Making Home Sweet Again: After Tsunami, a Baker Finds Purpose

By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI

RIKUZENTAKATA, Japan—Every morning, Masayuki Kimura's eyes pop open at 3 a.m., and he can't get back to sleep. It has been the same ever since the day a tsunami ripped through his hometown and upended his life.
The owner of a traditional sweets shop here, Mr. Kimura lost nearly everything when the waves swept over Rikuzentakata March 11, obliterating much of the town. All that remains of his family business—a local landmark that went back three generations—is the base of a stone wall running down into a drain overrun with weeds. Across the street is a patch of dirt where Mr. Kimura's home once stood.
"I still wake up expecting to find out this was all a bad dream," Mr. Kimura said recently.
Sleepless nights are only part of the struggle for the 54-year-old Mr. Kimura, who after the disaster faced a dilemma common across Japan's tsunami zone: whether to rebuild, or walk away and move on.
Hardly a thriving town before the tsunami, Rikuzentakata lost nearly 10% of its population in the disaster and an even greater percentage may soon leave in search of jobs, homes or medical care. About 80% of the businesses were destroyed. With neither a highway nor a bullet train running through it, and so much devastation, some residents have all but given up on the place.
Mr. Kimura had his own personal reasons to consider packing it in. Like many younger residents, he left Rikuzentakata 35 years ago for college believing it was the first step to a life as a globetrotter, only to get lured back after graduation when his parents convinced him to take over the family business. The disaster, he thought, might be a chance to start again.
But as the months went by, Mr. Kimura had an unexpected epiphany: His business, which he thought was inconsequential, mattered to a lot of people. Neighbors, even strangers, kept asking: When would he bake his sweets again? He realized maybe his life's work had meant something to the town after all—and it was part of what made it worth saving.
A stubborn determination to rebuild took hold. And it didn't let go.
Mr. Kimura woke up early on the morning of March 11 to get a head start on a busy day. He had a big order to fill—100 steaming sweet buns stuffed with red bean paste—before finishing his taxes ahead of a looming deadline.
At 2:46 p.m., the ground delivered a jolt unlike any he had ever felt. He ran from his home across the street to the store and told his 81-year-old mother and a remaining employee that a tsunami was likely on its way. The employee, Setsuko Murakami, a 25-year shop veteran, ran to an evacuation center and was never seen again.
With his mother, Mr. Kimura fled to the neighborhood's designated evacuation center—a temple atop a steep hill. His wife and son joined them there later. From the higher vantage point, he watched two giant waves thrash the shop, a sturdy stone structure that had withstood a fire and several powerful earthquakes during its eight-decade history. The third wave was the biggest, a monstrous wall of water that multiplied the force of the previous two and submerged his store. When the water receded, everything had vanished.
"The whole city got swallowed up and it looked like the end of the world," he said.
That night, Mr. Kimura was overcome by despair. He had watched the destruction of his hometown had no idea how many friends and neighbors were still alive. Not only was his shop gone, so were all his recipes and baking equipment which were customized and perfected over the years. The only thing that didn't disappear into the ocean was $370,000 worth of loans. "I figured we were finished," he said.
Mr. Kimura resigned himself to giving up. He told people he was moving to southern Japan to become an olive farmer. People laughed, but he was thinking about a chance for a fresh start. He considered another profession. He also had offers from friends to move out of Rikuzentakata and open a sweets shop in another part of Japan.
His mother, an energetic woman despite her age, spoke up. After the disaster, national broadcaster NHK went live from evacuation centers to give refugees a chance to tell friends and family they were OK. When it was Ms. Kimura's turn to speak, she had a different message: "I can't wait to make delicious sweets again. We will rebuild."
People began telling Mr. Kimura they had seen his mother on TV, and were looking forward to eating his sweets again.
There were large obstacles to consider, though. He lost a book in the shop's kitchen containing 150 recipes, some dating back to the store's opening. Backup copies were on computers that had also been washed away. Although he remembered about 30 recipes, he worried he might not be able to reproduce the taste that made his sweets so well-known.
"It's not that I don't want to do it, but it's hard to be brimming with confidence when I think about all the hurdles," he said in May. "If I was 10 years younger, I can say I'd definitely rebuild. If I was 10 years older, I'd probably pack it in. But I'm stuck in the middle."
One of his earliest memories, Mr. Kimura recalled, is the smell of sweet buns wafting from the ovens of his parents ground floor bakery up to his bedroom on the second floor.
Founded by his grandfather, Yousaku Kimura, in 1926, the Kimuraya bakery specialized in local traditional Japanese sweets, like ganzuki, a sweetened steam bread with a consistency of chewy pancakes. When he was 5 years old, Mr. Kimura remembers making the buns in the bakery with his parents and bringing them to his nursery school teachers as presents.
His grandfather, who had no sons, felt so strongly about keeping the business in the family that he adopted his wife's sister's son, Mr. Kimura's father, to take over the shop and carry on the family name.
In middle school and high school, Mr. Kimura helped out making deliveries and managing supplies. His father taught him how to make dough, like the rice flour and sugar mixture for yubeshi, a gelatinous tube-like dessert that was a house specialty. His mother taught him techniques to wrap the dough into perfect shapes.
When it came time to go to college, Mr. Kimura left Rikuzentakata for Kyoto and studied business at Doushisha University, one of the top private colleges in western Japan. He traveled the world during this time, visiting the U.S., France, Germany and Austria. In his senior year, he made it to the final round of interviews with a major advertising agency for a job in a big city or possibly abroad.
A few weeks before he was to hear about the job, he received a letter from his mother begging him to come home and give up advertising. She said his parents worked hard to build the business so they could one day pass it on to him. He felt like he had no choice.
"I thought I could go out into the world and do something bigger," he said. He returned to Rikuzentakata, but the decision gnawed at him—especially at college reunions.
"All my classmates seemed to be doing something great and here I was in the boondocks," said Mr. Kimura.
He settled into life in his hometown. At 28, he married a high-school classmate, Junko, and they had three children. It took him years to master the family recipes. He sometimes worked 16 hours a day, but barely managed to eke out a profit.
After a month in an evacuation center following the tsunami, Mr. Kimura moved his wife and middle son, 25, into a rented home in Esashi, an inland town in Iwate prefecture. (His oldest son and youngest daughter live near Tokyo.) In daily commutes to Rikuzentakata with his wife, he navigated a light blue Nissan compact—a donation from his daughter's boss—90 minutes through mountain roads. He helped distribute supplies at evacuation centers while his wife found a job as a music teacher at a Rikuzentakata school.
Mr. Kimura wore donated clothes for the first two months: faded jeans, a black Champion sweatshirt and running shoes. His graying hair sat disheveled on his head and receded slightly from his forehead, while his metal-rimmed glasses framed his droopy eyes.
One day, Mr. Kimura—known by his childhood nickname of "Ma-chan"—was handing out desserts sent by his former college classmates from famous sweet shops across Japan.
An elderly woman, a regular customer at Kimuraya, said she was grateful for the gift, but she yearned to eat his sweets again. Others came forward saying the same thing.
"I realized it's not important whether the sweets are famous or not. People are longing for our local taste," he said.
Around mid-May, he began looking more seriously into rebuilding. Mr. Kimura met with bankers who agreed to suspend his loan repayment for one year and possibly extend a second loan for rebuilding. A government agency offered to build temporary stores and provide two years' worth of rent if the business owners paid utility bills and found a plot of land. Mr. Kimura found an empty field belonging to his cousin, alongside a road that has now become one of Rikuzentakata's main thoroughfares.
Mr. Kimura still needed equipment, which he estimated would cost about $65,000. After weeks of fruitless searching, he got a call from a supplier who said a pastry shop in neighboring Akita prefecture was closing.
In late July, Mr. Kimura drove 2½ hours to see the 67-year-old shop owner, Yukimitsu Tsuruoka, who was shutting his doors because his wife was sick. Mr. Kimura inspected the oven—a model similar to the one he used to have—as well as rolling tables, a mixer and a display case.
Mr. Tsuruoka said Mr. Kimura could take it all for ¥600,000, or $7,800. It was a huge discount but Mr. Tsuruoka said he was happy to play a part in helping Mr. Kimura. Over a Japanese box lunch, Mr. Tsuruoka offered some advice.
"You should work while you can. For men, they are happiest when they are working," Mr. Tsuruoka said.

* * *

Mr. Kimura moved back to Rikuzentakata in August. He rented a home for his family, including his mother, who was deeply affected by the tsunami. After her pronouncements on TV, she couldn't speak for a month. She worked with a therapist, and her mood improved and she regained her speech.
Rikuzentakata, though, remained in ruins. Hardly any of the city's small businesses were reopening, and the main downtown area was a ghost town of empty lots and gutted structures.
Other business owners had their own tough decisions to make. A miso maker in his neighborhood left the city and moved his pregnant wife and young daughter to the northern region of Hokkaido to work at a larger miso company there. Yagisawa Shoten, a well-known soy sauce maker in the city, moved its company headquarters to a town an hour outside Rikuzentakata and restarted operations one month after the disaster. The city's biggest natural-gas provider decided rebuilding would be too much and moved out of the city.
Mr. Kimura still needed final approval from the government to get funding to build a new store, even though it was unclear when construction could start—or if there would be enough customers.
Soon, however, Mr. Kimura began seeing glimmers of progress. Late in August, he participated in a "revival" festival where small businesses could sell goods. His booth sold rice crackers and sweet buns from a factory elsewhere in Japan to a crowd of more than 10,000.
Dressed in bluejeans, a green T-shirt and a yellow towel wrapped around his head, Mr. Kimura felt invigorated. "It feels good to be back in business again," he said.
He had decided not to sell his trademark sweets because he wasn't sure if he could replicate the taste using a borrowed kitchen. He didn't think people would care.
But he was scolded by local customers and people who came from all over Japan expecting to eat his famous ganzuki and yubeshi.
"Because of this disaster, I came to realize how much people in this area loved our sweets," he said afterward. "I have an obligation to start my business as soon as possible."
In September, Mr. Kimura reached out to a Tokyo investment fund that collects investments of as little as ¥10,000 from sponsors who want to support businesses affected by the disaster.
To pitch the case for Kimuraya, Mr. Kimura created a 10-year business plan that included plans to return sales to predisaster levels in three years at a temporary location and rebuild the original store in the fourth year. He wrote a letter on the fund's website, pleading his case: "There are some people who say that Rikuzentakata is doomed. However, we will never give up."
Upon learning the temporary store wouldn't be ready until December because of approval and construction delays, Mr. Kimura converted a borrowed cargo-train car retrofitted with sinks and glass doors to serve as a kitchen.
Equipment started showing up on online auction sites, allowing him to buy another mixer, a steamer oven and a gas boiler. Some sellers refused to accept his money or cut the price when they found out he was from Rikuzentakata. Others offered to pay delivery charges.
"These are total strangers and they are supporting me. The best way for me to repay them is to get my business running as soon as possible," he said.

* * *

By mid-October, Mr. Kimura's initial doubts were gone. Though the location for the temporary shop was still surrounded by empty lots and pulverized debris, he had set up his trailer, installed equipment, and hooked up the gas, electricity and water.
Orders were trickling in. A local temple wanted 300 sweet buns. A university in Tokyo wanted sweets for a fair.
"I feel a lot of pressure, but it's good because it helps me move forward," he said.
On Oct. 18, seven months and a week after the tsunami, Mr. Kimura was back in the kitchen with his mother at his side for a trial run. Re-energized by the challenge of baking again, she had finally recovered from the trauma.
He started with ganzuki, the steamed sweetbread he first helped make as a child.
Mr. Kimura rolled up the sleeves of his yellow and blue plaid shirt. A white flour handprint stained the front pocket of his gray slacks. "I forgot to order my chef's uniform," he said.
Working from memory and his mother's notes, Mr. Kimura measured out sugar, soy sauce and water and placed the ingredients into the mixer. He added flour and baking powder, and poured the light brown batter into a shallow wooden box lined with a cloth. He stuck his finger in the batter for a taste and frowned. "Too light," he said.
The batter was topped with walnuts and placed into the steamer oven. After several minutes, the batter started to rise, but not to Mr. Kimura's satisfaction.
"We have the amounts wrong. This can't be right," he said. After an hour, he pulled the tray out of the steamer. "It's a failure," he said.
He decided they needed to add less baking powder, more powder oil and double the ingredients.
As he worked, there were reminders of what went missing in the tsunami. There were no hot gloves to handle the trays. The bowls were too small. There were no seats in the rail car.
He adjusted the recipe, jotting down numbers in a notebook. Another batch went back in the steamer. After an hour, he pulled out the ganzuki. The bread was fluffy and held its shape better than the previous one.
"This one is splendid," his mother said.
As the late-afternoon sun started to fade, they planned for the next day. He wanted to make steam buns in the morning and try yubeshi in the afternoon.
With steam rising from the sweet bread, Mr. Kimura paused to consider some lessons from his work—and the slow reconstruction of his hometown.
"In making sweets, things never happen the way you imagine it," he said. "And everything seems to take longer than we imagine."
Patrick Barta and Miho Inada contributed to this article.
Write to Daisuke Wakabayashi at Daisuke.Wakabayashi@wsj.com