Black Tsunami

BLACK TSUNAMI provides a haunting portrait of the devastation left by the great tsunami that engulfed northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011. Images of farms and villages in the exclusion zone show an uninhabited landscape where ancestral graves and abandoned livestock suffer the same neglect. Massive mountains of contaminated debris have become permanent features of the landscape in the effected region.


The book contains 80 black and white photographs, an Afterward by internationally recognized journalist Bill Emmott, a ten minute video interview with the photographer and a short video clip of the tsunami arriving in Myako Japan.


James Whitlow Delano is an award winning American photojournalist who has lived in Japan for over 15 years.  On March 11, 2011 he returned to Japan from an assignment in Italy and immediately traveled north to where the tsunami struck. He returned again months later to capture the changes that had occurred during the clean up. He risked arrest and thousand dollar fines to photograph inside the 12-mile exclusion zone around the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant.