Japan earthquake and tsunami anniversary: the mistake that cost 100 lives

March 9th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

On Sunday, as Rikuzentakata gathers to remember the disaster, he said he would
not attend. “I want to visit the families of my friends who died. But I
am not sure if that would be the right thing to do.”

Standing outside the wrecked sports centre, he said that on the day of the
tsunami, the fear “never entered” his mind that it would not be a
safe place to shelter.

Today the centre is a desolate sight, one of the few buildings in a desolate
plain, all the houses having been destroyed.

Its face has been ripped off, leaving girders and wires dangling.

Inside, there is sand on every surface. The back wall was punched through by
the force of the tsunami and there is still an upturned car in the middle of
the sprung wooden floor, along with the other detritus washed in as the
waters retreated.

“As the people made their way here, I told them all to go up the outside
staircase to the second floor. We had about half an hour from the earthquake
to get everyone up. I was at the top of the staircase helping the disabled,
people in wheelchairs, the older people,” he said.

Then he looked up at the sea. Rikuzentakata sits in a bay around two miles
wide, its flat plain surrounded by a horseshoe of hills. The town farms
oysters in the shallow waters. On a normal day, the distance from the sports
centre to the sea is around a third of a mile.

“First I saw the water coming through a line of pine trees near the bay.
Then I saw it reach the houses. Then I saw the houses moving towards us,”
he said. “It was not an angry wave, it looked quite unthreatening. It
just slowly crept up. And then suddenly it was there, an enormous mass of
water.”

“When I saw the houses being swept towards us, I realised suddenly we
might not be safe. We were screaming at the fire brigade crew in the car
park that was ushering people in that they needed to come up to the second
floor.

“Then people started to panic and to run away from the water, towards the
back of the hall where there are lavatories. But I knew we would be trapped.
I knew this was not the place we needed to be, that we needed to be
somewhere else.”

It took just one minute for the water to rise from the floor of the sports
centre to the second floor gallery. As soon as Mr Sasaki realised the
evacuees had made a mistake, the water was up to his knees.

“I reached the lavatories at the back and turned around. I saw the huge
plate glass window at the front of the hall shatter and a wave of water rush
in,” he said. And then, in a split second, his head was under water.

“I gasped, and inhaled a mouthful of seawater. I started to choke, to
panic, and immediately I thought this was the end. But then, as images of my
three children flashed before me, I became determined I would not die that
day.”

He bit down on his sleeve to stop himself from breathing in any more water,
and scrabbled to get a grip. Finally, as his body rose, he managed to hold
onto a pipe.

“I could feel other hands brushing my body. There were people all around.
I grabbed one hand and tugged hard, trying to bring it up with me, but it
slipped out of my grip.” As the water rose, he was able to find an air
pocket at the top and craned his neck to take two breaths. For the next ten
minutes, he frantically rose and fell, searching for mouthfuls of oxygen.
Finally, he said, the water began to fall, little by little.

After he finally fell to the floor, he went in the semidarkness to search for
a child’s voice he had heard crying out. It turned out to be a woman,
Yoshida Chikako, who had been shouting out for her husband as he slipped
away from her. Together with a third survivor, they waited out the first
night, shivering in wet clothes, in the winter cold, in the twisted wreckage.

As he retold his story, Mr Sasaki’s voice went quiet, his eyes screwed tightly
shut. ¡°In the other bathroom, there were about ten bodies. In the hall,
people had got caught in the beams, and their bodies hung down limply. As I
looked at the wave retreating, I will never forget the sound of all the wood
floors snapping, cracking and warping.”

Mr Sasaki has lived with the regret of the disaster for the past year, and
said he had tried to exorcise his demons by throwing himself into emergency
work, delivering aid to the people left homeless, and by personally seeking
out and visiting some 20 families of victims who died in the sports centre.

“We had enough time to escape, to get to higher ground,” he said. “If
the radio had said the wave would be ten metres, instead of six, I am sure
that someone would have suggested we move everyone elsewhere.

Maybe I would have suggested it.”