Rikuzentakata

He hoped to turn Rikuzentakata's beachfront into a popular resort and retirement area to attract more of Japan's affluent older residents.

His wife was missing, but his sons were alive, and he wanted to be sure Rikuzentakata would still be there when they got older.

At dawn, Rikuzentakata began to assess the staggering human toll. It was one of the worst-hit Japanese cities.

Rikuzentakata, on Japan's northeast coast about 250 miles from Tokyo, was one of the communities hardest hit by the March 11 disaster.

And he wants Rikuzentakata's children to have the chance at least to know the richness of their community's past.

Mr. Suto, who is staying with his wife and two children at an emergency shelter in a school gym, said he'd like to remain in Rikuzentakata.

Yuma Takahashi, 17, a high-school student from Rikuzentakata, said some of his friends are considering enlisting after they graduate.

Amid the debris in Rikuzentakata, a 62-year-old woman wearing trainers was prodding around for her 94-year-old aunt.

As the immediate tasks of emergency assistance started to fade, the scale of challenges facing Rikuzentakata became painfully apparent.

On March 26, construction finally began, making Rikuzentakata one of the first cities to start building temporary homes.

The prefabricated metal boxes with wooden floors were put up on the hillside near the devastated town of Rikuzentakata.

All the schools in Rikuzentakata are slated to open on April 20, about two weeks later than usual, but that plan has challenges.

Japanese military walk by a body lying in the rubble of a village destroyed, March 15, 2011 in Rikuzentakata, Miyagi province.

The group is working on a project to archive photos along with tsunami-related information from Rikuzentakata and nearby towns.

"I saw the dust rising up, " she recalled days later, standing outside a shelter in the shattered coastal city of Rikuzentakata.

Hiromaru Sasazaki was at his fishing-tackle shop by the beach in Rikuzentakata when the the tsunami warning sounded.

'First we have to find and bury our dead, ' said Takeshi Kumagai, a Rikuzentakata resident.

None of this is what Mr. Toba had in mind when he came to Rikuzentakata 18 years ago.

Press reports suggest roughly half of the 23, 000 people of Rikuzentakata, in Iwate, are unaccounted for.

Still, he says he is determined to reopen, to bring the message of Rikuzentakata's past to future generations.

She is the youngest homeless resident of the Rikuzentakata Gymnasium shelter.

One is 35-year-old Takashi Sasaki, who abandoned Rikuzentakata years ago to work in Tokyo as a computer-systems engineer.

Local television here reported thatthe authorities had found 300 to 400 bodies in the town of Rikuzentakata, inIwate Prefecture.

At 2: 46, tremors from the magnitude-9 earthquake about 60 miles offshore convulsed Rikuzentakata, knocking out electricity and phones.

Rikuzentakata has been inhabited for 1, 000 years.

Rikuzentakata had more than 30, 000 residents in the late 1960s.

The people of Rikuzentakata, he says, know as a rule that a big tsunami comes every 50 years.