Okawa Elementary School

Okawa Elementary School was an educational institution in Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, destroyed in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Of its 108 students, 74 were killed, along with ten of its eleven teachers, after the tsunami ran up the nearby Kitakami River while the children remained at the school on their teachers' instructions rather than evacuating to higher ground; only four of the students present survived. An inquiry found the school unprepared for such an event and that the scale of the tsunami was not realized until too late, and in 2016 the families of 23 of the children who died were awarded compensation of 1.4 billion yen, about 12.8 million US dollars, after suing Ishinomaki City and Miyagi Prefecture; the school was formally closed in 2018.