Years after the 2011 Great Tsunami: Transitional state of recovery in Ishinomaki, Japan in 2015 and 2019

This series documents the transitional state of recovery of Ishinomaki in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan that suffered from the highest number of casualties when 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami hit the region.

During the research about the city before my first trip in 2015, I found that much of the wiped out area was still almost deserted and the updated Google Maps seemed to show nothing but blank spaces indicating that there were no existing businesses or places to go. But surprisingly when I tried to zoom in very close to the area from the bird's eye view, I found that the Google Maps was still showing some of the places that didn't exist any more and it left me a kind of poignant emotion that I still could see some of the identities of the people who were gone now. 

The plan of my first trip to the area started from these identities. I tracked down the places that only existed in the map without knowing what I would encounter or even how to get there. The unimaginable amount of debris and the direct remnants of the disaster that I saw from the media were almost cleared when I first visited in 2015, but there were still so many scars at every corner of the streets that seemed to have become normal parts of the life in the city.

I made a second visit to the city in 2019 and realized that the recovery processes have been extremely slow although many parts of the city have been reconstructed and revitalized. I could feel the whole vibe of the city was much more lively than four years ago, but I still could feel the weight of the memories that the natural disaster has left in this region.