ISHINOMAKI, Miyagi--As the tsunami waters rose around him, one boy desperately stayed afloat by clinging to his evacuation helmet. A refrigerator with no door floated past so he climbed inside, and survived by staying in his "lifeboat" until the danger eventually passed.
This amazing tale of survival emerged during interviews with students and teachers of Okawa Primary School in Ishinomaki, which was battered by the March 11 tsunami. Seventy-four students, nearly 70 percent of the school roll, died in the tsunami or remain missing.
The interviews, which were conducted from March 25 to May 26, were compiled into a report that was released Monday.
The local board of education interviewed 28 people, including a senior male teacher and four students who survived being engulfed by the tsunami. The interviews revealed there was considerable confusion about where to evacuate in the minutes before the tsunami pounded the area.
According to the report, after the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, students and teachers assembled in the school playground for about 40 minutes before evacuating along a route toward the Kitakamigawa river. They walked in lines, with sixth-grade students at the front followed by younger students.
As they walked to an area of higher ground called "sankaku chitai" at the foot of Shin-Kitakami Ohashi bridge that traverses the river, the tsunami suddenly surged toward them.
"When I saw the tsunami approaching, I immediately turned around and ran in the opposite direction toward the hills [behind the school]," a fifth-grade boy said during an interview.
Another fifth-grade boy said: "The younger students [at the back of the line] looked puzzled, and they didn't understand why the older students were running back past them."
As the water swamped the area, many students drowned or were swept away. The boy who managed to hold on to the helmet he was wearing was one of the lucky ones.
After he clambered into the refrigerator, the water pushed him toward the hill behind the school, where he saw a classmate who had become stuck in the ground as he tried to flee.
"I grabbed a branch with my right hand to support myself, and then used my left hand, which hurt because I had a broken bone, to scoop some of the dirt off my friend," he said. His classmate managed to dig himself out.
The board also spoke to 20 students who were picked up by relatives by car after the quake.
A fourth-grade student said when the car they were in was driving past sankaku chitai, a city employee there told them to flee to higher ground.
Some interviewees said teachers and locals were split over where the best evacuation site was.
"The vice principal said we'd better run up the hills," one recalled. Another said locals who had evacuated to the school "said the tsunami would never come this far, so they wanted to go to sankaku chitai."
One interviewee said the discussion on where to evacuate developed into a heated argument.
The male teacher told the board that the school and residents eventually decided to evacuate to sankaku chitai because it was on higher ground.
Meanwhile, it has been revealed that the board discarded handwritten notes of the interviews after compiling the report.
Notes of all the interviews were initially jotted down on paper, but after the content was included in the report, all the notes were thrown out, according to the board.
The two city employees who spoke with the teacher for 20 to 30 minutes recorded his comments on one or two A4 sheets.
"We included all the notes in the report, but thinking back now, perhaps we should've kept them," a board official said.
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