Iitate Village
Yuki Ayukawa

“I bake and will keep baking. That's my way of showing gratitude.”

She ran out of gas in Shinjo on her way to evacuate to her parents’ hometown, Akita Prefecture. “I rushed out of the village on my little car and seemed like it was as far as the car could go.” Shinjo is the city of forty thousand people, located northeast of Yamagata prefecture. For Yuki, the place was just a transit city to Akita, where her parents awaited.
She stepped out of her car. It was March but still cold in Tohoku region. People in Shinjo city gave her a warm welcome. Then, she started to work at a local NPO organization, baking breads and cakes with rice flour. The warmth of her colleagues and neighbors penetrated and set her heart at ease.
“I arrived here totally by coincidence but they accepted me, treated me like I was part of them. That's how welcoming this city of Shinjo is.”
She came to Shinjo from Iitate village immediately after the Great East Japan Earthquake. Three years from then, she is now busy preparing for the opening of her own bakery in this April.
“It will never be as warm as what people here gave to me but I still want to show my gratitude to them. I can bake breads. That's the only thing I can do and that's going to be the warmth I can give.”
Once a pâtissier, the bread Yuki bakes is indeed so sweet.

Interviewed in February, 2014
Photographer : Hiroyuki Tamura