By Danielle Mages Amato

On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake struck Japan, originating 80 miles off the coast of the city of Sendai. The largest earthquake in Japan’s recorded history, the Tōhoku quake (sometimes also called the Great East Japan Earthquake) generated massive tsunami waves that reached up to 130 feet high, causing widespread devastation across a wide swath of Japan’s eastern coast. The tsunami also caused the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl: three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant melted down, releasing radioactive material and displacing over 150,000 people. In total, more than 450,000 lost their homes in the disaster. Almost 20,000 people were killed, and over 2,500 are still missing.

The town of Ishinomaki, where Empty Ride takes place, was among those most severely affected by the tsunami. Approximately 46 percent of the city was flooded by the waves, and 77 percent of houses were demolished. An entire elementary school was destroyed in the disaster; only four students and one teacher survived. The lives and livelihoods of all the residents of Ishinomaki were irrevocably transformed.