Miku Narisawa, a graduate of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, vividly recalls the terrifying night in March 2011 when a deadly tsunami struck northeastern Japan. At just 12 years old, Narisawa sought refuge on the third floor of her elementary school. She remembers the haunting sound of car alarms blaring for hours as she, her sisters, and mother sheltered with hundreds of others in a classroom, anxiously awaiting for the tsunami to pass.
“We weren’t sure if our house survived, and then obviously I was thinking maybe not because all I could see was [that] our small community was a lake. No buildings were there,” Narisawa explained. “Our small community was a lake and there were so many debris in our community, ocean, river.”
Kōkua (help) Lahaina
Those painful memories resurfaced when Narisawa heard about the devastating fires that swept through Lahaina in August 2023. Immediately, she felt compelled to help Lahaina’s students, just as she had been supported after the historic Tohoku tsunami years earlier. Narisawa was a participant in Tohoku Rainbow for Japan Kids, a program that brought young Japanese tsunami survivors to Hawaiʻi for rest and recovery.
“The amount of support that we received throughout Rainbow for Japan Kids was immense, and I knew that I needed to give something back to Hawaiʻi,” said Narisawa.
In March, Narisawa partnered with the U.S.-Japan Council’s TOMODACHI Initiative and Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to launch the TOMODACHI Kibou for Maui program. In Japanese, tomodachi means friends and kibou means hope. The initiative brought 10 teens from Lahainaluna and one from Maui High School to Higashimatsushima, Miyagi, Japan, where they learned about disaster recovery and saw firsthand Narisawa’s community’s remarkable rebuilding from the tsunami.
Part of the trip overseas involved students participating in an educational organization Narisawa founded in April 2023, Odyssey Nature Japan, which provides children with nature-based programs. The students from Lahaina met local seaweed and oyster farmers who shared lessons learned from the tsunami and the importance of inter-relation between land and ocean.
“During natural disasters, ocean takes our lives away sometimes but I take it as part of [a] life cycle of nature,” Narisawa said. “What I learned from March 11 was that ocean provides the life lesson to take care of our Earth.”
Kibou pathway
Narisawa is currently working on a PhD in marine environmental anthropology at Tohoku University in Japan. While at UH Mānoa, she earned a BA in peace and conflict resolution.
This July, she will host a second group of high school students from Maui who are scheduled to travel to Japan for the TOMODACHI Kibou for Maui program.
