Kenshi Yamamoto, a 20-year-old university student from Toyohashi, Aichi Prefecture, made a 1,746 kilometer round-trip bicycle journey earlier this month to Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, to challenge post-disaster media coverage that he believes focuses excessively on depressing news.
Yamamoto visited the Tohoku region three times while in high school as a volunteer in the wake of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake disaster, in which Kesennuma was hit hard by tsunami.
A second-year student at Nagoya University of Foreign Studies, he returned on Aug. 15 — sporting a new suntan — to Toyohashi Park in the city of Toyohashi, which had been his point of departure on Aug. 1, with a notebook filled with messages of hope from disaster victims.
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