When a tsunami is coming, don't try to look for your relatives. Don't try to help the elderly, your grandparents or your parents. Don't try to call your wife or your husband. Don't think about your children or your grandchildren. Run. Save yourself.
Such is the rubric known in Japan as tendenko — a teaching that saved an untold number of lives when massive tsunamis hit the Sanriku coast of the nation's northeastern Tohoku region in 1933, in 1960 — and again on March 11, 2011, following the magnitude-9 Great East Japan Earthquake.
It is a teaching that, to a large extent, owes its currently high degree of recognition to the tireless efforts of one Fumio Yamashita, a Sanriku native who survived all three of those disasters, but who succumbed last week to pneumonia at age 87.