A few hundred yard farther inland, two six-story concrete apartment buildings stand as the town’s tallest structures. Only the windows on the top floor remain. Looking through the empty squares to the buildings’ first five floors, in the distance are the remains of a school, resting at the foot of hills that shape the back of Rikuzentakata. The school was just high enough to escape complete destruction. The front is gone, opening the classrooms to the morning sunshine.
Rikuzentakata, once home to 23,000 people, is otherwise a landscape of splintered two-by-fours, upside-down boats scattered among the ruins, cars and trucks half buried in the wreckage, railroad tracks torn from their bed and twisted into a spiral, tanks from a sake brewery strewn among the debris. A pagoda-style roof, nearly intact, sits on the ground. The house it once protected from rain and snow is gone.
And all the people are gone.
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