"Come on up," said a man wearing dark-blue overalls and a baseball cap. "Come up and see the view."

Anywhere else in Japan and it would have been a welcome invitation. In the tiny village of Unosumai in Iwate Prefecture, however, it was made and accepted with the understanding that "the view" would likely be sickening.

So, on an overcast day in late May, myself and two colleagues followed Yoshinobu Ryokawa into the smashed entrance of his three-story concrete building and made our way up to the roof. We were in the middle of a reporting trip to areas of the Tohoku region of Honshu hard hit by the magnitude-9 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and tsunami of March 11, and Ryokawa had called out to us as we negotiated the rubble of what had been Unosumai Station, about 100 meters away.