“The tsunami stones are warnings across generations, telling descendants to avoid the same suffering of their ancestors,” Itoko Kitahara, a historian of natural disasters at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, told Fackler in 2011 after an earthquake killed nearly 29,000 people. “Some places heeded these lessons of the past, but many didn’t,” Kitahara told Fackler.
Danny Lewis
The Long View