Rikuzentakata in southern Iwate Prefecture was one of the hardest hit by the 2011 tsunami. Masahiro Hasunuma captures the post-earthquake landscape of Rikunzentakata (Takata for short) via delicate hand-drawn animations inspired by his interactions with locals and their relationship to sites in the town. His short, impressionistic animations take something as overwhelming as a major disaster and processes it through small and beautiful phenomena: in Rikuzentakata animation 2019, a ginger cat follows a group of school children in front of the former school building, with snow beginning to fall as it did on the evening of March 11th. ‘The former [pre-tsunami] cityscape of Rikuzentakata is no longer there’, Hasunuma wrote at the time of his 2019 residency, ‘nor is the new cityscape that awaits construction’. The construction project adds 10-12 metres of ‘tsunami-proof’ high ground to the former shopping area—seen in the bare hills in Hasunuma’s images. Many of Tōhoku’s tsunami-hit towns are undergoing similar defensive re-groundings, but Takata’s is by far the largest.

Rikuzentakata in southern Iwate Prefecture was one of the hardest hit by the 2011 tsunami. Masahiro Hasunuma captures the post-earthquake landscape of Rikunzentakata (Takata for short) via delicate hand-drawn animations inspired by his interactions with locals and their relationship to sites in the town. His short, impressionistic animations take something as overwhelming as a major disaster and processes it through small and beautiful phenomena: in Rikuzentakata animation 2019, a ginger cat follows a group of school children in front of the former school building, with snow beginning to fall as it did on the evening of March 11th. ‘The former [pre-tsunami] cityscape of Rikuzentakata is no longer there’, Hasunuma wrote at the time of his 2019 residency, ‘nor is the new cityscape that awaits construction’. The construction project adds 10-12 metres of ‘tsunami-proof’ high ground to the former shopping area—seen in the bare hills in Hasunuma’s images. Many of Tōhoku’s tsunami-hit towns are undergoing similar defensive re-groundings, but Takata’s is by far the largest.