In the village of Kamaya, near the Kitakami River, a concrete shell is all that remains of what used to be Ookawa Elementary School. Here 74 children and 10 teachers died when the waves struck, alongside worried mothers and other locals who had headed to the school, which was a designated disaster evacuation site.

The ruin is to become a memorial to the victims – one of whom was Shinichiro Hiratsuka’s 12-year-old daughter Koharu.

He was teaching in nearby Ishinomaki City at a junior high school that escaped the tsunami on that fateful day. “It turned into an evacuation centre and we had 2,500 people there,” he recalled. “There was no television, no phone service, the roads were unpassable.”

When he finally reached Kamaya four days later, he could tell by the rows of children’s bodies recovered from the mud and rubble that he would never see his daughter alive again.

His wife Naomi, also a teacher, quit her job and got a licence to operate heavy machinery to search for their daughter’s body, which was found five months later in a bay 4km away.

Sightings of oarfish put Japanese on alert for earthquake, tsunami

Shinichiro continued teaching and put on a brave face for his two surviving children. “As a teacher I had to smile in front of my students. Then I would cry in the car on the way home and then smile again for my family,” he said.

He has since co-authored an illustrated book for primary schoolchildren titled Kimi wa 3.11 o Shiteimasuka? (Do You Know About March 11th?), which came out in February.

“The message is that you have to value your life and can overcome hardships,” he said. “I want my daughter in heaven to be happy to see the way I’m living my life.”

More than 100km south, the village of Iitate was far enough inland to be untouched by the tsunami. It was struck instead by an invisible enemy: clouds of radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where three reactors went into meltdown after floodwaters overwhelmed its cooling systems.

Tatsuo Harada, 80, had lived all his life in the village – until he and all the 5,300 other residents were ordered to evacuate following the disaster. He returned last April after nine years away, one of only 1,500 former residents to have done so – many of them elderly.

“The hearts of the local young people have changed, what will happen to the next generation?” Harada said, adding that the void left by absent villagers has been partly filled by wild animals.

“There didn’t used to be boars or monkeys in the village until after the disaster. Now there are no hunters to shoot them,” he said. “There are big troops of 40 to 50 monkeys roaming around, they aren’t scared of people or cars at all. They act like it’s their territory now.”

Nana Matsumoto is among those trying to attract young people back to the village. The 28-year-old native of Fukushima City moved to Iitate three years ago, after studying and working in Tokyo.

Life on the edge: Japan’s stoicism in the face of natural disaster

She is coming to the end of a three-year stint with the local government to revitalise the village, but has decided to stay on and launch a company to continue the task.

“There are a lot of buildings empty since the disaster and we are working on turning some of them into share houses and spaces for artists and start-ups to work in,” she said.

Iitate has benefited from government-sponsored recovery programmes in the wake of the disaster, with the local authority completely covering the cost of children’s education – from tuition fees to school lunches, outings and even school uniforms.

But lingering radiation fears make many wary of returning and have scared away potential new residents, though Matsumoto is not worried.

03:50

Ten years on, Fukushima nuclear disaster clean-up challenges include future natural disaster risks

Ten years on, Fukushima nuclear disaster clean-up challenges include future natural disaster risks

“I think it’s safe to live here,” she said. “I’ve researched it and talked to scientists, but people have to make their own decisions.”

After the disaster, 12 per cent of Fukushima prefecture was off-limits and around 165,000 people fled their homes either under evacuation orders or voluntarily. Numerous areas have since been declared safe after extensive decontamination, and incentives are being offered to lure people back. But many are reluctant.

Just over 2 per cent of Fukushima remains under evacuation orders, with the figure for evacuees officially at around 35,700, though some experts believe there could be nearly twice as many.

But there is no deadline for lifting all the evacuation orders, and doubts persist that Fukushima Daichii can be decommissioned on schedule by 2041 at the earliest.

Japan’s ‘secondary disaster’: how 2011 quake survivors faced abuse in shelters

The urge to rebuild in a land that has been wracked by millennia of disaster – volcanic eruptions, tsunami, earthquakes, war and famine – is powerful, and there are areas where there’s little or no trace of the devastation of 2011.

But the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown “triple disaster” in the Tohoku region was unlike any Japan had faced before, and the challenges of returning to what was normal a decade ago have been immense.

More than 30 trillion yen (US$280 billion) has been spent on reconstruction so far – but even reconstruction minister Katsuei Hirasawa acknowledged recently that while the government has charged ahead with new buildings, it has invested less in helping people to rebuild their lives, for instance, by offering mental health services for trauma.

Additional reporting by Associated Press