Photo: Associated Press
Japan tsunami survivor Hiromitsu Shinkawa found 10 miles out at sea
Photo: REUTERS/Yomiuri Shimbun
*Miracles in Japan: Four-Month Old Baby, 70-Year Old Woman Found Alive
A 60-year-old man has been found on the roof of his floating house nearly 10 miles out at sea, two days after the tsunami that devastated the north-east coast of Japan.
Hiromitsu Shinkawa must have resigned himself to his fate when he was swept away by the retreating tsunami that roared ashore in his home town of Minami Soma in Fukushima prefecture.
As the wave approached, Shinkawa took the fateful decision to return home to collect belongings. Minutes later he was out at sea clinging to a piece of the roof from his own home.
Incredibly, he was spotted by a maritime self-defence force destroyer taking part in the rescue effort as he clung to the wreckage with one hand and waved a self-made red flag with the other. He had been at sea for two days.
*
Amid the silent corpses a baby cried out – and Japan met its tiniest miracle.
On March 14 soldiers from the Japanese Defense Force were going door-to-door, pulling bodies from homes flattened by the earthquake and tsunami in Ishinomaki City, a coastal town northeast of Senda. More accustomed to the crunching of rubble and the sloshing of mud than to the sound of life, they dismissed the baby’s cry as a mistake. Until they heard it again. (See 7 ways to help earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan.)
They made their way to the pile of debris, and carefully removed fragments of wood and slate, shattered glass and rock.
And then they saw her: a four-month old baby girl in a pink woolen bear suit.
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GHA!
😉