Ishinomaki, Rikuzentakata, Ofunato, Kamaishi, Kesennuma, Fukushima… These places were suddenly placed on the map in the world consciousness on the 11th of March 2011. Before that fateful Friday, few people abroad had heard of these towns. Small as they were, together they still were home to hundreds of thousands of people. Only the largest city in the area, Sendai, might have rung a bell amongst those with an interest in Japan or world affairs in general. Having been destroyed by severe bombing during the World War II, Sendai had risen from the ashes to become a very pleasant city of more than a million inhabitants and the capital of the Tohoku region.
The
smaller towns on the Sanriku Kaigan facing the Pacific had lived off the ocean
for hundreds of years. Generations of fishermen had eked out a living in the
sea and the area was the world leader in mariculture of oysters and seaweed.
Sanriku kombu, nori and others set the world standard in quality and taste.
Sanriku Kaigan had acquired new economic activities, including some heavy
industry and notably tourism due to its unparalleled beauty, but much had
remained the same for generations. That was much of the attraction in these
ocean faring communities. On that cold early spring Friday, the ocean struck
with unimaginable force claiming the lives and livelihoods of entire towns and
communities.
Much
has been written about the tsunami and the massive magnitude 9 Tohoku earthquake that
caused it. I wrote about it immediately based on reports from the media supplemented by scattered messages
that were received from family and friends in Tohoku. There have been
scientific analyses of what happened and why, as well as many reportages about
the human cost, about people who lost everything, about survivors crowding into
temporary shelters where they’d have to live for months to come. Officially,
more than 15,000 people perished in the event, with more than 3,000 still
missing.
What
also received plenty of attention in national and international media was the
meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant after the earthquake and tsunami.
This sad episode revealed some unexpected incompetence and a dark side in the
cosy relationship between big industry and the governmental agencies that are
supposed to regulate it. These tensions continue till today, as the nuclear
lobby and its pawns in the government have restarted the pressure to rebuild
the power, while 80% of the Japanese people now favour phasing it out. But
that’s another long story that I am not in the best place to comment on.
Just
recently, I had the chance take a tour of some of the worst affected coastal
areas. It was 1 year and 9 days after the event. Our friend, Takehiko Abe, living
in the Iwate prefecture of Tohoku region offered to take us on a day trip to
the coast. Another geographer by training, he shares my interest in the natural
and human processes that shape the earth. In fact, Abe Take Sensei, as he is
known, was Yoko’s high school teacher years ago (the ‘sensei’ part refers to
the respect given to teachers in Japan). He picked us up with his Toyota Belta
at Mizusawa town hall and we headed straight east across the coastal mountains.
It was late-March but new snow was falling and the mountains rising some 800
metres above sea level displayed a tricolour pattern with the dark green of the
conifers and the brown of the leafless trees against a matt of white snow on
the ground. On the higher reaches as the winding road edged up the hillsides,
the tree branches looked dreamlike covered with thick pads of white snow. In
between, in the valleys, rice paddies glistened wet.
After
some 60 km, we descended to the coastal plain along the Kesengawa valley. The
river valley had provided a natural conduit for the tsunami waters, which had
here reached 8 km inland wiping out everything low enough on the riverbanks
with its force.
We
arrived in Rikuzentakata, the town where the tsunami damage had been the
widest, although there were towns where more people had died. The determinants
of the death toll were varied, depending obviously on the geographical setting
of the coastline and the settlements, but also on other factors. Abe Take
Sensei explained that in Iwate prefecture, the population had been educated to
drop what they were doing and immediately head towards higher ground when they
heard the tsunami warning, whereas in neighbouring Miyagi prefecture to the
south such education had not been given. So when the tsunami warning came,
school kids and others in the Iwate towns like Rikuzentakata started running,
grabbing smaller ones with them, while students in Ishinomaki in Miyagi were
told to stay put in the assumed safety of the school building only to be
swallowed by the waves.
Still,
it was hard to see how anyone could have survived the onslaught of the waters
in Rikuzentakata. Most of the city was built on the wide floodplain that seemed
to go for kilometres before the coastal terraces rose above it. Virtually all
the individual houses that had stood on the plain had been entirely wiped away.
Not even their foundations could be anymore detected, as the bulldozers had
pushed the unfathomable amount of rubble that had covered the land into high
mounds that now dotted the landscape. In one place, in the middle of the plain,
I saw the two headstones that had marked the entrance to a large house sticking
up from the flat open land. The family’s name was permanently carved in the
stone, but nothing else of them or their house remained.
Some
of the larger and sturdier buildings constructed with reinforced concrete still
stood, but were mostly only frames with their innards gutted out. Some, like
the Capital Hotel that had held the prime spot on the waterfront, were so
strong that it still seemed conceivable that they could be repaired. We stopped
by the local hospital, which was gutted up to the 3rd and top floor.
The flat rooftop luckily had been high enough to be out of the reach of the
waves. Patients, doctors and nurses who had made it there had been rescued by
helicopter. Close by, we saw an apartment building still standing. There the
tsunami had reached up to the 4th floor pushing straight through the
building taking with it whatever and whoever was inside.
Abe
Take Sensei told about his daughter’s friend who had just recently moved to Rikuzentakata from Sendai with her husband and two small children, one of whom
was just a new-born baby. The entire family had perished in the tsunami.
A
visit to the city hall was heart breaking. The lobby, facing towards the sea but
far from the water, was still full of rubble with cables and beams hanging from
the ceiling. There was a crushed car, which the waves had washed in. On the floor,
there was a pile of elementary school children’s rucksacks still full of books.
A page from a photo album with faded snapshots of smiling children was lying
amongst them. An impromptu altar had been erected at the entrance, with burning
incense, fresh flowers and other offerings piled on it. Helplessly, I added my
modest contributions to it. This was o-higan
time during which, according to the Japanese Buddhist tradition, spirits return
to the land. The flowers, drinks and food were placed there for them.
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We
drove up to a terrace behind the floodplain. There a Buddhist temple stood
amidst a small forest. As is the tradition, the temples are usually located on higher
ground and thus this and others survived the tsunami. The graveyard next to it had
many new graves (including for pets) and people were there to bring flowers,
buckets of water to wash the tombstones, and incense.
The
tsunami also caused huge damage to the natural environment, which has
gone—perhaps understandably, given the immediate impacts on people’s
lives—underreported. The best assessment I’ve read about the environmental
damage comes from my friend Vicente Santiago-Fandiño, a scientist with many
years in Japan. Such irreplaceable loss was evident in Rikuzentakata, its
Matsubara beach destroyed. The beach had been recognized as one of Japan’s most
beautiful natural sites since the Taisho period in the 1920s. The 2 km stretch
of sandy beach was lined with some 70,000 pines. The tidal wave left only one
of them, a 200 year old tough tree standing. It still stands there as a lone
sentry guarding over its fallen comrades, but its future is not promising. Despite
efforts to protect it—it is testimony to the spirit of the Japanese that they
would dedicate any energy to the tree under these dire circumstances—its
standing place has become waterlogged with sea water and its roots exposed to
the saline water are dying.
As
we left the town and headed north on the coast the snowfall intensified, the
wind whipping it sideways turning the bleak landscape into monochrome. The road
took us through several tunnels till we emerged on the other side of the
mountains. Here there was less snow and the weather was turning sunny. Ofunato
was built along a long and narrow bay stretching north and protected from the
open ocean by a thin peninsula to the east. The town and its port still had not
been safe from the tsunami. Yet, the atmosphere here was somehow more
optimistic and I hope it wasn’t just my own mood improving with the sun coming
out.
We
stopped in Fukkoo Yataimura, an area
where prefabricated housing for shelters had been erected. In the same area, we
were delighted to find, many restaurants and izakaya drinking establishments—even some clubs with live music—had
reopened after their original places in downtown Ofunato had been rendered unusable.
It was time for lunch, so we decided to have some here. The choice
was—unfortunately—left to me, as it was assumed (partly correctly, I’m sorry to
say) that I had the most food limitations in company. I regret to say that I do
have some prejudices towards seafood that is not readily identifiable as fish.
And that, in essence, is what the Sanriku delicacies consist of. Our previous
visit to Sanriku had been slightly embarrassing We had stopped in Kesennuma—no
longer in existence—which then was a major fishing port and the main centre of
Japan’s shark fishing industry (I am not fond of that: most sharks are
endangered and the Chinese fancy for shark’s fin is driving the despicable
trade, which is both wasteful and inhumane). Abe Take Sensei had designs for us
to eat a long and fabulous seafood lunch at one of the local places. The
restaurant was great: wooden tables with no tablecloths, entirely genuine with
no tourists around—and you could get any creature from the ocean, cooked or
uncooked. Abe Take Sensei was ordering various delicacies—from shark’s heart to
sunfish, mambo, with an odd, flat
face—when I shocked him by asking for a simple grilled samma, a pike mackerel, common in any non-specialist restaurant and
amply available in supermarkets. Till this day, I have a reputation in Iwate
for having ordered samma teishoku in
a superb seafood restaurant.
Well,
I’d take such embarrassment any time if that brought Kesennuma back. This time
in Ofunato, however, we settled for a small Chinese restaurant and sat at the
counter. The lady running the place was very friendly, even cheerful, despite
the fact that a year ago her restaurant had been destroyed and she had had to
relocate to temporary barracks. The food the cook—her husband labouring in a small
space behind some curtains—produced was very tasty. This time the meal
contained no seafood. The inside of the little restaurant was painted red. The
top of the counter was decorated with artistic calligraphy in gold drawn by
hand with a brush by a Chinese volunteer who had visited the restaurant. The
proprietor explained how the sea connected coastal areas in Japan since ancient
times. The local dialect here, which she masters, is closer to that in Kyoto
far to the south and west, than to the dialect spoken further inland in Iwate.
Continuing
north, we arrived at Kamaishi, with a tall white Buddha statue, Kamaishi Dai Kannon, overlooking the
city from a high forested cliff.
The town is located in a narrow valley at the
end of a bay. Thus it had been badly hit. “In this town, most people died,”
said Abe Take Sensei as we entered the city. Not quite, but the devastation was
still visible. The main street, running up from the harbour, was lined with
buildings that had been gutted until the 2nd and 3rd
floors. 
Amazingly, shops had reopened in buildings that were still operational.
“Oh my, that barber is open,” Yoko exclaimed as she noticed the classic
red-blue-white spiral marking the small shop squeezed in between badly damaged
buildings. Around town we saw many stores that were open again and tempting
customers. The reconstruction has brought to the area large numbers of workers—mainly
men without families. The barbershops and izakayas would likely be in demand.
The
double tragedy of the earthquake and tsunami was horrible. Luckily the nuclear
disaster, bad as it was, took place far enough not to threaten this area. Still,
so many lives ended and so many others were devastated. The economy of the
region and the country suffered an incredible blow. Yet, people and towns are slowly
being reconstructed and bouncing back.
This is not the first time Sanriku has
been badly hit: in 1896, the Meiji-Sanriku earthquake caused a major tsunami in
the region killing at least 22,000 people; then again in March 1933, another
earthquake sent in a destructive tidal wave. One can only admire the Japanese
people whose stoic discipline, organization and respect for other people and
community has done what in many other places would seem impossible: cleaning
up, building back, re-establishing businesses, restarting lives in the face of
incredible adversity. Where one would not even know where to start and the
enormity of the task would seem insurmountable, after just a year they have
brought new hope to Sanriku Kaigan.
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