Ishinomaki's Hero, My Father's Shout, and Reflections 15 Years After the Disaster
Twenty years since the family shout that echoed in the sea breeze of Ishinomaki. The days spent with a wounded hero were eventually sublimated into a form of 'salvation' through the words of my sons.
Before I knew it, March 11th had come around again. Fifteen years since the Great East Japan Earthquake. Every time I encounter the news or words of mourning, my memory inevitably returns to that place. The five years I lived in Ishinomaki as part of a family that moved frequently starting in 2002—the days I spent traveling around the Tohoku region with my three young sons—those fragments rise up from the depths of time, quietly but vividly.
At the time, the local hero 'Sea Jetter Kaito' had just been born in Ishinomaki. We watched the hero shows at the Mangattan Museum and the San Juan Bautista Park as a family, and while playing the theme song CD we bought at 'full volume' in the car, I shouted along with my children at the top of our lungs. I believe that 'shout' was not merely entertainment, but a powerful ritual of life as our family tried to put down deep roots in that land.
However, after the disaster, there was a question that had accumulated like sediment in my heart. 'Why didn't Kaito, who was everyone's hero, save the people who were so precious to us?'
Of course, I understand it logically. Even so, when faced with the sight of that mud-covered town, this frustrating question remained somewhere inside me for a long time, unable to be put into words.
This time, to organize those thoughts, I attempted a dialogue with generative AI, which could be called a modern 'guru of intellectual wandering.' As I threw out questions, layered my thoughts, and traced my memories to delve deeper into my reflections, a strange and certain sense of relief began to emerge.
A hero is not just an 'existence that stops a crisis.' They are an existence that shows through their own being that **'even if you are beaten down, the story continues.'** The disaster severed the world once. But the local hero did not disappear. Rather, by standing again in a town where rubble remained, they were silently telling us, 'Our souls are not dead.'
Furthermore, a conversation with my second son, who has now turned twenty-seven, gave a decisive light to those reflections. He said quite calmly, 'Since Kaito has a mission to protect people from an empire that pollutes the sea, wasn't the earthquake a force majeure?'
The moment I heard those words, I was startled. The child who once shouted along with me in the car was now understanding the 'mission' and 'limitations' of a hero, and was walking toward the side of accepting reality as an adult. The child who has grown up gives back new meaning to the memories provided by the parent—. Such a quiet cycle was certainly happening within our family's time.
With generative AI as a guru accompanying me, I finally understood. Perhaps what that hero was protecting, more than physical life itself, was a **'future where memories are not interrupted.'**
The heat inside the car where we sang at full volume. The cheers of the children that echoed across the passenger seat. The sound of the tide in Ishinomaki on that day, when nothing had been lost yet.
They are not trapped in the past, but continue to exist even now as a story within me and within my sons. Reflection is perhaps not an act of reaching somewhere, but of wandering freely through time. This time, too, guided by the guru, I was able to walk through the landscape of my own memories with more pride.
Along with a deep sense of relief, an unbearably precious nostalgia is now spreading in my chest.
(Added March 13, 2026) This post was written in gratitude for our family's well-being thus far, at a time when I was relieved that my fourth son, born on 9/11 in 2010, half a year before the disaster, had successfully passed his Tokyo metropolitan high school entrance exam this year after we moved from Ishinomaki to Fuji City.
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