A year on

Sunday marked a year since the earthquake-tsunami-meltdown. It's been a tough year, emotionally and physically, living in the disaster area, but not.

On Sunday there were ceremonies and moments of silence. At 2.46 pm (the time of the quake), fire trucks sounded their sirens followed by a "mokutou" - where everyone bowed their heads and payed their respects. There were also lighting and candle ceremonies in the prefectural capitals, and prayer services throughout the region.

Ad for a lighting ceremony in my prefectural capital, Morioka, Iwate.

WHERE WE ARE

I haven't been out to the coast since the 3 days I spent there last March. So my impressions of the coast come from friends and TV.

It seems much of the road network is back up. Some of the train tracks have been fixed, but I'm not sure how much. The airport in Sendai is running. People are rebuilding. There is still a long way to go. A long, long way, but everybody is dealing with it.

We're still on setsuden - electricity conservation measures. Noone seems to know if or when power plants will generate enough energy to support East Japan again. But we seem to be getting by on what we have. Everyone is conscientious about energy use.

WHERE I AM

I can't explain the emotion I feel in regard to the disaster. I lived through it, like people all over Tohoku. I live way too many miles in land to have been in danger of tsunami, but I went through the thousands of earthquakes with everybody else. My colleague and I started joking that anything under 6.0 wasn't even worth the time. It sounds offhand and callous, but when you experience 100 earthquakes in a day, you have to deal some way.

It's hard for me to deal with the coast. My TV broke and I didn't get a new one. That's partially because I don't want to pay NHK's ridiculous licensing fee. But it's also because there's tsunami are coverage every day, and I can't take it. I guess it's different when you've been there. You've seen my tsunami area pics. Imagine travelling to somewhere - somewhere you've been before, where there used to be houses and buildings and schools - and there's nothing. There's not even debris, no grass, just dirt, as far as your eye can see. I still can't get down to Ritz (Rikuzentakata) where my colleague, Monty Dickson, was claimed by the tsunami. I just can't face the place.

It's still hard to deal with how unaffected I was. I'm an hour inland. One drink fell over in the drink machine and an antenna fell off at work. We ran out of New Zealand Cheese and toilet paper. (My town is a farming town, so we were good for food.) We ran out of gas. The power went off. The trains didn't run for a week. The shinkansen (bullet train) didn't run for over a month, and then when it did run, it ran an hour slower. Due east of me another colleague spent her post-tsunami days cutting up cloth to cover dead bodies. I got off easy.

WHAT I HAVE TAKEN

I am still glad I was here. I am still glad I AM here. Living through the past year has taught me so much about the human condition. About who I become in a bad situation. About how far I can go before I can't take any more. I know how I can be helpful, and how it all feels. And I understand that when the world crumbles, all you can do is to keep moving as best you can. Never forget, no, always carry those memories with you. They make you stronger and better. But always keep moving.

Thank you, Tohoku. I will keep moving. ありがとう日本。続きます。

3 days in the tsunami area

I headed out to the coast on Monday to help in the tsunami. I went through the town church.

MONDAY
Our first stop was a church in Miyako, a city about an hour and a half drive South of here on the coast. We spent most of the afternoon walking around the neighbourhood with the Tokyo YMCA spreading limestone dust on the ground in the roads and in some of the old folks' houses. The guys helped another old lady clean up her shop. The population in the countryside is over 33% senior citizens.

MIYAKO

I don't even know how this car got in here. There were houses on all 4 sides...


70 footer parked in the midle of an intersection.


My neighbour after we'd finished spreading around the chalk.


Chalky me, pointing out the mark on the kindergarten van where the water went up to.


Overtaking a boat in the road.


Japan Self Defense Force hard at work.


After work, we headed down to the bay with the group from Morioka (prefectural capital) and Aomori, the prefecture above us. This two story building was flipped and broken in two.


These pics were taken from the top of the sea wall.


The road disintegrated in some areas.


This log landed on top of the sea wall ladder, about 30 ft above sea level.


Boats overturned and run aground.


Stitch.. Every time I saw a toy or doll I wondered about the kid who used to own it.


The seats in the lower left corner probably came from the baseball stadium in the upper right.


Piles of debris on the sides of the road. The crazy thing about Miyako is that you could draw a line between the devastated area and the unaffected area. Our driver told us as we got to the train station, "As soon as we cross this intersection, you will see the damage."


I joked that Toyota must be glad they got the high ground.


Bad joke. Mitsubishi, Daihatsu and Suzuki's other outlet were not so lucky.


Cars on Daihatsu's lot.

The girls spent the night at the kindergarten and the boys at the church. The area the church was in didn't have power back yet, though.

TUESDAY
In the morning we had breakfast and set out for Kamaishi, passing through Yamada and Otsuchi.

YAMADA

Yamada was hit harder than Miyako. It was a tiny bit closer to the epicenter and it's a little lower elevation.


Devastated home store.


Boats on the side of the road.


We think the red spray paint was the army's markings, but we're not sure what they meant.


A boat on a store roof.


A house on its side in the road.


A section of the sea wall crumbled.


The river banks.


Dressed for a day of hard work. The hotel behind me had it's first 2 floors devasted, but everything above that was fine.

OTSUCHI


Debris mountains on the river bank.


The Mitsubishi sign, but no building and no cars.


The second story of a house. This was actually pretty common. I think the first story probably crumbled with the pressure, but the 2nd stories floated.

There was a stretch of impassable road on Route 45, so we took the expressway to Kamaishi.

KAMAISHI
The plan was to clean the church out so there'd be a place to store donated goods and for volunteers to camp out. There is still no power in the area and the bathroom doors all came off, which meant the girls had to use the porta-potties at the hospital next door. The stove was destroyed so we cooked on camp stoves with portable spray cans of gas.


The kitchen at the church after we'd been cleaning for an hour. The tsunami was much taller here. Even though we were a couple blocks in from the coast, water reached the second story of the building.


A car parked on top of a roadside fence.


The base of operations for Police and Red Cross. JSDF was camped a little further on at a Junior High School School is out right now. It's actually the end of the school year. The earth quake happened on the last day of school.


It is life as usual just a little further on. The devasted areas in the towns we visited extended less than a mile from the shore.


We spent the night at a church in Tono, which is inland of Kamaishi. (Apparently it takes 5 people to fill up the can with gas. We were travelling with cans of gas because of the ridiculous lines in gas stations. I think the priests and volunteers coming in from outside the area must have brought gas with them.)

WEDNESDAY

KAMAISHI

We headed back to the church in Kamaishi after breakfast and a short Thanksgiving service.

Somehow I didn't notice this car wrapped around a pole on the first day. It was right across the road from the church.


The license plates of cars which had been removed. You may not be able to see it, but it also includes where they were found, eg. 'in a pole in front of the church.'


It was only after the second full day at the Kamaishi church that we realised that the stained glass was a depiction of the Great Flood. Eerie.


The kitchen after 8 hours of being cleaned by 14 or so people. (All the people in my volunteer group. They was also a group from Hokkaido, but they were working on the building next door. As well as a group of American missionaries who live in Nagano, who were working with the donated stuff.)


Final meal of the trip at a ramen shop just before getting on the interstate at Towa.

The trip left me with a weird mix of feelings. I don't think anyone could come through that much devastation without getting a little depressed. But I was also pleasantly surprised to meet priests and Christians from 5 prefectures (Hokkaido, Aomori, Iwate, Tokyo, Ehime). Christians represent less than .1% of Japanese population.

I was happy to see the spirit of the people in the area. Everybody was cleaning their homes or stores or helping someone else clean theirs. Everybody was smiling. Even though many of them had only the frames of their buildings left.

And even though I feel weird about it, I actually had a good time. You can't really spend 2 days scraping mudd out of the insides of pianos and organs and stoves and not make friends.

So, there you have it. My 3 days on the coast.