Eight months on… lots of mud

A couple of weeks back I went up north to do a bit of volunteering and, let’s be honest, to have a bit of a stickybeak at the situation up there.

I hooked up with a volunteer group called It’s Not Just Mud, which is run by a young British guy who was happily teaching English down in Osaka but was so struck by what he saw on the telly that he quit his job and packed his bags and came up to volunteer while camping in a tent. That was in June and he’s still here, and It’s Not Just Mud is now a well-organised unit (soon to be an NPO) with a steady stream of volunteers coming through, and even their own house which operates like a huge commune and reminds me of the place I used to live 20 years ago.

Well the volunteering was a revelatory experience and I’ll try to describe what I encountered. Most of Ishinomaki still resembles a war zone. All the debris piled up in the streets has been removed and the streets have been cleared. The majority of the damaged buildings have been removed, but there are still enough around to give you an idea of the sheer power of the tsunami.

For instance, here are some typical examples of houses that have clearly not been touched since March.

(If you look really carefully you can see the clock inside that must have stopped when the water reached the ceiling.)

Many of the blocks have been cleared. I reckon that more than half the houses in our area were gone, and about half of those remaining were uninhabitable. In other words, maybe a quarter of the homes actually had the lights on and people in them.

The water came up to the top of the ground floor of most buildings and hung around for several days. So the top floors of homes are mostly OK, except where they’ve been bashed into by a large floating object, such as another house. Incidentally, we’re told that many people died of exposure in the freezing cold days after the earthquake, huddled in their upstairs bedrooms with no food or drinking water and no way to get out.

This house copped a bit more than most; perhaps it was a low-lying area.

The lucky homeowners with lots of money in the bank can just rebuild, and we saw quite a few brand spanking new homes around the place. But most don’t have that sort of money, and the government handouts have been pretty woeful and as for all the millions collected by the Red Cross worldwide, well, nobody seems to know quite what’s happened to it, which is kind of alarming. Meanwhile, I was surprised to see even some of the large franchises have elected not to rebuild. Or perhaps they don’t have the money either.

But there are also many stores up and running, including the ubiquitous convenience stores, the mainstay of modern Japanese society, as well as smaller local shops. And in amongst the devastation it was reassuring to see the vending machines back in action:

One morning I went down to look at the oil terminal that used to lie right on the shoreline. The area covered in water used to be where the trucks came to fill up with oil. Apparently the entire land mass has subsided by 700 mm — enough to let the sea in to cover it all over.

Nearby was this sad light pole:

And this oil tank, completely shifted off its base:

There are several rubbish dumps around town where bulldozers work ceaselessly adding more to the mountains of debris.

Along with piles of rubbish, there are piles of cars. Literally.

Anyway that gives you a general idea of the scene. So on to the volunteering effort. For the first two days we were shovelling mud out of drains by the side of the road, where it has been sitting for eight months, and into little white bags. It was a bit like an archaeological dig; in one place the mud was full of tools and car parts, in another place household crockery, occasionally a DVD, all sorts of stuff. It was a slow and labour-intensive job, but until such time as somebody invents a roadside trench scraper, this is the only way to get the stuff out.

I must admit to being pretty apprehensive beforehand, given that manual labor is not my strong point, but I’m happy to report that the back held out OK, I was a Useful Member of the Group and lots of mud was duly shoveled into bags to be taken away, presumably to one of the rubbish dumps. Which is kind of ironic when you think of it, because bags of dirt are exactly what you need when the water comes. Perhaps they could store them all somewhere to be brought out in time for the next tsunami?

On the third day we were on house-gutting duty. This involves removing the water-damaged walls, floors and sometimes ceilings on the ground floor of a home in preparation for Real Builders to come in and redo them all with new materials so that the owners can move back in. For those whose homes were left relatively intact, it must be a wonderful thing indeed to have teams of volunteers come in and refurbish the place for you. But a pity for the ones whose homes had to be torn down. Such is the brutal luck of natural disasters.

This is one of the rooms where we removed the floor. Note the thick layer of mud on the concrete base that has sat there for months and then dried up during summer. And yes, we had to shovel all the dry mud into bags too. Next to me is Nicole, a 16-year-old from Canada who came all the way over with her step-dad to help out.

On the fourth day, our sturdy team of volunteers started the day helping to hand out a truckload of 16,000 cabbages donated by a kind farmer in Nagano prefecture. We unloaded a stack at one of the temporary housing villages on the edge of town. I was surprised to see a soup kitchen set up at the village, doling out meals to the residents; surely by now everyone would have their act together? But then someone pointed out to me that these people would have lost absolutely everything on March 11, including their jobs; so they started with nothing and with no source of income still don’t have enough money to buy and cook food. You just assume that everything sorts itself out, but clearly in many cases it doesn’t.

In the afternoon one of the guys took a few of us about 20 minutes up the road to the town of Onogawa. Here the devastation was complete. The entire township, with the exception of a few houses well up on the hillsides, has been wiped clean. The funnel-shaped topography of the inlet at Onagawa served to channel the tsunami into a wall of water higher than anything seen elsewhere.

This photo was taken on our way down the valley. Even up here, the ground is bare.

This photo shows the hospital on the hill near the sea; the hospital carpark doubles as the official evacuation point. But the wave got so high at its peak that it reached the second floor of the hospital, and those who gathered there were swept away. In the foreground is the underneath of a four-storey reinforced concrete building that was toppled over. Word is they’re going to leave it there as a sort of monument to the power of nature.

This is the old seafront, previously a bustling shopping district, showing the toppled building and the newly raised roads.

It’s a similar story over the other side of town. If the wave reached the hospital then I imagine that these buildings would have been totally submerged.

This used to be the produce market on the water’s edge.

And finally, another toppled building lying serenely in the peaceful lapping water with boats nestling nearby.

So that was my four days and I dearly wish it could have been more. It was an inspiring experience and one that I would love to do again. Many of the It’s Not Just Mud volunteers are repeat offenders; some have been there for weeks if not months on end. I’d love to be a bigger part of the clean-up effort. If only we weren’t going back to Australia in a couple of months… if only we didn’t live down the other end of the country… if only I’d gone up there a bit earlier… lame-sounding excuses I guess.