This is the Guardian.

Hello, I'm Richard Lloyd-Pary and I'm the author of The School Beneath the Wave.

A piece about the extraordinary natural disaster that struck Northeastern Japan in March 2011

when a massive undersea earthquake set off a tsunami which slammed into the coast over a 100-mile stretch

causing destruction and death on a huge scale. Now of course it was news all over the world

but internationally the natural disaster was eclipsed to some extent by the man-made disaster

that followed that the nuclear meltdown which I've all remembered but to some extent it overwhelmed

coverage of the tsunami and it remains the case that so far although some people died indirectly

no one has directly died as a result of radiation from Fukushima Daiichi whereas 18,500 people

died in the tsunami at a stroke crushed or drowned by this immense unstoppable wave.

The story you're about to hear is one of how this inexorable natural disaster intersected with

human failure and incompetence and its story of a school or kawa primary school which suffered a

unique tragedy only 75 of the 18,500 people who died were schoolchildren but 74 of them or but

one were at a single school at kawa elementary school under the care of their teachers and in the

weeks after the disaster this became clear to the parents of those children who died and they began

to question why that had happened the questions they asked received very unsatisfactory answers

and the parents grief and devastation soon took on edge a frustration and anger that developed

into a campaign even into a legal struggle but it was a long and anguished fight before they found

out the truth of what had happened and why their children had died.

In the end the parents were not passive in the face of their grief they took that grief and

they turned it into something really very positive. They took on these incompetence authorities

who'd failed their children and then took great extent lied about it and they took up

...