Town officials say they are trying to draw up plans that will entice younger residents to stay. Most of the ideas are coming from Tokyo and call for grand schemes to move coastal towns to higher ground by constructing huge platforms or shearing off nearby mountaintops — the sorts of megaprojects that Japan may no longer be able to afford.

But town officials say they are overwhelmed by more immediate demands, like relocating the 2,247 residents who still sleep on the floors of school gymnasiums and other cramped refugee centers to longer-term temporary housing, or finding the 1,044 who remain missing in this town, which had 15,239 residents before the tsunami. So far, the bodies of 680 people have been found.

Image Waves as high as 50 feet destroyed more than half of Otsuchi. Credit... The New York Times

Just cleaning up the mounds of debris left by the waves, which towered as high as 50 feet and destroyed more than half of Otsuchi’s homes and buildings, will very likely take a year. The town’s administrative functions were also crippled by the waves, which gutted the town hall and killed the mayor and some 30 town employees.

“We are far from reconstruction,” said Masaaki Tobai, 66, the vice mayor, who stepped in to lead the town and who survived by scrambling to the town hall’s roof. “Medical services, administration, education, police, fire, retail stores, hotels, fishing cooperative, farming cooperative, industry, jobs — all are gone, all washed away.”

In other hard-hit areas, particularly around the region’s main city, Sendai, there are already signs of recovery, with the cleanup well under way and full bullet train service having resumed. But more remote communities like Otsuchi, on the rugged coast further north, are falling behind.

While the shortages of food and drinking water of the first desperate weeks are over, the town remains a flattened landscape of shattered homes and crumpled vehicles, where soldiers still pull a dozen bodies or so from the wreckage every day.