Inside the Japanese Museum Built From Tsunami Debris

The air is thick with ocean salt and summer heat as I climb the hill toward the Sanriku Railway station in Okirai, a small village in Japan’s Iwate prefecture. I’m five days into hiking the Michinoku Coastal Trail with Oku Japan on the tour company’s first guided trip since the 620-mile route opened in 2019. Our guide, a soft-spoken Tokyo local, has been steering us to places we’d never stumble upon as English-speaking travelers. Earlier that day, we met the mayor of a fishing town. Then we had lunch at a strawberry farm only open once a week. The sweet taste of the plump, red fruit still lingers on my tongue when, in the distance, I notice a haphazard shack made out of scrap wood and corrugated metal, glinting in the sunlight like a beacon.

As we approach the strange compound, a man steps out from a house next door to greet us. He introduces himself as Waichiryo Katayama, but friends call him Waichi-san. He’s the builder of this colorful and curious museum called Shiome, meaning “the place where the cold sea current and the warm sea current meet.” Every single piece of the facade, from the roof to the gate to the hand-painted walls, is debris from the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami that struck the country’s northeastern coast on March 11, 2011.

One exterior wall is lined with clocks frozen in time, their hands still pointing at the minute and hour when floods wiped out the village’s community hall. That same wall displays photos of the town both before and after it was swept away, as a memorial of sorts. A staircase forming the roof of the wall, Waichi points out, is the evacuation bridge from the primary school; all 70 students got out just in time using this “miracle staircase.” In total, the disaster resulted in more than 20,000 confirmed deaths across three prefectures; Waichi says 96 people died in Okirai, which earned it the nickname “the miracle village.”

As I peer at some aerial photos, I hear neighborhood kids out back riding scooters and playing video games, their small voices speaking quickly in Japanese. Meanwhile, Waichi smiles big and talks with his hands, and his joy cuts through any heaviness.

“I am a kid at heart,” he tells me. Unlike Shiome, many monuments and museums that memorialize natural disasters suspend tragedy in stone, silence, and seriousness. Just south of Okirai Bay, the Kesennuma City Memorial Museum, which I visited later on my trip, preserves a high school that was badly hit by the 2011 flooding. Visitors, including me, clutched tissues and dabbed their eyes as they quietly roamed between the exhibits, including a simulation of the earthquake magnitude and a compilation of news broadcasts from that day.