Memories

I watched NHK proram today, It is a documentary program about some group of people that collected photos album around disaster affected area right after Japan last year tsunami. The motor of this project is a mother who lost her son during tsunami. At the beginning she only tended to find his son photos around her ruined house. But after she came with an idea to extend her effort to collect other’s photo albums too.

One of local school hall was transformed as a gallery of memories. Many photos are hung to make them dried on hundreds of line. Some of volunteer seemed busy. They sorted the albums on alphabetic order, some other tried to clean the wet photos before reorder in to a new albums. People come and go during to this school hall. They looked for their own album. The memories that remain after the tragedy.

I just interested in this program because I also experienced the same tragedy. But unfortunately. We lost all of our photos albums. Photos of my family early time, Photos of my parents wedding, Photos of my childhood, and all photos that captured the important event in our life. We threw away all of them because it was to late to save them. It was in bad condition when we found them during our post tsunami cleaning efforts. It was really sad, but what else we can do.

Today, I went to my aunt offices. Accidently, I found one of my childhood photos in her photos box. My aunt is the family member who have camera in the past, so she took a lot of pictures including family photos. It make me happy when I can find them because I have none of that photos any more. In that picture I played with my little cousins. We laughed together. Compared with the photos, it changes a lot now. I’m not kid anymore while my cousins is grow up. May be they will be shame if they look at that photo. But it how the photos work. It reassemble all the old rusty memories. It brings happiness, shame or some extent, tears.

It can not be denied that the people who lost or the event that passed were irreplacable, but by the photos we have,  at least it can help us to keep the memories.