'We lost everything - but our hearts and our feelings will be the same'

This afternoon there will be a few prayers and readings at the Sogotai Kukan sports hall, which doubled as the town's main evacuation shelter for much of last year. There will also be a Zen ceremony at the Shogen-ji temple, where most of those bodies were eventually cremated, including more than 70 that couldn't be identified. In those cases, bone samples were kept in storage for future DNA purposes. There is a folk tale going round that the bones can be heard crying at night.

People try not to talk too much about the anniversary. "Because it's been a year, they keep showing those images on TV," says Tomiko Matoba, one of the few remaining residents of the Shimizu-Cho district. "That wall of water coming in. I don't want to see it. It brings back a lot of bad feelings. I think that memory of that wave makes people scared to live here, even if they love Onagawa."

The change in Onagawa now is the difference between a warzone and a wasteland.

Where there was wreckage, soldiers and heavy machinery last summer, there is now a razed plain leading down to the sea. There are new streetlights and power lines in place, but little town to speak of.

"The debris has been removed," says local teacher Ikuo Fujinaka, "but nothing else has been done ... [We] are waiting, waiting, waiting for a plan."

Fujinaka is sitting in the temporary home he calls his "rabbit house", one of 159 container units assembled on the rugby pitch beside the town sports hall. It is snowing outside and condensation drips through the panels in the ceiling. This has been a chronic problem all winter, but the on-site volunteer reconstruction centre can only offer duct tape.

Satoshi Ito dropped out of university to help the residents of the container units. "A lot of people went to help in Kobe after the earthquake [in 1995], and they ended up staying," he says.

"Onagawa's going to take a lot longer to fix, maybe 10 or 20 years. I feel like I want to be a part of it, for as long as people still want me around."

Keigo Ito (no relation) quit his job as a nurse in Tokyo to work as a counsellor here. The shock of the tsunami is wearing off, he says, and there's a growing sense of "munashi" among evacuees – emptiness, or lack of purpose – after so many months without houses and jobs. Many spend their unemployment benefit gambling at pachinko parlours.

"If it makes them feel better, I can't tell them not to do it." More generally, though, says Keigo, people are beginning to realise that these homes, and these conditions, might not be so temporary.

People are giving up and starting to leave the city – going elsewhere to rebuild their lives. The same complaint is heard all over town: what's taking so long? The answer, sighs Kiso Kikawada, local businessman and chairman of the non-profit Onagawa Reconstruction Committee, is "government. The way things are done in Japan".

Formed within weeks of the disaster, his committee submitted its first proposals to resurrect the town within a few months.

Kikawada won vocal support in parliament, but none of his proposals have been implemented yet.

At his prefab headquarters near Mangokura Lake, Kikawada outlines some of his ideas – shopping malls, Spanish-style street art, imported grapes from France and flowers from Holland. "This is more like an ideal vision," says his colleague Takahiro Aoyama, of the Onagawa chamber of commerce. "New houses have to come first. But to do this hard work, you need to have a bigger picture in mind. You need to think about your children living here, and laughing."

By way of illustration, Aoyama tells his own tsunami story. This day last year, he and three others were clinging to a water tower on the roof of their building while the waves rose up to their legs. Certain he was going to die, he could only think about his two small daughters and how he'd failed to kiss them goodbye before they went to school. He tied his necktie to the tower in case his body was never recovered.

"In this town, the most common job for women is to work in the fisheries," says Aoyama. "I'd like to think my daughters could do something else if they wanted."

Funding, when it finally comes, will be allocated at national level through the government's new Reconstruction Agency – a body only formalised in December, after months of wrangling in Tokyo. But the building, when it finally begins, will be run from Onagawa's planning department, which has played its own small part in the delays so far.

This was only to be expected, says architect Masunori Kusaka, whose Osaka-based firm Urban Renaissance has been brought in to handle logistics. "The staff were affected by the tsunami. Many of them lost their homes or loved ones. They had no experience of anything like this, and they didn't know what to do." His office is in the new prefabricated town hall; the old one was flooded to the top floor. That empty building is one of the few still standing near the waterfront.

Three other buildings lie where they fell on the day, ripped out at the concrete roots – the Enoshima ferry waiting room, a police box, and a vitamin supplement retailer. It's been proposed that these buildings should be left as they are. "I'm wondering if that's a good idea," says Kusaka. "My home town is Hiroshima, so I know that memorials are important, but I would understand if people didn't want to see these buildings any more."

He hopes to put a park here instead. The town centre will be zoned for commercial use only. Post-tsunami legislation won't permit anyone to live in the area. Civil engineers will terrace the surrounding mountains to make room for new homes, and the earth they dig out will be used to raise the lower land and roads by 5.4 metres.

"Almost everyone agrees it's the only thing we can do," says community leader Shigeo Suzuki, in his hometown Takenoura, one of 15 fishing villages linked to Onagawa. Eleven of its 160 residents were killed on March 11, and another six in the days that followed – all elderly people suffering from shock and cold.

Of the 60 homes that stood here before the tsunami only two remain and only one of those is occupied, by an old couple who won't be moved. "It's a sensitive issue," Suzuki says."They don't want to relocate with the rest of us. They think that it will take too long, and they won't live to see it. They would rather keep living on the previous site, even if the government says it's too dangerous.

"We lost everything but we will still have our relations, our traditions, even if we move to a higher place. Our hearts and our feelings will be the same."

There's a historical pattern to all this, almost like the waves. Among the few things still standing in the village is a stone marker for local victims of a tsunami in 1933. Tsunamis come, and people retreat. Time passes, and people forget. They move back to the waterline. But the last tsunami of this size on this coast was more than 1000 years ago. How long can people be expected to remember? Suzuki, who comes from a long line of fishermen, doesn't know.

"All we can do is go higher, so we don't have to worry about our children and our grandchildren. Hopefully this tsunami will be told from generation to generation, like a warning." Speaking perfect English, Suzuki then says something that sounds like a Japanese valediction. "It has only been a year. So many people washed away. Those who suffered in this tsunami, their hearts are still floating in the sea."