Some days he sketches until 2 in the morning, falls asleep and then wakes up and knows instinctively that the face he constructed isn't quite right. The Tohoku police inspector spends the vast majority of the time staring at the photographs without lifting his pencil. "I felt like I was somehow healed."Ībe's portraits of the dead depend on equal parts CSI-style anatomical expertise and an Hercule Poirot like psychological intuition. Then she examined the next drawing and saw her ex-colleague Toshihiko Yoshida (no relation to her boss) looking back at her as well. But three victims, including company head Yoshida, were still missing.Īs her eyes flicked across Abe's sketches in the newspaper, Onodera suddenly saw the factory owner's fleshy face staring out at her, his dignified expression intact. At a morgue, Onodera recognized her boss's mother by the ring she always wore, since her features had been stripped by the tsunami. Having retired two years before, Onodera took responsibility for naming the dead. All 11 factory employees, including her boss Akira Yoshida and his mother and brother, perished when the tidal wave inundated the two-story building. For more than a year, she had scanned hundreds of postmortem photographs trying to find her missing former colleagues at a fish-processing factory in Kesennuma, a port town that lost around 1,280 residents. Last year, Yuriko Onodera was drinking her morning coffee when she came across Abe's forensic drawings in a local Tohoku newspaper. (PHOTOS: Fukushima's Fallout: The Half-Lives of Nuclear Refugees)Ībe's sketches have so far helped identify 22 tsunami victims. "There are lots of people who can draw," says the 63-year-old policeman, "but there are very few who can bring life to a corpse." Inspector Abe's pencil, though, has uncovered the personalities that once animated these ruined faces. In many cases, the visages in these postmortem portraits were so destroyed that it has been impossible for family members to identify their loved ones. Of those, roughly 2,650 are still missing, either vanished at sea or lost among the anonymous bodies that were hastily numbered and photographed. Nearly 20,000 Japanese living in the Tohoku region, Japan's rugged northeast, died in the natural disaster. After more than 30 years as a police forensic artist for Japan's Miyagi prefecture, Abe took on his most challenging case last year when he was handed 200 photographs of unidentified victims from the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami. It is from horrifying images like these that Shuichi Abe has brought the dead back to life. Hair appears in paltry tufts or not at all. Still others were dragged by the tsunami, the force of the wave obliterating features and leaving only the vaguest indications of individuality: half a lip, perhaps, or a single eye socket. Others that spent months at sea are bloated, the skin as taut and smooth as boiled eggs. Some are blackened from fire, with carbonized noses and charcoal gashes where mouths should be. Is hard to see in what remains of the victims' faces.
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