Girl who lost father in last year’s deadly Hokkaido blizzard pens heart-wrenching thank-you letter [View all]

http://en.rocketnews24.com/2014/02/24/girl-who-lost-father-in-last-years-deadly-hokkaido-blizzard-pens-heart-wrenching-thank-you-letter/

Some of you might remember that I started an OP last year about a Japanese father that froze to death while using his body to keep his 9 year old daughter warm in a blizzard. Here is an update. Let's give a hand to all the fathers who sacrifice themselves for their families. Even if it isn't this spectacular, giving yourself to work for 1/3 of your life to feed your family deserves a medal in my book.

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While Tokyo’s recent blizzard showed us the lighter side of natural disasters with amusing snow sculptures and insane images of overly panicked urbanites, these kind of storms have the potential to be very deadly and serious if you are caught outside. Last March, a violent storm hit the northeast part of Hokkaido and took the lives of nine people.

One of the most tragic stories to come out of this storm was a young girl who lost her father after he used his own body to protect her from the freezing temperatures and strong winds. On the one-year anniversary of the tragedy, the girl asked one of Japan’s biggest newspapers, the Yomiuri Shimbun, to publish a heart-breaking letter thanking the country for the huge outpouring of support over the past year.

On March 2, 53-year-old Mikio Okada and his then nine-year-old daughter Natsune were driving down a road in Yubetsu Town, Hokkaido when their minitruck became stranded in the deep snow. The pair decided to abandon the truck to find shelter, but found themselves stranded out in the elements. With no way to keep warm, Okada hunched over his daughter and held her tight, shielding her from the wind and snow. The next morning, local police found the girl cradled in the arms of her father who had frozen to death overnight.

In the letter, she said that she “cried a river of tears when I found out that my father had died protecting me,” but that the overwhelming amount of support from strangers “surprised me and made me so very happy.” She wrote that the kind words of people from all over Japan have inspired her to “become a person that thinks of others.”