Ogatsu

We came to Ogatsu after reading a short article about its inkstone makers, the kind of piece that mentions a craft almost in passing and then quietly breaks your heart with what came after. This small town on the Oshika Peninsula, not far from Sendai via Ishinomaki, had for generations produced most of the suzuri inkstones used across Japan, ground from a particular local slate prized by calligraphers. Then the 2011 tsunami hit the coast here directly, killing residents and washing away nearly all of the town’s houses and workshops. Lia and I went in quietly, unsure what exactly we’d find of a craft town that had been so thoroughly emptied out, and left having met people rebuilding it stone by stone, almost literally.

Stone That Survived What the Town Didn’t

What makes Ogatsu’s story so specific is that while the buildings and workshops were destroyed, the actual resource the craft depends on — the slate quarries in the hills above town — survived largely intact. Walking near one of the old quarry sites with a local guide, seeing the dark, fine-grained rock still sitting there waiting to be worked, made concrete something that’s easy to say abstractly: the raw material of a centuries-old tradition had outlasted the disaster, even when almost nothing built on top of it had. Lia ran her hand over a rough, unworked piece of the stone, cool and slightly damp, and said it felt strange to think something this ordinary-looking had outlived so much.

Watching the Ink Stones Take Shape

We visited one of the rebuilt workshops, where a craftsman who’d lost his original studio in the disaster now works out of a newer building near the water, carving inkstones with tools and techniques passed down through his family. Watching him work — slow, deliberate strokes carving shallow wells and decorative patterns into the dark slate — I understood why this craft takes years to learn properly; every motion looked unhurried but exact, nothing wasted. He let Lia hold a finished stone, smooth and cool and startlingly heavy for its size, explaining briefly how the stone’s fine grain lets ink grind almost silklike against it. He spoke about the tsunami plainly, without dwelling, more focused on describing the stone in his hands than on what it had taken to get back to holding it.

A Town Still Being Rebuilt

Driving and walking through Ogatsu itself, you can still see the scale of what happened — cleared lots where houses once stood, new elevated roads, a scattering of rebuilt buildings among still-empty ground. It isn’t a town performing recovery for visitors; it’s a town still, visibly, in the middle of it, more than a decade on. Lia and I didn’t say much walking through the quieter stretches near the water, past foundations with nothing rebuilt on them yet. But the inkstone workshops, back in operation and training a small new generation of craftspeople, felt like a genuinely hopeful thread running through all of it — proof that a very specific, very old skill can survive even when almost everything around it has to be rebuilt from nothing.

Getting There

Ogatsu sits on the Oshika Peninsula a bus or car ride from Ishinomaki, which connects by rail to Sendai in under an hour. Public transit to Ogatsu itself is limited, with infrequent local buses, so a rental car from Ishinomaki or Sendai makes the trip considerably easier, especially if you want to visit a specific inkstone workshop rather than just pass through. It’s worth calling ahead or arranging a visit through a local tourism office if you’d like to watch a craftsman at work, since these are small, working studios rather than formal tourist attractions.