Japanese Ask: What Kind Of Changes Do We Want? via NPR

At a hospital in northern Japan, two high school girls drag a muddy bed outside, puffing with exertion, before throwing it onto a huge trash heap. Other kids push wheelbarrows brimming with a brown sludge made of mud and seawater.

The whole high school class is cleaning up the waterlogged Minami-hama Chuo Hospital, near the northeastern city of Iwanuma. The tsunami three months ago left 10-foot-high brown tidemarks on the hospital’s walls. Nearby, cars have been thrown into a newly created lake.

Sixteen-year-old Mana Sato is shocked by what she’s seen. “We’ve been going on with our lives as normal,” she says. “We need to take this more seriously, and change the way we live. We need to get our act together.”

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