Keimei-maru

Before the Great East Japan Earthquake, Ms. Sakiko Miura ran “Keimei-maru,” a farmer’s & fisherman’s restaurant at Hadenya in the Togura district where she was born and raised. The restaurant served home-made dishes using a wealth of seasonal food collected from the nearby sea and mountains. “Keimei-maru” was the name of the Miura Family’s fishing vessel. In Japanese writing, “Keimei-maru” is composed of three Chinese characters – “kei,” “mei” and “maru” where “kei” originates from one of the two kanji characters that represent her husband’s name “Keigo.” As a decoration and a restaurant sign, she used three large glass floats used in fishing to mark the three characters of “kei,” “mei,” and “maru” with one character on each float.

However, the massive tsunami following the Great East Japan Earthquake washed away and destroyed her restaurant full of sweet memories as well as the house that she and her husband had worked hard to build on their own. On the evening of March 11 that year, she saw her hometown changed drastically without any trace left of its former landscape.

When a year and three months had passed after the Earthquake, one of the fish farm floats decorating the entrance of the restaurant was miraculously found in Alaska and returned to her. It was the float with “kei” written on its surface.

Sakiko made up her mind to re-establish the “Keimei-maru.” She hoped to build a relaxing place where people of the community could spend time with their children and grandchildren who came to visit, and a “gathering place” for volunteers who had come to help the townspeople who had lost everything after the disaster. On April 17 2013, she reopened a spacious reservations-only restaurant on the site of her former home that faces the sea of Togura. Visitors not only enjoy her home-made dishes made from plenty of local food but also are able to listen to her story of the disaster over coffee.