Ruiko Sasahara can never forget the sight of a little girl lying in a morgue after the tsunami five years ago. The 43-year-old mother of two is a nokanshi (undertaker) from Kitakami, Iwate Prefecture. She prepares corpses for cremation. Sasahara was confident she could restore the ...

Life can be bleak for the people still living in temporary accommodations nearly three years after the Great East Japan Earthquake, but pets have been a great help for some. Prefectural governments were initially wary that allowing pets in temporary compounds could stoke complaints, but ...

Yoshi Tabata, 88, has been using handmade picture cards for more than 30 years to recount her experience of surviving powerful 1933 tsunami that hit the Sanriku coast in the Tohoku region. Tabata wrote the story titled "Tsunami" and drew 10 picture cards for it ...

When the catastrophic earthquake of March 11, 2011, struck the Tohoku region, Makoto Yanagisawa was researching stem cells at a university laboratory in the United States. "I was thinking of returning (to Japan) someday, but decided to do so sooner after I kept seeing TV ...

Seiichi Hirabayashi, 59, a drug store clerk in Nichinan, Miyazaki Prefecture, underwent an operation in April 2006 to remove epithelial cancer in his mouth, transplanting flesh and skin from his chest to his left cheek. The patched skin formed a ringlike shape measuring 5 cm ...