The Seawall of Fudai

On March 11, 2011, a 9. 0 earthquake shattered the ocean floor off Japan's coast, unleashing tsunami waves that obliterated entire coastal towns. Over eighteen thousand people perished. But in the tiny fishing village of Fudai, in Iwate Prefecture, something remarkable happened — almost nothing. While neighboring towns were swallowed by forty-foot walls of black water, Fudai stood. The reason was a fifty-one-foot floodgate built into the hillside decades earlier by former mayor Kotaku Wamura, who had survived a tsunami as a child.…