The Seed of Hope in the Heart by Teiichi Sato (Teiichi Sato)
“As long as I have the seed of hope in my heart, I can live anywhere. No matter what comes up, no matter how hard it gets along the way, we have to move forward for the future. For this reason, even if your hometown has been utterly destroyed by an unexpected tragic event, or something similar has happened to you, even if you have lost everything, have strong souls, look up at the sky, and move forward. Then, you really sow the seed of hope in your heart. Eventually, you can reap happiness…”
March 11, 2011, a date that will forever be etched in the Japanese psyche. At 2:46pm on Friday, an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0 hit the Tohoku region of Japan, the most powerful quake to hit Japan and the fourth largest quake in the world. The quake caused a tsunami which wiped out many coastal towns and caused the accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.
Teiichi Sato is an ordinary man. He owns and runs a seed shop in Rikuzentakata City, a small town in Iwate Prefecture. He was a successful business one day and in one moment, he lost everything - his shop, his house, official documents and more. Sato gives a first-hand account of that fateful day.
Sato states the purpose of The Seed of Hope in the Heart is “as a record of the tsunami for posterity, for the repose of the souls of the victims, to prepare for next disaster, as a survivor’s Bible, and as a small token of my gratitude for the kind support of from everyone, I have written this book while rebuilding my seed shop.”
This is the fifth and final edition to date of Sato’s self-published book which he decided to write entirely in English. Sato tells his story in English because he says, “If I wrote this Japanese, it would be too sad. I would be so emotional that my sentences would be ambiguous”. Sato tells us that by writing in English he could suppress his feelings and keep his mind busy by looking up the meanings of words he doesn’t know.
He also wanted to write in English to tell his story to people overseas. He wanted to share his story about being a victim. He “wanted to talk about my experience of that awful tsunami”. It’s a harrowing account of one man’s experience of being a self-employed and fairly successful business with his own seed shop reduced to being a beggar. He was left with virtually nothing.
But Sato’s story doesn’t stop there. He discusses what he did and what he accomplished on his long road to recovery from wanting to die and ending his life to starting over. He discusses the Kesendamashi or spirit of the Kesen people and how he overcame obstacles and government red-tape to re-open his store. The most amazing story is how Sato manages to re-open his shop in the tsunami-affected area a mere six months after the disaster. This is a story about the human spirit of survival .~Ernie Hoyt