When Angela Ortiz describes what it felt like to return to Aomori Prefecture five days after the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, she uses words like "horror," "incredulous disbelief" and "intense curiosity."
The 36-year-old American lived in Aomori between the ages of 15 and 23, and when disaster hit the prefecture and the broader Tohoku region, she returned with her 8-year-old daughter to be with family and help with the recovery.
What she remembers most were the people she encountered, even the ones she saw fleetingly from her car window as she drove through the rubble.