This paper attempts to offer a direction for public anthropology based on an examination of our ongoing intervention in the process of reconstruction after the 3/11 tsunami hit a small village in Iwate, Japan. At the beginning of 2012, I happened to meet the local committee for reconstruction of the town. Since then, we, an ad hoc group composed of an anthropologist and two urban planners, have visited the town regularly and supported the drafting of a local reconstruction plan. In this paper I describe a collective relocation project and the construction of a stone monument in detail. Both cases suggest that different wishes, sorrows, and visions emerge and sometimes crash into one another in the devastated area. The important thing is not to make explicit the differences and conflicts between these, or in other words, to provide a clear vision of the situation they are trapped in. Instead, what is needed is to prepare, through nuanced words and practices, a space where people in different circumstances and with different interests can meet and work together. Paraphrasing James Peacock's simile for anthropology as a lens bringing soft focus in harsh light, I dub this "public anthropology as soft light."