To be honest, writing the lyrics for this song wasn’t easy. My work always requires imagining experiences I’ve never had, but my abilities were never so tested as they were with this song.
While struggling to come up with the idea for the song, I remembered the words of a friend who was directly affected by the disaster. “We can only hear the stories of the people who survived. We can never hear the stories of those who died.” He said survivors could only imagine the suffering of those who lost their lives.
This helped me a lot and I was able to let my imagination take over and follow the words where they wanted to go.
After the tsunami I was constantly tweeting, looking for family and friends living in the devastated area. I was able to find them by sharing and getting information, and passing it on to people in the same situation. One person living in the area who read my tweets even went out to find one of the friends I was looking for in the city of Ishinomaki.
I read a tweet by a young girl who was looking for a boy. She said she had a secret crush on him so she didn’t want him to know she was looking for him. I thought that was so cute, and I was amazed that even in their frenzied search, people still had feelings like this. It made me smile, and I remembered that area of Japan as a sacred place in my heart where my own first love bloomed. I thought, if the young people there can still harbor a secret love just one week after the disaster, maybe it is possible that flowers will bloom out of the rubble.
These were the things I was thinking about as I imagined the words to the song.
People who died from the disaster, people who survived it, and the people who worried about it from a distance, I tried to imagine how all of these people felt after 3.11. I knew how difficult it was to express something so unfathomable in just a few words, but I really wanted to try.