But that all changed after his daughter, Taylor, perished in the massive tsunami spawned by the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake.

Anderson, 53, a realtor living in Midlothian, in the suburbs of Richmond in the U.S. state of Virginia, is determined to continue the work that his 24-year-old daughter started.

Taylor had been teaching English to a handful of elementary and junior high schools in Ishinomaki, a coastal city in Miyagi Prefecture that bore the brunt of the tsunami that devastated the Tohoku region.

She has been working as a teaching assistant since August 2008 under the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, a Japanese government initiative known as the JET program.

It allows English-speaking college graduates to teach English at schools across Japan on a yearly contract that can be renewed up to four times.

Taylor was caught up in tsunami as she was helping students to evacuate after the magnitude-9.0 earthquake.

Anderson said his daughter enjoyed interacting with her students, in addition to teaching the language.

“She really liked having relationships with students beyond just teaching, meaning talking to them about what they were interested in, and what she was interested in, about America, about Japan,” he said.

She treasured letters her students wrote to her.

Calling it “the wall of love,” she once used a webcam to show her family over the Internet the letters she had put up all over her apartment.

Taylor chose to study Japanese over Spanish and French in a foreign language course when she was attending junior high school. She had been exposed to the three languages in elementary school.

Her interest in Japanese language and culture grew as a result of her history teacher, an American who was raised in Japan. She also became immersed in anime.

Eventually, Taylor decided she could serve as a bridge between the two cultures.

After his daughter’s death, Anderson pondered how he should take over Taylor’s dream. He came up with the idea of donating books–her passion–to schools in Ishinomaki by establishing a fund with the senior high school from which she graduated.

Taylor, he said, drew great inspiration from books. And that is something he would like the children of Ishinomaki to experience, too.

Taylor especially loved works by Haruki Murakami.

Anderson took Murakamai’s books his daughter kept in her apartment back with him to the United States.

He was intrigued to find out what attracted his daughter to the renowned Japanese novelist.

Not long after that, he came across a passage that altered the way he coped with the enormous sense of loss that had gripped him: “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” The passage is from “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,” Murakami’s essay about long-distance running.

“I felt like it was a message from her to me, that, ‘I’m in pain but it’s not inevitable that I should suffer,’ because of her loss,” he said. “I was like, ‘Taylor, are you talking to me here?’ That was the first thing I read.”

Anderson became determined not to be overwhelmed by grief after reading that passage.

“Jean, my wife, says we know Taylor wouldn’t want March 10 to be the last happy day of our lives, so we plan on being happy,” he said.

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