Fukushima tsunami 2011: Survivor clung to a tree for hours to flee loss of life in Japan’s worst pure catastrophe
“I felt like the ocean was all around me. The water was so cold it chilled me to the bone,” he recalls.
As the water came up to his knees, Kurosawa saw people in cars gripping their steering wheels as their vehicles were washed down the road. Others who had been hanging on to trees felled by the waves were swept away. For hours, Kurosawa endured sub-zero temperatures. He thought of his wife — he’d reached her on her cellphone for 15 seconds while in the tree, before the line went dead.
As night turned to day, he heard someone in the distance calling for help with what seemed like their last ounce of energy. He says he doesn’t know that person’s fate — but Kurosawa had just survived the deadliest natural disaster in Japanese history.
More than 20,000 people died or went missing in the earthquake and subsequent tsunami. But the devastation went deeper than natural disaster. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, in this part of Japan, became a catastrophe of its own.
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