At 2:46 p.m. Sunday, March 11, my family and I joined millions of Japanese standing silently at a Buddhist temple or a Shinto shrine. With heads bowed, we remembered the events of one year earlier, when our house swayed for nearly three minutes and the power died. In the Tohoku region, several hundred kilometers north, waves engulfed entire towns and two nuclear power plants. We relived the sorrow over the 19,000 lives lost in the Great East Japan Earthquake, as the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami are known here.