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.
http://lostandfound311.jp/en/
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