Until the day of March 11th 2011, all the photos we have here today were in people’s homes.

After the earthquake hit, a massive tsunami swept away houses, and everything that was inside them. Coastal towns were buried in rubble. Cars, clothes, refrigerators, photo albums: everything was swallowed up and turned to waste as people stood speechless.

As the search for survivors ended and attention turned to the clean up mission, Self-Defense forces, firemen, and policemen who were in Tohoku to help survivors began to pick up photos they found in the mud, and to store them in an elementary school gymnasium. They were not asked to do it, nor did they have a clear sense of their objective. Perhaps they were just desperate to find something in of the rubble that could be saved. Over time, the gymnasium began to fill up with salvaged photographs.

Two months after the earthquake hit, a group called the “Memory Salvage Project” began to sort out the photos and prepare them for return to their owners.
The images were cleaned and digitized by volunteers who came from Tokyo and other parts of Japan.

The images varied in condition, from relatively clean to damaged beyond recognition. Some of the photographs you see here were so badly eroded by bacteria that they could not be cleaned, and therefore could not be returned. But each of these images, kept in a drawers or cabinet, was someone’s treasured memory until that fateful day.

We all take photographs. A few special ones are cherished, and the rest forgotten. We take pictures when we are having fun, when we want immortalize a moment shared with another person. The photographs you see here were also taken under those circumstances. The depth of emotion might vary from snap to snap, but each one captures a point in time that somebody wanted to keep.

What are we supposed to feel and think when we look at these pictures?
Should we be happy that they were found at all, or sad that they will never be returned to their owners? Or should we simply mourn for the dead? The more I struggle to find answers, the more missing pieces I seem to find.

But without looking at the pictures, I don’t think we’ll see anything at all.

For those who are unable to come to the exhibit to purchase our posters, posters are available for purchase online. One purchase includes three posters which each have different prints of photographs and each have different information explaining about our volunteer group “Memory Salvage,” about our “Lost & Found Project,” and about Yamamoto. Please be aware that there is a shipping fee.

“The Project Salvage Memory” was started by a team of young researchers from The Japan Society for Socio-Information Studies, who felt the need to return the photographs which were swept by the tsunami to their owners.
Everyone who is involved in this project is a volunteer.

We are trying to return a few hundred thousands of photographs which were damaged by the tsunami by sweeping the dirt off, rinsing with water and reproducing them in the digital format.

The people who were working in the early stage of the project were professors, college students and volunteers, but as the project became known through twitter and blogs,
many people who specialize in photography, professional photographers, and private companies from various fields started to join the project.

The cleaning process involves the following steps.
1) Sweeping dirt off and rinsing photographs with water
2) Numbering
3) Reproduce the photographs in the digital format
4) Find their owners by using index files and the search system

More than 500 people volunteered for this project, and 680 photo albums and 12,000 photographs have been returned to their owners by using the data which took 3 months to build.

As of November 2011, we are continuing to look for owners of the digitized photographs.

Yamamoto is a town in Miyagi prefecture, Japan.
Strawberries, apples, and surf-clams are noted specialties of Yamamoto.
The western part of the town is a mountainous region, and the eastern part is a lowland facing the ocean. The scenery of Yamamoto was beautiful with farms and rice fields.

50% of the town was flooded when the tsunami came after the earthquake hit.
The tsunami not only swept the harbor away, but also many houses, cars, trains,
as well as people. 614 people died out of the town’s population of 16,700,
4 still missing, and 2,209 buildings were completely destroyed, 1,062 buildings half destroyed, and 1,110 buildings were partially destroyed.

I’ve come to realize that just telling the facts in words are not enough.
Numbers do not tell what it is like to lose their loved ones all of a sudden,
and not being able to see them again to tell a joke or even to apologize or
just to say thank you anymore.

There are still 1,000 families who lost their homes and still having to live in temporary shelters today.