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The stones that tell you where to run
The Sanriku coast is marked with 津波石 — tsunami stones — some of them centuries old, carved with a line and an instruction: do not build below this point. A few are famous for having been obeyed. The village of Aneyoshi kept a 1933 marker reading 高き住居は 児孫の和楽 — high dwellings are the peace of descendants — and built above it; in 2011 the water stopped short of the houses. Others were ignored, moved for roadworks, or simply forgotten as the generation that carved them died. This is why the museums and memorials built since treat 語り継ぐ as infrastructure, run school programs, and put the evacuation route on the same post as the names of the dead. The stones are a message system with a design flaw, which is that it has to be re-read every seventy years, and 伝承 is the attempt to fix it.