Fifteen years after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami remade the northeastern coastline, Crown Prince Akishino and his son Prince Hisahito traveled to Kesennuma, Miyagi, to stand inside the ruins of what the ocean had passed through. Their visit — the young prince's first to a disaster-affected site — was an act of witness as much as ceremony, a reminder that nations carry their catastrophes forward not by forgetting them, but by returning to look again. In the preserved wreckage of a school building and the rebuilt bustle of a fish market, Japan's long reckoning with 2011 found quie
Japan's Crown Prince, Son Visit 2011 Tsunami-Devastated City on 15th Anniversary
The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami caused widespread devastation; however, all occupants of the visited school building were safely evacuated.