On a chilly weekend morning last month, Yasukatsu Miura, 74, is bundled in a down jacket and wool beanie as he watches TV in his old two-story wooden house in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, cold air entering through gaps in the front door.

Nearly five years have passed since towering tsunami ravaged the first floor of his house, but broken outer walls and torn wallpaper remain as reminders of the devastation.

Following the March 11, 2011, disasters, pensioner Miura repaired the house as much as possible with the ¥1.3 million in subsidies he received from the municipal government under an emergency support program to mend damaged homes.

But the amount was far from enough to fix everything, so damage remains five years since the waves hit.

"If I had money, I would repair the wall first. . . . But I'm living off a pension and it's just about enough to feed myself," the small-statured Miura said.

The former carpenter said that with a pension of less than ¥80,000 per month, he is also providing financial support to a disabled son who moved in when he lost his job after 3/11. After paying utility bills and medical fees, he can barely make ends meet, he said.

Given his age, Miura was not able to borrow money from a bank to patch up his sliding entrance doors, so he could only afford to repair half.

Even if he wanted to move into temporary housing, Miura does not qualify as a tenant because of the subsidies he received to repair his badly damaged house.

Miura is a prime example of the bleak reality faced by many disaster survivors still struggling five years after a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami took the lives of more than 19,000 people.

Since the disaster struck, the Tohoku coast has seen drastic changes. A massive injection of public money has led to the construction of roads and ports, and a controversial project comprising a total 400 km of seawalls being built along the shores of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures. Many survivors who lost homes have also left prefabricated temporary housing and moved into private or public permanent houses.

But there are many others who fall through the cracks of the system, including Miura.

Although there are no official figures available, the Ishinomaki-based volunteer group Team Ohkan estimates that about 12,000 households in the city live in severely damaged dwellings.

"The reality is there are still so many issues remaining even after five years," said Kenya Ito, head of Team Ohkan who has been supporting people living in damaged homes in Ishinomaki since March 2011.

On Jan. 22, during a keynote policy speech in the Diet, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he could "now see bright sunlight," referring to the state of Tohoku's reconstructionand claimed the recovery of livelihoods was "fully underway and this recovery will enter a new stage."

But the reality is far from bright.

Even those who were fortunate enough to fully renovate or build a new house in their hometowns are facing disappearing communities as the catastrophe led many survivors to move away.

Like many remote towns and villages across Japan, those coastal communities were already experiencing graying, shrinking populations even before 3/11. The catastrophe only moved the clock forward.

A census conducted last October showed the population had shrunk 3.8 percent in Iwate, 0.6 percent in Miyagi and 5.7 percent in Fukushima over the past five years.

The decline was much higher in tsunami-ravaged coastal areas. Ishinomaki, one of the hardest-hit cities in Miyagi, saw its population shrink by 8.45 percent to 147,236, from 160,826 in 2010.

When examined further, declines were far more acute in coastal parts of the city, such as a 74.5 percent drop in the Ogatsu district and a 43.3 percent fall on the Oshika Peninsula.

On a recent weekend afternoon in the fishing town of Ogatsu, the streets were deserted and the only people visiting the district's temporary shopping area were government officials.

Masahiko Ueyama, 46, who runs an eatery in the temporary shopping area, said he rarely received visitors these days.

"We had only one customer yesterday," Ueyama said.

"Many tourists and volunteer staff came here in the first year after the disaster. I hoped that trend would continue. But what happened was people stopped coming, and we've been losing money."

Along the Tohoku coast, the 400 km of seawalls are being built to protect residents in case monster tsunami strike again.

But the project, which is reportedly costing about ¥1 trillion in public money, is universally unpopular among local residents, who say the wall will only block the view of the ocean. With or without a seawall, the most important way to escape tsunami is to get to higher ground, they say.

In Ogatsu, the construction of a 9.7-meter-tall seawall is scheduled to start this month in areas designated as a zone where officials have banned the building of new homes.

"Why do we need such gigantic walls in areas where people can't live? Who are they going to protect?" Ueyama said. "Those seawalls will cover the view of the ocean necessary for our daily lives, because we make many fishing decisions by looking at the condition of the sea."

On Ishinomaki's Oshika Peninsula, Tsuyoshi Koya, 87, the leader of a small fishing community in the Momonoura district, said the hamlet was on the verge of disappearing.

"I thought people would come back to Momonoura, so I renovated my house and returned here in August 2011," said Koya, who now lives alone in one of the three houses that survived the tsunami. "But in the end, nobody came back."

After heated debate, residents of Momonoura decided to relocate to higher ground under the government's reconstruction program. But as it took much longer than expected, most left the town for good and migrated to larger cities, including Sendai.

Out of the 65 households, or about 150 residents, only five households, or six people, moved to higher ground. Among them, five residents are aged over 65, Koya said.

"If things . . . continue like this, the community will be shuttered 10 years from now. There will be no one left here, and I certainly won't be alive," Koya said.

In a bid to revive the deserted village, local oystermen who left the community set up a company in Momonoura in October 2012 with Sendai-based wholesaler Sendai Suisan and about ¥400 million in state subsidies.

The enterprise started with 15 local oystermen but now employs 44 people, including young fishermen in their 20s and 30s who hail from other prefectures, including Tokyo and Chiba, leader Katsuyuki Oyama, 69, said.

Oyama hopes the young employees eventually move to Momonoura, get married and have children. But things are not that easy.

The newcomers do not qualify to build houses on higher ground as the area is reserved for disaster survivors only. The former residential areas in Momonoura are now designated no-housing zones, as they are likely to be flooded if killer tsunami hit the region again.

"Even if young folk come to work in Momonoura, they can't place down roots in the village. Because of that, I think we have yet to make a true step toward revitalization," Oyama said.

"This is our hometown, so we want to bring the village back to its former state. But reconstruction of the fishing village will be difficult unless existing regulations are relaxed."