Out of business for 2 years

When did you start considering the reopening of the workshop?

We couldn’t think about anything other than confirming our trainees’ safety in the days following the disaster. We moved from there to think about the future of the trainees. We had to face our challenge of “living together” and it was not yet time to talk about reopening the facility. But of course we weren’t giving up. None of us thought about leaving things we had built in the past.

You can’t abandon your trainees, right?

I believe that not doing what we can do constitutes abandoning the trainees. Our continuous efforts to do what we could have led us to where we are now, I think.

I heard that it took two years before you reopened the workshop.

Yes. The experiences in that disaster differ person to person, and it is not possible to summarize them into one story, right? It took two years for us to reopen our workshop, but yet it was the first building that had been built in Onagawa after the disaster. That tells how badly the town was damaged.