Exhibiting records from the disaster-stricken areas To make use of them in the future

Risking their lives to document the disaster sites

March 11, 2011: The Great East Japan Earthquake struck. Our museum suffered severe damage, rendering it unusable as an evacuation center. It was temporarily repurposed as a relief supply storage facility. On the night of the 15th, after the supplies were moved elsewhere, we curators gathered and decided: even if the museum never reopened, even if we lost our jobs, we would document this. It was something only we could do. Why?

First, we had prior knowledge of tsunamis. And if anyone should conduct this survey and research, it would be us, the specialists. Furthermore, we knew the town before the disaster. At the time, photographers who came from outside often stood there momentarily stunned. They frequently said they didn't know what to photograph. But we knew exactly where the damaged areas were and what had been destroyed.

Then, on the 16th, we voluntarily took our cameras and entered the disaster sites. On the 23rd, we received a special assignment from the Mayor of Kesennuma and the local Board of Education to document the disaster damage and conduct surveys in Kesennuma City and Minamisanriku Town. Our goal was to record the current state for regional reconstruction. We continued this activity for about two years, until December 31, 2012. As a result, we gathered approximately 30,000 photographs, about 250 damaged artifacts, and a vast amount of other materials, including survey records. From this collection, we have carefully selected about 500 items to present in the permanent exhibition "Records of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the History of Tsunami Disasters."

Photographer's commentary conveys the meaning behind the photos

"Unused records have no meaning" is my conviction, and I agonized over "how to convey what I want to convey." Take photos of disaster sites, for example. The information conveyed by these images is overwhelmingly greater than what humans can process. Viewed alone, they leave a uniform impression of "utter chaos." Therefore, every photo panel displays an accompanying caption written by the photographer themselves. These captions explain what the photographer sensed with their five senses, what they thought, and why they took the photo – helping viewers understand its meaning. One could even say these captions are more important than the photographs themselves.

Currently, our museum welcomes many visitors ranging from elementary school students to university students, including numerous people from overseas. Recently, we've seen an increase in visitors from areas where the Nankai Trough earthquake is anticipated.

However, our challenge is the near absence of group visits from local schools. Among children living in the same area who were not directly affected by the disaster, some have memories centered around celebrity visits and events. We want them to understand what happened in their own community, what the townspeople endured, and to apply this knowledge to future community building and their own futures.

This June, we were deeply honored to receive the 10th Nogami Hiroko Memorial Art Documentation Promotion Award from the Art Documentation Society for our exhibition. To make this exhibition accessible to people in other regions, we prepared a full set of loanable photo panels and exact replicas of disaster-affected items. We held traveling exhibitions at the Hiroshima Onomichi City Art Museum in 2014 and at the Meguro Museum of Art in Tokyo from February to March this year. We sincerely hope that many more people will see this exhibition and that it will contribute to disaster prevention and mitigation, material and psychological preparedness, and legal frameworks.