SHIOGAMI, Japan — It was a bitterly cold afternoon, and there were moments when the hospitality tent was almost ripped from the ground by fierce gusts of wind.

But the fishermen of the Urato Islands were not going to let the weather spoil what for them was a huge step in the recovery of their community — the handover of a fleet of boats donated by the U.S. charity, Operation Blessing International.

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After a brief ceremony, they took the boats for a spin, in circles around the small windswept bay, children lining up to take a ride.

There were plenty of smiles, but none broader than that of 37-year-old Yoshimasa Koizumi, the architect of the recovery here.

"We'll soon be able to support ourselves again," he predicted.

Koizumi is not your archetypal fishermen. For starters he's a good deal younger, and he arrived on the Urato Islands only in 2011, shortly before the tsunami struck. His was a rare move, since most migration had been away from these areas, leaving a barely viable and elderly community, just 400 strong.

But he was attracted by the pristine environment of the islands and joined the oyster business, taking delivery of a boat just one day before the tsunami struck. That boat was swept away, together with most of the local fishing fleet.

The islands, which sit close to the city of Sendai, acted as a sort of shock absorber, which was good news for some of the mainland coastal districts but not for the islands, which were devastated. Incredibly, nobody on the islands died.

A simple request
When, soon after, Koizumi was asked what he most needed, he replied: "Wi-Fi and a laptop. I just need the Internet."

The tech-savvy oyster farmer then began a Web-based campaign, the Children of the Sea, using the Internet and Twitter to rebuild the local oyster industry. Under the scheme, supporters were offered 10,000 yen ($105) shares to help the rebuilding of the industry. He soon had 14,000 shareholders and also attracted the attention of Operation Blessing.

Shareholders are really donors. They don't make a profit, but they are kept abreast of the recovery -- and also receive oysters as a kind of dividend.

Koizumi says that other, mostly elderly, fishermen were a little puzzled at first, and not at all sure about all that Internet stuff. But they soon rallied round as the shares were snapped up.

The islands benefit from sitting astride nutritious areas for raising oysters regarded as among the best in Japan. In fact, the oysters harvested there are so good they serve as "seeders" for other areas, making them not only critical to the local economy but important to the greater Japanese oyster industry. And Koizumi is confident Urato Islands oysters will soon be profitable again, thanks in part to the help of the many donors.

Government help has been slower, and like 200,000 other tsunami survivors Koizumi is still living in a temporary home.

"I never expected I'd still be living like this after two years," he said.

Much of the coastline here is now a vast, wind-swept wasteland. Rebuilding has hardly started, bogged down in bureaucracy. According to a study late last year by the Board of Audit of Japan, half the $150 billion tsunami relief fund has yet to be allocated.

Millions of tons of debris have been cleared and sorted, but it will take years to dispose of it.

"Some places are picking up, but there's still a lot more that needs to be done" said Don Thomson, the director of Japan operations for Operation Blessing.

For his part, Koizumi said he believes that communities themselves need to take the lead, demonstrating the can-do attitude that has provided inspiration to his neighbors.

"Rather than just wait for government aid, we have to do it ourselves," he said.

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LONDON -- Eleven years after he was resuscitated seven times following a horrific 200 mph crash, former race car driver Alex Zanardi was among the athletes honored at the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Paralympic Games on Sunday.

His return to the podium – winning two golds and a silver for handcycling - is one of many inspirational stories behind the competition.

The 45-year-old Italian triumphantly lifted his three-wheeled cycle with one arm after winning a time-trial at England’s Brands Hatch course – a track on which he used to race with four wheels.

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In an emotional interview with NBC News, the ex-Formula One driver said his return to being a champion was not about victory but enjoying the long ride to it. 

“I’m a happy man and I know that happiness does not come from a medal,” he said. “A medal makes the taste of the steak a little better.”

PhotoBlog: Stars close London Paralympics that 'lifted the cloud of limitation'

It is nothing short of extraordinary that he is alive, let alone the winner of three Paralympic medals.

Zanardi's journey to the Paralympics began at the American Memorial 500 on Sept. 15, 2001, at the Eurospeedway Lausitz in Germany — the only American-based series to go forward on the weekend after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. 

Zanardi, a two-time CART champion, had had a difficult season. He started 22nd in a field of 27, but the car was responding well. He was enjoying the drive, passing one car after another, until with 13 laps to go he was in the lead. 

Zanardi went into his final pit stop and the crew chief waved him off urging him to "Go, go, go!" 

But as he built up speed to get back into the race, the car spun out of control and he veered onto the track. Canadian driver Alex Tagliani, traveling at close to 200 mph, could not avoid him. The reinforced carbon fiber cone of Tagliani's car sliced through the area beside Zanardi's left front wheel and cockpit, the weakest part of the vehicle. 

On the track, Dr. Terry Trammel slipped and fell as he raced to the wreckage. He thought he had fallen in oil, but it was Zanardi's blood. 

But Zanardi was alive. 

More London 2012 coverage from NBCNews.com

The crash had severed Zanardi's right leg at the knee and his left at the thigh some five inches above the knee. The driver's lower legs had disintegrated like those of land mine victims, said Dr. Steve Olvey, director of medical affairs for CART at the time. He had lost 70 percent of his blood, his pelvis was fractured in five places and he had a lacerated liver. 

His heart stopped seven times.

As part of his rehabilitation, Zanardi took up handcycling, which uses a vehicle powered by the arms that features two coasting rear wheels and one steerable front wheel. 

He heard about the sport by chance. Zanardi and another athlete had both tried to pull into a disabled parking spot, setting off a dispute as to who should get it. He saw the other man's handbike on top of the car and got curious.

“I don’t know why it happened but I don’t complain because I’m here,” Zanardi said. “Everything else was up to me, to change an adversity into an opportunity…and I think you can do that with everything in life.”

'Admiration'
He said the athletes in London - the biggest Paralympic Games in history – had demonstrated that their achievements are about ability rather than disability.

“I saw a woman swimming as fast a shark with no arms and I got [goose bumps], I got tears in my eyes – but not because of pity, but because of admiration.”

“At the end of the day, I didn't do this to win the gold medal. I did what I had to do because I was enjoying what I had to do and the results I had … was just a logical consequence of adding something every day to what I had done the previous day.”

Jay-Z, Rihanna and Coldplay performed at Sunday night’s Paralympic closing ceremony, whose highlights included a spectacular fireworks display and a heart-shaped ring of flame.

China finished top of the medal table, with 95 golds out of 231 medals. Russia came second with 36 golds out of 102 medals and Britain came third with 34 golds out of 120 medals. The United States came sixth with 31 golds out of 98 medals.

The London Paralympics sold 2.7 million tickets - almost 900,000 more than in Beijing.

"Paralympians have lifted the cloud of limitation,” London Games chairman Sebastian Coe told the 80,000-strong crowd watching the ceremony at the main Olympic Stadium in East London.

'Meet the Superhumans': Paralympians burst onto world stage

That theme was echoed by Zanardi, who spoke of the ordinary sources of inspiration that can drive humans to success.

“I want to want to share this great gift that I have with all the athletes, with all the people that do great things in life because we only need our eyes to catch examples… of great inspiration,” he said. “Not just athletes like me who had the opportunity and the luck in life to stand above all others, but also great mothers - they wake up in the morning, they are sick, but nonetheless they feed the breakfast to the kids, they take them to school and they go to work because there's a great family to feed. If we have eyes to see, we are surrounded by great examples which could be inspiration for us all.”

365 days after blindness, swimming sailor claims gold

Zanardi paid a tearful tribute to this father, who died in 1997. “It's amazing how much is anyway passed on into my, through my skin and into my soul, you know. I am my dad… and I miss him so much, and I know … that in these days he's just getting a pat on the back from all the mates he's got up there because I'm sure he was very excited for what his son did and … I just hope that one day my son will be the same.”

He added: “My dad told me that if you find some tail wind, life can be much easier - but you've got to be there waiting for it. If when the tail wind comes you are in harbor because you thought it was impossible the tailwind would come, you're not going to be that lucky b****** that gets it. So you have to work, do your part, work very hard to get out of that harbor. It’s going to be hard with no wind… but if then the wind comes there's no reason why even an old crashed boat can't win the race… you have to try to make what you can.

“Take every day as an opportunity to add something to what you've done the previous day  - this whether you have become Usain Bolt or whether you have fallen down and you are in a hospital bed with very little left. But there's something left and something you can use to compensate and to start again. And if you do it right it will for sure be very exciting.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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A Japanese teenager has identified himself as the owner of a soccer ball that washed up on an Alaska beach last week – the first traceable debris to arrive in the United States from last year's tsunami.

Misaki Murakami, who comes from the city of Rikuzentakata, where more than 3,000 homes were destroyed, came forward on Sunday after reading news reports about the find.

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Marker pen writing on the soccer ball identified the 16-year-old and the name of his school.

The soccer ball and a volleyball were discovered by David Baxter, a technician working at a radar station on remote Middleton Island in the Gulf of Alaska, Doug Helton of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote ina  blog post last week.

Japan’s Kyodo news agency said Murakami was at home at the time of the tsunami disaster in March 2011 but managed to escape the waves by running to higher ground with his pet dog.

His family lost everything, including their home, and are currently living in temporary housing provided by the local government.

Ghost ship sinks to bottom of Gulf of Alaska 

Murakami told the news agency Sunday that he had been searching for his family's belongings but that until the ball was found he had had no luck.

Prized possession
The ball was a gift from his former homeroom teacher and his 13 classmates when he had to change schools in the same area seven years ago.

He said it was a prized possession, which he always kept hanging in a net next to his bed.

Murakami spoke with Baxter on the phone to thank him for finding his treasured ball.

The magnitude 9.0 earthquake off Japan's northeast coast on March 11, 2011, triggered a 75-foot wall of water that flattened waterfront towns, killing 16,000. About 3,000 people are still unaccounted for. The tsunami triggered a crisis at Tokyo Electric Power's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, forcing tens of thousands of people to flee in the world's worst nuclear accident in 25 years.

U.S. authorities were immediately aware that the clockwise circulation of the Pacific's northern waters would deliver some remnants of that destruction to American shores.

A Japanese ghost ship, Ryou-Un Maru, turned up earlier in the Gulf of Alaska off Southeast Alaska after a 4,500-mile journey. The U.S. Coast Guard sank the vessel April 5.

In January, a half-dozen large buoys suspected to be from Japanese oyster farms appeared at the top of Alaska's panhandle and may be among the first tsunami debris.

State health and environmental officials have said there's little need to be worried that debris landing on Alaska's shores will be contaminated by radiation.

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LONDON -- A blind British writer failed to notice her pen had run out of ink while writing 26 pages of a book, but her lost words were recovered by police forensic staff.

Trish Vickers, who took up writing after losing her sight, uses pen and paper and is helped by a volunteer who comes by to type up her manuscripts.

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Her son, Simon, also reads her work back to her during his regular visits to her home in Dorset, England.

It was during one of his visits that he discovered she had written 26 pages, but there was nothing on the paper, according to the Bridport and Lyme Regis News which first reported the story.

“We battled with various ideas until we thought of the police. We rang them and asked to speak to their fingerprint section. They said if there was anything they could do they would be happy to help. I was gobsmacked and so happy," Vickers, 59, told reporter Rene Gerryts.

Her son drove her to the county police headquarters, whose officers worked in their spare time to recreate the missing words from her manuscript.

“I think they used a combination of various lights at different angles to see if they could get the impression made by my pen. I am so happy, pleased and grateful. It was really nice of them and I want to thank them for helping me out," Vickers said.

Dorset Police were unavailable for comment.

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Raymond Aubrac, a leading figure in the French Resistance movement during World War II who became a hero after escaping the Nazi's Gestapo with the help of his pregnant wife, has died aged 97.

His daughter said he had died at Val de Grace military hospital in Paris on Tuesday evening, the BBC reported.

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Aubrac and his late wife Lucie became important members of the underground movement, which aimed to disrupt the German occupation of France, and his death marks the passing of the last of the key Resistance leaders.

A Jew, he was born as Raymond Samuel, before changing his name to avoid Nazi persecution.

The Guardian in London recounted that Aubrac was arrested in 1943 near Lyon, along with 12 others including Jean Moulin, head of the movement, who was tortured, taken to Paris and later died.

Aubrac was interrogated and tortured by Klaus Barbie, the notorious head of the Gestapo nicknamed the Butcher of Lyon, it said.

Although sentenced to death by execution, he was freed when Lucie, then expecting a baby, led a raid on a truck moving him and other resistance members from jail – an episode that was later made into a film.

Pre-execution marriage
In a BBC interview earlier this year, Aubrac told how Lucie convinced a German commander that she had yet to marry, feigning horror at the prospect of the couple’s child being born out of wedlock. The commander agreed to a pre-execution marriage, creating the pretext for Aubrac to be escorted by road from prison to the police headquarters where a wedding was take place.

"One of the Resistance cars overtook the truck in which I was being transported, and when the two vehicles were level they shot the German driver," recalls Aubrac, who received a ricochet bullet in the side of the face.

The couple fled – first to London, then to Algeria – until after the war, when they returned to help in the reconstruction of France.

Their parents had been deported to their deaths at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

News service Agence France Presse said French President Nicolas Sarkozy paid homage to Aubrac, calling him "a heroic Resistance figure" whose "escape, thanks to the bravery of his wife Lucie Aubrac, has entered into the legend of the history of the Resistance."

"These heroes of the shadows who saved France's honor at a time when it appeared lost are disappearing one after the other. It is our duty to keep their legacy alive in the heart of our collective memory," Sarkozy said.

Lucie died in 2007, and Aubrac leaves behind three children and 10 grandchildren.

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