Looking past the sacred torii arch at a Shinto shrine on the hill, summer grass spreads far and wide through traces of a town engulfed by the massive quake-induced tsunami in March 2011.
Reconstruction progress appears to be painfully slow for the town of Otsuchi in Iwate Prefecture, one of the areas hit hardest by the disaster in the northeast.
Worried about the lack of a suitable study environment for children, two Tokyo-based nonprofit organizations jointly launched a program last December to provide free after-school tutorials and study space — mostly for junior high students who need to prepare for high school entrance exams.