coast wiping out the town, but he decided to stay and undertook PR to get international aid .
4000 were dead or missing after the tsunami, the highest % casualty rate of any town along the coast.
We went to the Ishinomaki Minamihama Tsunami Memorial Park and the Miyagi 3.11 Tsunami Disaster Memorial Museum. In the Park, there was a memorial stone to an American woman who had been teaching English and who had died in the disaster.
The whole coastal area of the town had been rebuilt by 2020, including a controversial sea-wall 7.2m high. Some residents thought it wasn't high enough whilst others wanted the money spent on other defences further inland as a neighbouring town had done.
A few of us went for lunch at a cafe where you keyed your order into a vending machine and pre-paid.
In the afternoon, we drove to Sendai and stayed at the Hotel Vista. We went to the 31st floor of an office building to get a view of the lively city of one million. Dinner was at a restaurant where we used a tablet to order tapas.Read more