It was 2:46 p.m. on a Friday when the walls around Tomoyuki Murakami started to shake. He scrambled for cover inside the city hall in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, a fishing hub along Japan’s mountainous northeast coast. Murakami, a city official, had never felt an earthquake so strong. The shaking lasted six minutes.
"I thought I was going to die in that city hall,” Murakami said recently through an interpreter.
In Murakami’s office was a photograph of the youth baseball team he coached, a team photo taken the previous year at the baseball field by the water’s edge. In the second row was 8-year-old Roki Sasaki, one of the youngest boys in the program. The coach had noticed Sasaki’s strong arm when playing catch, but it was not until the final scrimmage of the season that Sasaki was allowed to pitch. He struck out the side in his first inning. "That,” Murakami said, "was when I realized.”
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