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The irreverent back-and-forth starts almost immediately when sellers arrive at the morning market around 6 a.m.
The traditional Japanese storyteller kneels in front of a room full of families that have lost everything — their homes, their loved ones, their entire town — and his face stretches into a broad grin.
When water begins to trickle down the streets of her coastal neighborhood, Yoshiko Takahashi knows it is time to hurry home.
The battle between the buggy-eyed blue superhero and the evil sea monster and his ninja henchmen was a brief but refreshing return to normalcy for children in this Japanese coastal city.
Sakuji Funayama watched intently as a giant steel claw tore chunks off the remains of his two-story home, ripped open like a dollhouse by last month's tsunami and washed up onto a pile of debris. Suddenly, he spied something, waved his arms and pointed.
In the gray of early morning, plastic curtains are pulled back from the school gym's windows and 260 evacuees sleeping on blankets stir to life under basketball hoops. For 13-year-old Yuka Chiba, it's the first day of eighth grade.
A Japanese soldier grins as he cradles a tiny baby in a fuzzy pink blanket, plucked from a wreckage-blocked house three days after a powerful earthquake and tsunami flattened much of the country's northeastern coastline.
The pictures are a random, soiled sampling of years and decades past: a young girl laughing at a festival; a somber couple in black and white; an awkward group posing at Universal Studios.
Classes start in a week at Okawa Elementary School. But 74 of the 108 students will never come back. They died in last month's tsunami. All but one of the dozen teachers also perished.
Modern sea walls failed to protect coastal towns from Japan's destructive tsunami last month. But in the hamlet of Aneyoshi, a single centuries-old tablet saved the day.
As a massive tsunami ravaged this Japanese fishing town, hundreds of residents fled for the safest place they knew: the local nuclear power plant.
After more than two weeks without a proper bath, some residents on this tsunami-hit island decided to take matters into their own hands.
The funeral for Chieko Mori's daughter and granddaughter was an affront to Japanese sacred customs — the two were placed in simple wooden coffins that soldiers lowered into a ditch in a vegetable patch as a backhoe poured in earth, burying them alongside scores of other bodies.
The rice paddies on the outskirts of this tsunami-hit city are ankle-deep in a black, salty sludge. Crumpled cars and uprooted trees lie scattered across them.
Yasuhiko Konno stands next to a pile of debris that reaches over two stories high. He bows his head for a moment and takes a deep breath.
The temperature drops about 10 degrees when you walk into Senen General Hospital, which hasn't had gas, electricity or running water for a week and a half.
Close to the epicenter of Japan's devastating earthquake and tsunami, workers at a warehouse hauled out cans of coffee and soda this week to offer to passers-by for free.
Masashi Imai wrapped his arms around the wheelchair that held his disabled wife and clung on with all his strength.
Within the dark and fetid wards of the Senen General Hospital, some 120 patients lie in their beds or slumped in wheelchairs, moaning incoherently.
Japan's jobless rate held steady in January but consumer spending fell from a year ago, the government said Tuesday, underscoring the fragility of its economic recovery as a political battle rages over the next national budget.
In the fervor of the Academy Awards in Hollywood on Sunday, last year's winners will be a distant memory. Half a world away in the Japanese fishing village of Taiji, few will ever forget the film that won in 2010 for Best Documentary Feature.
A powerful lawmaker from Japan's ruling party said he was indicted Monday over a funding scandal, the latest setback for a political kingpin once on track to be the country's prime minister.
The Japanese prime minister said he wants 2011 to be the year Japan opens up to rest of the world and called Tuesday for debate on raising the sales tax to prop up ailing finances as the country's population shrinks and ages.
Japanese and American officials discussed taking action to weaken a prominent anti-whaling group, with Tokyo insisting that Sea Shepherd's confrontations on the high seas actually hurt efforts to reduce whaling, U.S. diplomatic cables show.
Japan's beleaguered ruling party worked on Friday to pass a new $61 billion stimulus package that aims to create jobs and revive the country's faltering economic recovery.
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