I moused over the colorful shapes spread out on the chronological table. The green square I innocently clicked was a tab telling the story of the devastated district of Nagata turning the tables and establishing “Shin-Nagata Machizukuri Co., Ltd” (new Nagata urban development Co., Ltd.). The next pink circle I hovered over announced the untimely death of a young artist who kept sketching the scenes from the aftermath of the earthquake. Each mark has a moving story and triggers you to think. The stories are various but the size of the marks is the same. A modest story is treated the same way as a dynamic one, naturally making you focus on the interrelationship between them. Wandering between the marks on the table, I started to feel like I was watching someone’s personal history. Various activities came to look like one big flow of movement.

I was involved in many things after the Great East Japan Earthquake. It was not unusual for me to feel powerless. Although the ability of one person is limited, I also had doubts about only belonging to a large movement. Looking at the big flow of this timetable, with that feeling on my mind, I noticed that even the small action of each individual had a role in a big flow. That made me feel better.

One of the characteristics of this timetable is that it seems to have no particular intention behind the selection of events. It is like a storage medium for whatever raw data to be thrown in. So, you may call it a platform for archiving various activities. I have a suggestion: how about publishing the updated history of the data like Wikipedia does? I hope this timetable will collect many more marks until it is difficult to grasp the entire flow.