15 Years On: Teacher Shares Memories of 2 Disasters with Young
Newsfrom Japan
Society
Kobe, March 9 (Jiji Press)--Koji Yamaguchi, a 38-year-old schoolteacher in Kobe, western Japan, has made it his mission to share his experiences of two catastrophes with younger generations.He grew up in Hyogo Prefecture and went on to attend university in Miyagi Prefecture, each home to communities devastated by large-scale natural disasters."I have a responsibility to speak as someone who has lived in both places," Yamaguchi says. He now passes on his memories to students who did not live through either the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake or the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.Yamaguchi currently teaches biology as well as disaster preparedness and response at Rokko Gakuin Junior and Senior High School, a private school in Kobe, capital of Hyogo. In March 2011, he was a fourth-year student at Tohoku University in Sendai, capital of Miyagi, one of the northeastern prefectures hit hardest by the Great East Japan Earthquake.On March 11, 2011, Yamaguchi was in the northern city of Sapporo, Hokkaido, to give a presentation at an academic conference when the 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck. He only felt a "slight tremor" there, but quickly understood the scale of the disaster as he watched television images of the massive tsunami surging ashore.[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]
Jiji Press
