Arahama Elementary School

photo by 立石知己 · CC BY-SA 4.0

The water reached the second floor: 320 people stayed on the roof for twenty-seven hours.

You go in through what was once a school like any other, and you climb. On the second floor the water came inside, and the walls have stayed as it left them: plaster torn off, window frames bent inwards. On the fourth floor a room shows a seventeen-minute film, ‘The twenty-seven hours of Arahama school’. From the roof you can see the sea, and you understand how close it is.

On 11 March 2011 this was the elementary school of Arahama, a village of about 800 families and 2,200 inhabitants on the Sendai coast, and 91 children studied here. When the tsunami came, 320 pupils, teachers and residents in all climbed onto the roof: the wave reached the second floor and the building was cut off by the water for twenty-seven hours, until everyone had been rescued. Arahama has not been rebuilt. The school has been preserved as it was and opened to the public as a 震災遺構, a ‘disaster ruin’: a building left standing, broken, so that it tells what happened.

ℹ️ Free admission. Open from 9:30 to 16:00, and from 9:30 to 17:00 in July and August. Closed on Mondays and on the fourth Thursday of the month (if these fall on a public holiday it stays open) and from 29 December to 4 January. By public transport you take the metro, Tōzai Line, to Arai Station, and from there a municipal bus that ends its route in front of the school in a quarter of an hour. There is a car park, for coaches too. You go up to the roof on foot.

🚉 震災遺構仙台市立荒浜小学校前 · 1 min walk

Sources: arahama.sendai311-memorial.jp · tohokukanko.jp

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