It was 2:46 p.m. on a Friday when the walls around Tomoyuki Murakami started to shake. He scrambled for cover inside the city hall in Rikuzentakata, a fishing village along Japan’s mountainous northeast coast. Murakami, a city official, had never felt an earthquake so strong. Plaster cracked. Picture frames fell and shattered. The floor sank in spots. The shaking lasted six minutes.
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“I thought I was going to die in that city hall,” Murakami said recently, through an interpreter.
In Murakami’s office was a picture of the Little Leaguers he coached, a team photo taken the previous year at the baseball field by the water’s edge, flanked by a forest of
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