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Moving video commemorates anniversary of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan

Oona McGee Mar 6, 2018
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The tear-jerking video encourages viewers to “Search for 3.11” on the anniversary to help support reconstruction in the region.

Ever since Japan’s Tohoku region was devastated by the effects of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in 2011, support for people in the area has never waned, and one Japanese company in particular has been leading the way in recent years with an annual campaign to help generate donations.

Called “Search for 3.11“, the initiative from Yahoo! Japan encourages Internet users to type “3.11” into their search engine on 11 March. For every person who does this, Yahoo! Japan will donate 10 yen (US$0.09) to Tohoku’s Recovery Support Organisation.

In 2014, when the campaign first began, support for the initiative exceeded all expectations, with Yahoo! donating a total of 25,683,250 yen (approximately US $216,000) to charitable organisations.

To help raise awareness about the funding initiative this year, Yahoo! Japan has released a moving video that looks at what might have happened if 11 March 2011 had been an ordinary day.

▼ Click on the closed captions button to enable Japanese subtitles,
and settings to automatically translate into your chosen language.
(Alternatively, scroll down for human-generated English translation below video)

While the automatic translate option for the video does a good job of translating the voiceover into English, the more poetic nuances of the Japanese voiceover in the video can be translated as:

If 11 March 2011 had been an ordinary day, there wouldn’t have been such sorrow. There wouldn’t have been so many tears.

If 11 March 2011 had been an ordinary day, those close to us wouldn’t have been treasured so much. Ordinary days wouldn’t be this precious.

The local images and the smiles that appear in the video tug at the heart-strings, as the life-changing events from 2011 present a new perspective on life that’s both heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time.

As Tohoku and its residents look towards a brighter future, people around the world can lend their support by heading over to the Yahoo! Japan search engine page and searching for “3.11” between between midnight and 11:59 p.m. JST on March 11. Donations will be given per user, as opposed to per search, so just one search will send some yen to help people in the affected regions.

And if you’re donating, Yahoo! suggests spending a moment online scanning through the search results and reading related information about the event, so that even now, seven years on, that day will never be forgotten.

Source: Net Lab
Images: YouTube/YahooSearchJP