IWAKI, Fukushima -- Each stride seemed to be taken with great care. As Jun Izumita ran his leg of the Tokyo Olympics torch relay, he carried a deep pain in his heart that has lingered over the 10 years that have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake.
The 61-year-old Izumita, who completed his relay run Thursday in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, was vice-principal of Omika Elementary School in Minami-Soma in the prefecture when the earthquake and subsequent tsunami struck on March 11, 2011.
When the first huge tremor subsided, a group of students left the school, located on high ground, and headed home. Five of them never made it; four were killed by the tsunami, and another one remains missing.
"I should have stopped them, even if I had to force them," Izumita says with a regret that he harbors to this day. He carries a pocket notebook in which their names are inscribed, and apologizes to them repeatedly, "I'm sorry I was not able to protect you."
Izumita applied to become a torch relay runner in 2019, when he was the principal of Futaba Kita Elementary School. The entire Fukushima Prefecture town of Futaba had been evacuated in the wake of the resulting nuclear disaster, and the school was relocated to a makeshift building in Iwaki.
Izumita said he wanted to convey to the students at Futaba Kita the importance of having a dream. When he was one of the lucky ones selected, he and the students celebrated by making replica torches out of paper.
Since reaching mandatory retirement age last year, he has kept busy as a storyteller at the Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum in Futaba. When the prefecture approached him about the job, he hesitated at first, thinking, "Is it alright for someone like me who could not protect children to do this?"
He subsequently accepted the offer, noting, "There are surely some things that only I can tell about."
For his relay run, he quietly slipped two items into his pocket -- a photo of the notebook with the five students' names, and a cell phone containing commemorative photos with students of Futaba Kita Elementary School.
"I imagined that I was running with the children who died in the disaster," Izumita said placidly after finishing his run. "I also think the children of Futaba, who are still living as evacuees, got the message that something good will happen if you keep on having a dream,"
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