As the fifth anniversary of the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami approaches, the tragic story of 74 schoolchildren and 10 teachers who drowned near Okawa Elementary School in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, continues to resonate painfully.

On a cold day last month, I prayed at an altar in front of the roped-off and damaged school building I first visited five years ago. A path now leads to a more elaborate memorial to Okawa's victims, which includes a statue of a kneeling mother cradling her child wrapped in a purplish shawl and festooned with a garland of origami cranes. She wears a woolen hat on her bowed head, eyes closed with a seraphic smile; the word komamori (protecting a child) is engraved on its base. This memorial is next to a steep, partly wooded slope that might have provided a safe haven for the children.

Takahiro Shito, one of the bereaved fathers, called me over to his car where he was standing in the frigid winds after a snowfall had blanketed the coastline, swathing the muddy work of reconstruction in shimmering white. Only four of the 78 students present at the Okawa Elementary school survived the tsunami and, according to Shito, only the kids who disobeyed their teachers' instructions and scrambled up that hill lived to tell their story of what happened on that fateful day. Shito is remarkably composed and calm in talking about the tragedy that befell his daughter Chisato, who would have now been a high school teenager with a full life ahead of her. But she will never grow up, get a job, get married and raise a family, and he will never have any grandchildren to dote on.