The first entry is by Ryo Sato, a basketball player who was in the second grade at Kurosawajiri Kita High School, Kitakami City, Iwate Prefecture. (The two other essays will appear on Wednesday and Friday.)

Sato’s Essay

“Ittekimasu.” [I’m going to school.] After I said that, I got out of the car. On March 11, we still had snow on the ground in Kitakami. I normally ride my bicycle to school, but my father had been driving me to school as a favor. I repeated this casual greeting as usual, but who would have thought that it was going to be the last words I would say to my father?

That afternoon, an enormous earthquake hit northeastern Japan. We were in the middle of class. We hid under our desks. After a long, fearful time, we came out from under our desks and evacuated outside. My classmates, teammates from the basketball club and I rejoiced and relieved that we were safe. But soon, I started worrying about my family. I checked my cellphone. There were text messages from my mother and father. I was relieved. I wrote back that I was safe, too.

But after I got home, I saw that the inside of our house was in an indescribable condition. Almost everything was scattered on the floor. I was very shocked at what I saw. But when I saw a picture of the tsunami hitting the coastline on my cellphone, the rooms in my house looked calmer.

I started putting things away with my mother. My father didn’t come home. He went to the coast for his business. But we had received a text message from my father the night after the earthquake so we believed that he must be at an evacuation center. We didn’t worry that much about him even though the phone line was out. Late at night two days after the earthquake, the electricity came back on. We could watch TV so we were able to collect information about evacuation centers. However, we couldn’t find my father’s name on the lists of people at the evacuation centers.