New Zealand Listener

Points break

Ulo’s Kitchen, a little bar-restaurant in Raglan decorated like a kind of cross-cultural surf shack, is bedlam on a Friday evening.

It’s the Waikato surf town’s low season, but family groups trail in the door, twenty-somethings find wobbly tables and a group of grown-up lads from Auckland have settled in next to the DJ for what they clearly intend to be a big night.

Yuko Shirai, 67, does her best to manage the flow from the front counter, while her family work around her, mixing cocktails and rolling sushi. She’s ebullient and just a little hard of hearing.

For Yuko and her family, this is the landing place of a journey that began with an earthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear disaster. It’s a story of determination, disappointment, a chance meeting with a fellow wanderer and the lure of the long left-hand break.

Until Friday, March 11, 2011, the Shirai family lived in Koriyama, a city in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture. At 2.46pm that day, the magnitude 9.0 Tōhoku earthquake struck, sending cars bouncing in the street and taking out the electricity. Fifty minutes later, a tsunami rushed at the coastline, flooding the Fukushima nuclear

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