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 in 1979 to teach her grandchildren a local lesson for disaster prevention called "inochi tendenko" (self-preservation) that has been handed down in the tsunami-prone region.

The saying means that when an earthquake or tsunami comes, each person must run away to safety and not go back to save someone else, even if it is a family member.