It’s a mixture of relief and sadness for the Kanda family, whose patriarch was the prime instigator behind the Onagawa Bay monument dedicated to Nelson’s Lt. Robert Hampton Gray.
“Without Yoshi Kanda, his wife, and friends, none of us would be focused on Onagawa right now,” says Gray’s niece Anne George, who lives in Prince George.
Yoshi and Fumiko, who both died a few years ago, hosted the Gray family in 1989, in a house that no longer exists.
Their daughter Emiko and her husband, who took over the family general store in Onagawa, are missing. However, their adult children and grandchildren are safe in Sendai and Tokyo.
“They were equally nice, generous, and kind people,” George recalls. “The two generations ran the general store and lived in the two floors above the store.”
The last time she saw them, they “described their disappointment that none of their three children stayed in the small fishing village to take over the store; instead they chose to move to the bigger cities of Sendai and Tokyo.”
However, “It is those moves that saved that generation and the next.”