Boy of nine searching for family with a homemade sign

Still hoping: Toshihito Aisawa holding his sign.

Source: Daily Mail UK

He has become a poignant symbol of the human tragedy in Japan.
Day after day, nine-year-old Toshihito Aisawa walks from shelter to shelter looking for his family.
Clutching hand-written signs bearing the names of his missing relatives, the schoolboy has spent the past week wandering the corridors of refugee centres in his ruined home city of Ishinomaki.
The boy last saw his mother, father and grandmother when they piled into their car in a desperate attempt to escape the tsunami.
But the car ran into a dead end and was swallowed by the killer tidal wave.
Toshihito escaped by smashing a window before being pulled, unconscious, from the water by rescuers.
Now he wanders with his sign that also reads: ‘I will come at 11 o’clock tomorrow, so please wait. I will come again tomorrow.’
There is hope, as he has already been reunited with a cousin who was in the car. Toshihito recalled the sounds of debris crashing into the sides of the vehicle as it hurtled along with the current.
When one of the objects cracked Toshihito’s window, he and his cousin Yuto used their bare hands to smash the glass and claw their way out of the car.
‘Then something, probably a tree, came crashing through, and I had to let go (of Yuto’s hand),’ Toshihito said. He lost consciousness until he was washed up about half an hour later on a piece of driftwood.

Nothing left: Toshihito's home town of Ishinomaki in Miyagi prefecture was virtually wiped off the map following last week's earthquake and tsunami