An old phone still holds messages left behind by a little girl from Watari, Miyagi Prefecture, who lost her life in the tsunami that followed the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011.
Nearly a decade after the disaster, the little girl's mother, Hiromi Takahashi, 56, rediscovered the phone that had belonged to her daughter Hinano.
"I love you, Mommy." "On my birthday, let's put some candles on a cake and eat it." The messages left behind by Hinano, then 5, are filled with love.
She was riding in a nursery school bus when the tsunami engulfed it, claiming the lives of Hinano and seven other children and one nursery school worker.
Hinano was Takahashi's "treasure at long last," after Takahashi gave birth to her at 40. Her daughter suffered from asthma and was frequently in and out of the hospital. The family moved to Watari in 2009, just before Hinano started attending a nursery school, in the hope that the cleaner air would result in fewer asthma attacks.
Hinano was a shy girl who, whenever she was given a homemade character bento lunch, said, "It's too cute for me to eat." She was a kind child who used her first prayer of the New Year at a shrine to not ask for something for herself, but to ask that her mother be happy.
After the first earthquake struck on the day of the great disaster, she is said to have comforted the other children at the nursery school.
During interviews with The Yomiuri Shimbun last November, Takahashi recalled that she had given her daughter an old cell phone to use as a toy.
This recollection led her to find the phone and thus read the messages again.
Before bedtime, her daughter would type up the messages, sometimes asking her mother to type in a word for her. There are 15 of them.
The messages range from everyday life -- such as "Can you wake me up at 5? I'd love some fried eggs for breakfast" -- to requests for the future -- such as "Let's go play in a garden" and "Let's go to an onsen hot spring." Some messages are left incomplete as Hinano apparently fell asleep before finishing them.
"These all are proof she was once alive," Takahashi said tearfully.
"I want to live such a full life that when I meet my daughter in heaven, I can say to her, 'I was happy.'"
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