Vegalta Sendai - Disaster, Hope, Rebirth.

A story of how a small market Japanese club in Sendai reinvented itself after a severe earthquake caused a tsunami to devastate the city.

#PausaHistoria [THREAD]

11 March 2011, a few days before the J-League season is due to start, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake hits the towns of Okuma and Futaba where the Daiichi nuclear power plant is located. Winds blowing to the north and east prevent a major calamity from reaching the capital, Tokyo.

It instead affects only 20-30 kilometres in and around the coastal towns of Okuma & Futaba. Nearly 15,000 people lose their lives and more than 300,000 are forced to evacuate & abandon their homes and become refugees, finally resettling in government-built shelters.

Vegalta Sendai, then the lone representatives in the J-League from the country’s Tohoku region, were already assumed to be relegation favourites. Add to that, Vegalta's stadium, the Yurtec Stadium Sendai, is severly damaged by the disaster.

Just over a month after the disaster, Vegalta finally play their first home game, beating the Urwa Reds 1-0. The occasion is marked by an insane emotional outpouring of fans, who are glad to see some familiar faces alive and not dead as they had feared.

From this point, Vegalta fans develop an ultra-culture on par with many German clubs and unlike anything else seen in Japan. The club’s fans sing chants based to the tunes of "We’re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sisters & "Country Roads" by John Denver.

Yurtec Stadium becomes a fortress that season. They finish 4th, way beyond anything expected. The next season they do even better and are involved in a title race, losing to Sanfrecce Hiroshima, another club that had risen from the ashes of a massive disaster decades earlier.

The disaster shaped Vegalta from being merely a club to a representative of a community that has seen death up close and still fought their way back. The results are important but not more important than the feeling of being alive and knowing that they have each other

Vegalta’s story represents some of the best facets of human resilience and solidarity. It is a reminder that in its most raw form, a football club unites people from all walks of life. It helps a fan develop their identity, while also making them a part of a bigger whole.