Takeshi Yokoyama, 70, and his wife Umeko, 64, walk under a ship that rests on top of where their house used to be in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, on Tuesday.
© Japan TodayRemains of the day
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Takeshi Yokoyama, 70, and his wife Umeko, 64, walk under a ship that rests on top of where their house used to be in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, on Tuesday.
© Japan Today
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ExportExpert
Amazing pic and how this thing ended being the right way up still.
jj1980
Yes it is. Although it must be mind blowing to see a huge ship sitting where your kitchen table once was, that they seemed to have forgotten how dangerous that area must be. I'm not so sure I would be getting that close.
kwatt
Tsunami must have been 100 feet high there.
888naff
How are they going to pay to rebuild their houses? (..after the ship has been moved.) Presumably at the same spots where they own the land.
Will they redesign some town layouts?
jianadaren
I wonder how many folks will want to rebuild in the worst hit areas?
RobbieFowler
emotional attachments to the area for many will want them to rebuild on the same spots but is it wise for anyone to do that? or would they hope that lightning doesnt strike twice?...............tricky one..
gaijintraveller
There house may have been insured for earthquake damage. I don't know whether that includes tsunami damage. Insurance companies often use escape clauses to avoid paying.
tclh
Just wonder that the cost of removing that huge ship belongs to whom; the owner ,government or both?
haruka
Video footage here in Japan was unbelievable with very few repeat at all...not like cn junk with over repeat and kill around the world. Never show the whole truth.
asianTourist
Water power has been exploited to power human-being life and activities for centuries; but we also witness how catastrophic it can change our destiny ... hydrothermal electric power plan, dam and water-steam propelling ships ... more. Drifted giant ship was the symbolic image of the past and challenge underneath ruined remains ... Japan like this senior couple will soon rebuild their lives with admirable strong will.
Fadamor
We had to live with 15-minute loops of the English-feed of NHK news on our cable network. After the fourth-time through where the financial news reporter said "the markets have been open for 9 minutes now...", I turned it off for the day. Instead of it being news, it was just a snapshot of what happened during the 15-minutes it was recorded.
I can't imagine owning a house near the shore in Japan and not having earthquake AND tsunami insurance. Of course, the insurance companies probably price it so that only the independantly wealthy can afford it.
In the picture, I can't believe the mooring lines are intact.
Sarge
Great Scott!
sqwak
From my experience with a property (not in Japan) for which I had arranged an insurance for, one of the clauses stated that "acts of God" or riots, etc are not covered. By "acts of God" I deem it to mean natural disasters such as earthquake, tsunamis, landslides, etc? This means that even if one wants to, there is no insurance cover available at all for such calamties.
Where Japan is concerned, it being a quake prone country, I wonder whether it's insurance companies apply such a clause in their house insurance, or that one can get a separate cover for natural disasters.
jigjapan
very strong and as high as 1-2 story building tsunami. imagine how it float the ship.
TokyoTanuki
I have house insurance from SECOM here in Tokyo. Earthquake insurance covers 50% of what it cost me to have it built - i.e. I have to pay half of the cost before I get a penny from SECOM. It is fully insured for other forms of damage such as fire, land subsiding, flooding (not tsunami) etc..
So you can get insurance to cover quakes, but it has the worst terms of all of the events covered by my insurance at least. If reparing the damage costs less than half the cost of originally building the house, I may as well have no insurance.
shirokuma2011
Incredible photograph.
Generally, the word out is that the insurance companies are going to be (shock!) quite liberal about interpreting the terms of homeowners' contracts in this particular disaster. It might not mean much, though, since such coverage is generally limited to the cost of rebuilding on the same site, and no one knows how many people are going to want to do that...
I guess the moderators are pau hana for the night... :-/
ca1ic0cat
Since a tsunami and earthquake of this magnitude are rather rare and given the lack of land suitable for building on in Japan I'm guessing that the towns will be rebuilt the same way Tokyo was after 1923. Still, I guess I'm not sure what I would do if I saw a ship sitting where my house used to be. It's an amazing and saddening photo.
nimbus
For those who are interested. There are a couple pictures of this ship from other angles on MSN's PhotoBlog and I think they give the viewer a better idea of the size of this ship.
The name of the PhotoBlog is:
"Panoramic image of the destruction in Kesennuma, Japan"
haoushokuhaki
That's an amazing picture. The images I've seen with people sifting through the remains of their houses (some which have been carried several meters away) make me sad. However, I couldn't help but feel a bit of happiness seeing some of them find things such as pictures. The military has been doing such a wonderful job of sifting through the rubble and collecting valuables and then setting them aside for the victims to come and collect them.
Patricia Yarrow
Yikes! This picture says it all. No way I'd rebuild my kitchen table on that spot again.