On the trains: America has a lot to learn from abroad

The train sped through the rice paddies that shone intense green in the bright sunshine. Some of the paddies seemed already be turning yellow, somewhat early for the season in the beginning of August. Behind the fields rose the Ōu mountain range that separates the central valley of Iwate from the Sanriku coast. It was a hot, clear day but thick white and black clouds were lingering over the mountains. We were heading north towards the highest peak in the range: Mt. Iwate that reaches 2,038 meters above sea level and is the tallest mountain in the northern part of Japan’s main island, Honshu.

This was a local train with just a few cars, with seats arranged on the sides facing the center aisle, subway style. We could see the conductor standing behind the glass in his cabin at the front of the train. Beyond him, we saw the tracks opening ahead of us. The train was quite crowded on this Sunday afternoon. High school kids, boys in soccer uniforms, old people dozing off, middle-aged women with shopping bags. Two pairs of young people were wearing beautiful cotton yukatas that looked cool in the hot afternoon. I was the only gaijin – foreigner – on the train, which we had caught at the station in Mizusawa, my wife’s hometown, about 70km south of the prefectural capital of Morioka. While we waited at the Mizusawa station, tens of nambu furin wind chimes provided a lovely soundtrack in the light breeze. The Japanese Ministry of Environment has designated Mizusawa station as one of the 100 Soundscapes of Japan.

The train ran smoothly, reaching high speeds between the stops. The stops were rather frequent: not just the bigger centers of Kitakami and Hanamaki, but numerous smaller places: Kanegasaki, Rokuhara, and others. A few passengers were traveling with suitcases, heading to the Hanamaki regional airport, which in addition to domestic airports serves international destinations in Taiwan and Shanghai. Due to the frequent stops, the trip to Morioka took over an hour. We could have taken the shinkansen bullet train, which would have been much faster – the elevated shinkansen tracks run more or less parallel to the local train tracks – but would then have missed the pleasure of slower travel at ground level. Traveling on these local trains in Japan is to me a distinct pleasure. It gives meaning to the tired old saying, attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: It’s not the destination. It’s the journey.

It is also such a joy to see that these local train lines are doing well and are in heavy use. They are carefully maintained and widely used by a variety of people. Apart from the bullet train and the local train line, there’s an superb highway – the Tohoku Expressway – that connects all these places. Yet, because of the excellent and affordable public transportation options, not that many people feel the need to jump into their own car. Consequently, the highway is not excessively crowded. Why bother driving yourself when you can just jump on a train and enjoy the scenery?

Despite my love for the local trains, I do appreciate the shinkansen as well. The bullet trains are, well, fast, smooth, reliable, and environmentally sound. It impresses me that the ride is so even that you can leave your drink unattended on the tray while the speed approaches or exceeds 300 km/h. The trains run so punctually that you can literally check your watch based on when the train departs. There is not even half a minute’s deviation from schedules (unlike in the US, where Amtrak staff only start thinking about getting the train ready a few minutes after the scheduled time). A couple of weeks ago we took the Yamabiko shinkansen from Tokyo to MizusawaEsashi, a trip of 500 km, which takes just over 2.5 hours.

Last April, I had the pleasure of taking the Nozomi shinkansen from Tokyo to Japan’s second city, Osaka, in the west of the country. That trip runs just below Mt. Fuji, Japan’s tallest at 3,776 meters. The iconic mountain boasts a perfectly symmetric cone rising close to the sea at Suruga Bay. Admiring the handsome landscape as we sped by it, I remembered years ago hiking to the top. It took several hours and, despite some additional oxygen, gave me a splitting headache. However, staying overnight on the summit was definitely worth it for the gorgeous sunrise over the Pacific Ocean. It’s easy to understand where Japan got its moniker as the Land of the Rising Sun.

These types of train are not the only ones in Japan. All major cities have functioning subways, and in many places – from Tokyo to Osaka to Naha in Okinawa – there are convenient and comfortable monorails running on elevated tracks connecting the cities to their airports. All rails in the country are, naturally, electrified, another major difference with the US. Of the Amtrak network, only the Northeast corridor, running from Washington, DC, to Boston, passing through Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York City, runs fully on electricity. The rest still relies on diesel and thus contributes to pollution and climate change.

The US situation is globally the exception. Countries from Europe to China have clean and efficient high-speed trains. As it happens, this year has allowed me to experience several of them. In May, I rode the Frecciarossa, which connects the north of Italy to the south, from Turin to Salerno. That train can reach even higher speeds, up to 360 km/h. I only took it from Rome to Florence to see a friend there. In July, while in Finland, I rode the intercity train from Helsinki to the second city of Tampere to visit another old friend. He had advised me to pay a few euro extra to reserve a seat on the second floor, which I did and could thus enjoy the scenery in quiet comfort (that is, until I descended to the restaurant car and joined a crowd of cheerful fellow travelers for a cold beer). The return to Helsinki was on an Italian-made Pendolino train, which is used in more than a dozen countries across Europe, as well as in China and some routes in the US.

Continuing from my native country to Switzerland, I landed in Zurich and had to travel to the capital, Bern, where I was to teach a three-day workshop hosted by the university. Naturally, I took the train. On the way back, there was an unfortunate delay due to an obstacle on the tracks, which forced the train to divert. The operators apologized profusely for the 6-minute delay in our arrival to Zurich.

This to me is the normal state of affairs. Virtually all developed countries have invested in high-speed electric rail networks. They are fast, safe, and environmentally sound. Only the US lags behind. Amtrak is losing money, with only the Northeast corridor operating on a profit. The ticket prices are exorbitant, making the train trip from, say, the national capital to New York City a luxury that is beyond the reach of many travelers. While the Acela trains would be capable of traveling at high speed, the state of the old rails prevents it from doing so, thus rendering the trip much slower than necessary – not to mention unreliable with frequent delays. As much of freight in the US moves by rail, the freight trains get the right of way, forcing the passenger trains wait for their passing.

Lack of basic services, such as reserved seats, even in business class, makes the boarding process into a mad rush, a deficiency that could so easily be remedied. (I do have to admit that there have been significant improvements to the boarding process at New York’s Penn Station, which I could experience early in the year.)

In addition, there are occasional derailments that give the perception that train travel is not safe. A recent poll showed that a majority of Americans think that traveling by private car is the safest mode of transportation, which obviously is far from truth, statistically. Still, derailments do happen and give Amtrak a bad rap. Recent ones include a derailment in Missouri in June 2022 and in Montana in September 2021, both of which resulted in loss of life. Add to that accidents, such as the February 2023 Ohio tanker train derailment in East Palestine close to the border to Pennsylvania, which spilled over 115,000 gallons of highly toxic and flammable vinyl chloride, it’s no wonder many Americans are suspicious of train traffic.

California, arguably the most progressive state in the union, has worked on a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco since the $33 billion project was approved in 2008. It was supposed to be completed in 2022, but is nowhere near there. The cost overruns are staggering. The latest estimates have placed the real cost to $113 billion. According to the New York Times, the difficulties have been mostly due to political compromises that have sent the tracks through various diversions through difficult, geologically complex, and costly routes in the mountainous and earthquake-prone area. With the costs escalating and the heavy delays holding back progress, political and public support to the project is flagging.

There are many explanations and excuses why rail traffic doesn’t catch on in USA. The above-mentioned difficulties with efficiency, cost, safety, and perceptions certainly all are important. There is also the issue of long distances. However, Europe is large, as well: it’s 3,300 km from Stockholm to Madrid, for example, or about the same distance as from Chicago to San Francisco. Distances in China are also long: about 2,300 km from Shanghai on the coast to Kunming in the Southwest. Americans take flying as a basic human right. But with the mess the airline traffic finds itself – frequent delays and cancelations, onerous security checks, crowded planes, poor service, unruly passengers – one would think that other alternatives would appeal to travelers. But for most people, the alternative that comes to mind is driving, even if it takes hours and sometimes days on crowded highways with aggressive drivers. Supposedly, this reflects the deep rooted individualistic on-the-road culture of Americans.

Then there’s the politics. In general, American politics from the Federal through State and local levels is highly contentious and polarized, making it hard to pass any major legislation involving costly investment. The general position, especially on the right, is that public investments – even as so much of infrastructure is crumbling – is unaffordable, as it would require raising the taxes for the rich. And, in particular, public transport smacks of socialism. In this atmosphere, making the needed investments for improving – and electrifying – the rail network would not be an easy task. The good news is that the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill passed in 2021 does include $102 billion to improve rail infrastructure over the 2022-2026 fiscal years. It remains to be seen how far this will reach. But you have to start somewhere.

Back in Mizusawa

Yoko and Nowa in the old part of Mizusawa

July and we’re back in Mizusawa, as regularly as migrating birds, every summer for many years already. This is Yoko’s hometown and I’ve grown to feel it’s mine as well. Nowa has spent most of her summers and some New Year's vacations there too. 

I’ve also watched it change, both economically, socially and geographically. Mizusawa has some history, although it’s short by Japanese standards where history is measured in centuries and millennia: the town was founded in 1889 and made formally into a city in 1954. But by now, Mizusawa is no longer a city in its own right. In 2006 it was merged with the neighboring communities of Esashi, Maesawa, Isawa and Koromogawa to form the new city of Oshu. The former cities (shi) were downgraded to the status of wards (ku) in the newly formed Oshu-shi. It probably made sense in some administrative manner. Life in Mizusawa didn’t change noticeably and the old Mizusawa city hall close to our house was turned into Oshu city hall.

Our house

We are in Iwate prefecture (ken) in the middle of the Tohoku region in the northern part of the main Japanese island of Honshu. Oshu-shi is almost 500 km straight north from Tokyo. It is located in a north-south valley, with the tall mountains of Akita-ken rising to the west. A coastal mountain range separates the area from the Sanriku coast further to the east. This is very lucky as the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11^th, 2011, that destroyed many of the coastal towns, such as Rikuzentakata, Ofunato, Kamaishi and Kesennuma, killed more than 15,000 people, and caused the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, hardly affected Mizusawa’s surroundings. Sure, the massive shakes were felt here strong enough and electricity was cut off for two weeks in parts of the town, but that was the extent of the damage.

Mizusawa was a small town, at least by Japanese standards. It used to have a bit over 60,000 inhabitants when it was put together with its neighbors. It is a center of an agricultural area with expansive tracts of rice paddies, apple orchards and vegetable gardens. Consequently, many of the inhabitants are rural types and the age structure rather old. Although Iwate (like Akita) has plenty of hot springs, the main resort areas – like the famous Hanamaki Onsen – are further north from Mizusawa, in the mountains. Mizusawa did have some things going for it, though, that made it different from some of the other small rural towns. It was an administrative center for the region and it had a big hospital.

Rural outskirts

Small rivers and canals run through the old part of town. Some houses along them are old and somewhat dilapidated but new ones are appearing here and there. The waterways are generally clean and there are fish and crayfish in the main channel. Some beautiful gardens line the creeks.

Urban canals

Interestingly, the town is also host to one of the six International Latitude Observatories, which has for decades brought visiting scholars and scientists to the town from all over the world. All these observatories – in California, Ohio, Maryland, Italy, Turkmenistan and Mizusawa – are located near the 39^o08’ parallel to measure the Earth’s wobble. You can still go for days without seeing another foreigner, but at least people are quite used to seeing my kind of big blond gaijin in town. This summer, there are three American kids enrolled in the Mizusawa elementary school.

The shinkansen station

Oshu-shi lies about halfway between the two largest cities in Tohoku: Sendai (pop. 1.1 million) to the south and Morioka (pop. 297,000) to the north. The main Tohoku shinkansen bullet train track goes through Oshu-shi and makes a stop at the Mizusawa-Esashi station. Some people are surprised that the shinkansen makes a stop at the juncture of these relatively small towns, but there is a logical explanation: Ichiro Ozawa (b. 1942). The perennial opposition leader and powerful politician actually hails from Mizusawa and remains quite popular in these parts. Even we received a congratulatory message from him when we got married at the Komagata shrine here in town (this didn’t please my mother-in-law who was a regional planner in the prefectural government and no fan of Ozawa’s). In a type example of politics of patronage, Mizusawa received a shinkansen stop.

A ceremony at Komagata shrine

There’s a twist to the story, however – a twist that explains some of the later developments in the urban geography of the area. Mizusawa is also on the regular north-south railway line on which the local trains to Morioka and smaller towns in Iwate travel. Naturally, the original plan was to build the Tohoku shinkansen line so that it would take the same route and the bullet trains would stop at around the existing Mizusawa station. The station area at that time was the heart of the city, with a thriving main street containing many shops and restaurants and a couple of hotels. Apparently the chamber of commerce feared that a shinkansen station would disturb their idyll and voted against it. Instead, the shinkansen would stop some kilometers further east, in a relatively unpopulated area between the cities of Mizusawa and Esashi.

How wrong could they have been? What happened was that the area around the new shinkansen station started to develop, as many people preferred to live close to the transportation hub that would take them to Morioka, Sendai and all the way to Tokyo. The area around Mizusawa station declined and shops started closing.

Universe -- A new shopping center

In a parallel development, Mizusawa became much more car-oriented. The old center with its narrow streets was made for walking and biking. Now shopping centers with expansive parking lots were developed on the outskirts of the town. The outer roads turned into strip malls with car dealerships, pachinko parlors with slot machines, chain restaurants and other establishments. The best hotel in town is no longer the Mizusawa Grand on the main station street (where our wedding reception was held) but the MizusawaPlaza Inn to the east from the local train tracks. Full disclosure: Plaza Inn is owned and operated by one of Yoko's best friends, Mami Kikuchi; the girls went to junior high school together. The hotel is very popular as a wedding location and boasts two excellent restaurants: a traditional Japanese restaurant Kikusui; and the Western Quattre Saisons. (Typically of the modesty of the Japanese people, the successful businesswoman Mami who in addition owns other restaurants in Iwate still drives a tiny Suzuki Lapin.)

With Mami and her Lapin

As in so many Japanese towns, there is a fancy multipurpose cultural center in Oshu-shi as well. The Z Hall that contains a large concert hall and hosts a variety of events (and where my brother-in-law Jun works) was also built to the east of the tracks towards Esashi.

There was a time a decade or so ago when it was rather depressing to walk along the main street by the station, as so many of the shops were closed down and very few people would be on the street. A large number of small bars were still operating in the narrow small streets north of the main drag but the evenings tended to feel rather lonely, while younger people drove to the family restaurants in the shopping centers and strip malls. Even the classic Takatoyo fish mongers moved further out.

Jun sings at Urara while Akira tends bar

Then something seems to have happened again and the area no longer feels dead. New shops and cafés have opened around the station, as have big and shiny karaoke joints to compete with the rustic Urara, a karaoke bar run by Yoko and Jun’s aunt Eiko and her husband Akira. One reason may be the development of new housing and opening of a shopping center, Universe, not far from the old center a stone’s throw from our house. The son of the owner of a classic coffee shop, Rengaya, a couple of years ago opened a stylish yet cozy café called Jazzrise, which boasts a great collection of jazz vinyls. It has to be said, though, that the collection is no match to that in Ray Brown, a jazz bar just a couple of blocks away from our house, which Yoko’s uncle Toshikatsu, a keen jazz man, introduced me to.

The old station area has recovered somewhat

Apart from the scientists at the Observatory and a few of us big noses who have married into the Mizusawa society, new groups of foreigners have appeared in recent years. I have heard Russian spoken in the supermarkets and a few years ago noticed groups of Pinoys and other Southeast Asian women, who presumably have moved to the area to get married. In Japan like in many other developed countries, young women move to cities leaving men to farm without ready access to spouses.

Rural Japan is facing a serious problem of depopulation and aging, with planners and researchers talking about ‘ghost towns’ (my friend Brendan Barrett, a professor at Osaka University is one who has written about the unfortunate phenomenon). Apart from the obvious social problems and the declining services in rural areas, this has also serious environmental consequences as old managed agricultural landscapes disintegrate into abandonment. Somewhat counterintuitively, this even threatens biodiversity as the rice-based agricultural and water management systems developed here over millennia – known as satoyama – maintain a rich and delicate balance between natural and human systems.

The main river has clean water, fish and crayfish

Luckily, these problems are not evident here and Oshu-shi is far from a ghost town. It has a fairly stable population of some 120,000 inhabitants and, as the existence of new cafés and bars attests, there are enough of young people in the town (and many have offspring of their own, which is obvious when visiting a shopping center). The city has enough of diversity in employment – from civil service to commerce to health care to science to agriculture – to support a reasonable level of cultural amenities and good restaurants (one of the best – anywhere! – is Ermitage, a French-Russian style establishment, which has attracted visitors from far away since 1983). It is well connected to the wider world through the shinkansen, as well as the Tohoku expressway. Hanamaki airport is less than 40 km away.

The water is clean and abundant, the locally produced food superior, and the climate pleasant (especially this summer when many places in Japan have broken heat records and dozens of people have died as a consequence – the new normal with climate change, I’m afraid – the somewhat cooler and less moist air of Tohoku is a blessing).

Mizusawa still may not be a thrilling center of excitement, but it is a good place to be. And it feels like home.

Tambo (rice paddy) art on the city edge

Rikuzentakata July 2015 - Reconstruction from the Tsunami

The earthworks are simply mind blowing. 24-7, the conveyor belts bring earth from the nearby mountains and pile it on the coastal zone to raise the level of the low-lying land by at least 10 meters. It’s more than four years since the tsunami leveled the Sanriku coast and killed more than 15,000 people and made 230,000 homeless on Japan’s Pacific coast. This rehabilitation work that shows virtually no end is a demonstration of Japanese spirit and tenacity.

I traveled back to the Sanriku coast together with Abetake-sensei to see the progress in reconstruction. We did our first jointtrip here in March 2012, just a year after the great east Japan earthquake and tsunami had laid waste to the most unexpecting part of Japan. Abetake-sensei is my wife’s high school geography teacher in Mizusawa, in Iwate Prefecture.

Mizusawa is luckily some 60 km inland and higher up in elevation from the coast. Although the earthquake affected my family’s area, the tsunami did not reach even close.

Abetake-sensei picked me up in Mizusawa this rainy morning and we crossed the coastal mountain range to reach the Sanriku coast. The rather high limestone mountains have all their steep slopes covered in thick forest. In odd flat locations one can suddenly see perfectly maintained rice paddies on terraces where the terrain has allowed adequate space. At this time of the year, their green is so bright as to shine amongst the dark hills. The rainy season – tsuyu – is supposed to be over but the rain has been heavy since last night.

We stopped at Daitoo, a town about half way to the coast for a rest stop and a cigarette for my host. Daitoo is in a beautiful spot in a valley protected from all sides by mountains. We continued onwards driving through the village of Ohara, a small agricultural congregation by the Satetsugawa river, a tributary to the Kitagamigawa river that flows from the north to the south traversing Mizusawa. We were still on the western side of the watershed, meaning that the river flows inland towards the more major Kitagamikawa river.

Having soon crossed the next range – through some distinctly impressive bridges and tunnels above and through mountains – we started descending to the coastal plain. At this stage the road followed Kesengawa, a charming if not a major river known for its Ayu fisheries (ayu or sweetfish caught in rivers and often grilled or fried is one of the delicacies of the Tohoku region). The Kesengawa drains into the Pacific Ocean and when the tsunami struck, its flow was reversed bringing the devastating flood waters as far as 7 km inland.

Descending onto the coastal plain past the sea terraces, the landscape had changed so much that it was difficult to get one’s bearings. On both sides of the road there were huge mounds of earth leveled by bulldozers while enormous conveyer belts transported more earth to the piles from the nearby mountains. It seemed that the goal was to raise the level of the entire coastal plain by 10 meters. For what purpose, was not imminently clear. Hundreds of men and machines were at work now more than four years after the tragedy.

Access to the coastline was blocked from the main area of the former town. We drove south towards Kesennuma and found a road that led to the fishing port. Even there men were at work establishing seawalls. Still, I was able to get to the waterfront to observe the bay where boats were again active.

The legendary lone pine – Ippon Matsu – that became the symbol of resilience after the tsunami is long gone. It was one in many tall pines that lined the coast and miraculously survived the tidal wave – but despite the efforts of the city officials, scientists and the public, it died because of the salinization of the soil and groundwater after the intrusion of the sea. It lives on in numerous flags and posters and a monument is being established for it, I was told although it was impossible to reach the location. Many Japanese people – including school groups – were strolling around the area with their cameras.

The work will continue for years. It begs the question, though, what for? This is not the first time the Sanriku coast has been hit by a tsunami and it won’t be the last either.  This time the destruction and death toll were huge, mostly because of the coastal development and population concentrations on the waterfront. So why spend all the trillions of yen and years of civil works only so that the coast could be rebuilt and people could reestablish themselves in the hazard zone? Unfortunately, this seems to be an expression of the Japanese attitude, a downside of the tenacity: Engineering and civil works to tame the nature – and at the same time do irrevocable damage to the surrounding mountain environments. Here this seems even more futile because the coast has already been depopulated and virtually all people left for the cities and towns further inland, many with no intent on returning. Some of the old folks may want to return to their home areas but even they would likely not want to live right on the coast where their old neighborhoods were destroyed and friends died.  Most likely, the official approach will be to provide homogenous housing, which will be convenient but not appealing.

Naturally, Rikuzentakata is not the only community on the Sanriku coast that is struggling with recovery. The central government is paying for the efforts but it is the local governments that decide on how the money should be spent. In fact, the central government has been criticized for not spending enough of the allocated funds, so massive civil works like those here are welcome, so that large amounts of funds can be disbursed. The local governments have a wish to make the communities livable again. The trouble is that nobody knows who and how many people would eventually return.

The tsunami disaster had a profound impact on the coastal communities, not only in a physical sense. The very fabric of the communities was torn apart. As my friend, Prof. Mikiyasu Nakayama of Tokyo University, has found in his research, many younger people who used to live with the grandparents in three generation households – especially young women dominated by the mothers-in-law – have found it liberating to move away and establish a new life on their own in the urban areas. Even others have realized that modern life in the city with all its amenities is convenient. There is no going back.

A year after the tsunami

 
Ishinomaki, Rikuzentakata, Ofunato, Kamaishi, Kesennuma, Fukushima… These places were suddenly placed on the map in the world consciousness on the 11^th 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 3^rd 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 4^th 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 2^nd and 3^rd 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.