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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.
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Two months on
Yesterday was officially two months since the Big One, and now that the initial shock has worn off and the international emergency teams have gone home and the one-month-on television specials are out of the way and even the radiation levels are old news, the nation can finally get on with the job of bickering about who’s to blame and how to pay for it all.
The government is rapidly ditching some of its rash election promises, such as free tollways (which always struck me as a contradiction in terms anyway) and the child payment (a blatant pork-barrelling stunt, though it was rather nice when the money arrived in the account I must say), and they’ve started talking about a one-off hike in the consumption tax up from the current 5%. The awful rolling blackouts imposed on Tokyo and the north seen to have been suspended for the time being, although when summer arrives and everyone starts firing up their air conditioners things could get ugly. Interestingly, the threat of blackouts now provides the perfect incentive for people to take notice of those well-meaning campaigns that have been trying for years to convince them to stop setting their air conditioners to such ridiculously cold temperatures. It’s going to be an interesting summer.
Meanwhile the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), operator of the world’s second-favourite nuclear power plant, is looking dodgier by the day: falsification of safety records, storing way over the allowable limit of fuel on site, overly cosy relationship with the industry “regulator”, all sorts of shenanigans are coming to light. Not to mention the general ineptitude of their response. Even taking into account “cultural differences,” that convenient catch-all used to justify secrecy, much like our old friend “commercial in confidence”.
But it turns out there is also an interesting back story to the Fukushima debacle. Apparently the Japanese were strongly encouraged/coerced/forced by the United States to buy the designs for the plant direct from General Electric back in the 70s or whenever it was built. Being designed for American conditions, the facility had only minimal protection against earthquakes and tsunamis. The cooling systems, the cause of all the angst, were sitting outside unprotected and right in the path of the tsunami. Interestingly, the Fukushima No. 2 plant just up the road was based on a home-grown design, with the cooling systems on the inside. And guess what? It suffered much less damage, despite being similarly inundated.
So what is going to happen to dear old TEPCO? Surely they’ll be up for compensation to the thousands upon thousands of residents who have been displaced, if not the businesses directly affected by the blackouts, let alone those indirectly affected, such as tourist operators (apparently there are no foreigners in Tokyo) and those residents of Fukushima prefecture who live well outside the exclusion zone but are being treated like radiation pariahs nevertheless. Surely the company will go under unless it gets government assistance. Surely the public will end up paying for the whole sorry mess through higher taxes anyway. (Not to mention electricity charges; there’s never been a better time to go solar.) And don’t call me Shirley.
Anyway, I wanted to relate some of the powerful images and stories that have remained with me these last two months. Here they are, in no particular order:
• SDF soldiers sorting through the wreckage of a town discover the body of a young girl. They gently cover her up with a sheet. Then they plant an incense stick in the mud nearby, remove their helmets and clasp their hands in silent prayer for a moment.
• Dehumanised radiation workers clad in white suits and masks conduct doorknocks of ghost towns within 20 km of the nuclear reactor. On the roads they have to dodge abandoned bicycles, cars, even a semi-trailer left askew with grass and rubbish all through its wheels. At one house they come across an elderly woman whose husband is confined to bed. They tell her she has to move out because of the radiation but the woman will have none of it. In the end the soldiers have no option but to leave them to their own devices, after checking that they have enough food and water.
• Fighter jets standing on the runway at the Sendai air base with grass and debris stuffed in their jet engines from the tsunami.
• A young mother breaks down as she tells how a local policeman saved her life by standing in the middle of an intersection ordering cars to turn back as the tsunami approached. He was swept away after saving countless lives.
• Grade 6 students in tears trying to deliver acceptance speeches at hastily convened graduation ceremonies at the end of the school year in late March.
• Terrifying stories of people who somehow managed to outrun the tsunami in their tiny cars; one woman didn’t quite make it, and had to abandon her car and scramble up the embankment of a bridge as the wall of water approached. In the newspaper I saw an incredible picture of workers clinging improbably to the broadcast antenna on the roof of a fully submerged three-storey building (ironically the local disaster emergency response centre) as the water surged beneath their dangling feet. They survived.
• Residents from the radiation exclusion zone making furtive trips back to their homes to collect their belongings. (This was last month; the government has since set up non-negotiable road blocks and nobody can get home any more. Except for specially organised visits when they are bussed into the centre of town dressed in radiation suits and permitted to scoot home for precisely two hours at a time.)
• Reports of people from the Fukushima area being denied access to evacuation centres out of fear that they might contaminate others with radiation.
• Our friend Eku (who came down from northern Japan by bullet train to visit us on March 11, passing through Sendai and Fukushima just hours before the earthquake and tsunami struck) has a good friend who lives in one of the towns that was swept away. Together we searched the official Miyagi prefecture website for the name of her friend. For the first few days there was no sign of her friend, but then, on the third day or so, there it is! And the thing that strikes me is that the list that appears on my screen is just a handwritten sheet of paper, the very list written by some volunteer shivering up in some evacuation centre. It somehow makes all those reports on the television seem more real. On seeing her friend’s name Eku was overcome with joy and burst into tears. She rang her sister with the good news. Her sister, while equally overjoyed, advised her not to go back north for a few more weeks since — to be brutally honest — she would just be using up someone else’s supply of petrol, food and heating oil.
• Driving down the highway and seeing a convoy of army trucks heading north for the relief effort.
• Evacuees enjoying a hot bath in portable tubs set up by the army with plastic sheets in a metal frame.
• A passenger cruise boat perched incongruously on top of a three-storey building, with the bow and stern extending out into the street. Even more than the endless destruction of homes and buildings, it is this image which speaks of the absolute power of the tsunami, of nature’s disdain for human endeavour. The captain recalls how he loved taking tourists out on the bay, but is resigned to the fact that his boat will have to be taken down and dismantled before a secondary tremor causes it to topple over.
There are countless more arresting images, not to mention all the heart-rending individual stories. I haven’t seen the death toll for a while but it must be close to 30,000. You try to comprehend the number of people who’ve been personally touched by the disaster and it’s like trying to count grains of sand on a beach. And you have to wonder, do we deserve to be safe and warm and complacent here down south? Is it our turn for a Big One? It’s enough to make you paranoid. Is that the wind rattling the windows or a preemptive tremor? Should I avoid the new 7-11 which is located right next to the sea wall? What I need is some of that Right Stuff the Japanese have, that stoicism that comes from being brought up under the constant threat of natural disaster. But I don’t think I have it in me.
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Too many questions
Twelve biblical days have elapsed since the Big One, and life is gradually returning to normal. Who am I kidding? Over 20,000 dead, 350,000 homeless and a nuclear reactor that still emits smoke can hardly be considered normal.
But there are finally signs of hope. The roads are being cleared and food and supplies are getting through. The government has ordered thousands upon thousands of temporary homes and the first of these have already arrived. Petrol refineries down south have boosted production and tankers are racing up north to ease the shortages. Local governments throughout the country are offering housing packages to tsunami refugees. Volunteers of all persuasions, including doctors and various other professionals, have flooded in from everywhere and donated food packages are arriving thick and fast. The rolling blackouts in Tokyo and elsewhere have been scaled back as people cut back on power usage. The aftershocks are less frequent and the newsreaders no longer deliver updates with their helmets on (seriously, they did!). More importantly, it’s clear that the government has learnt some valuable lessons since the Kobe earthquake of 1995 (I was here for that too; hope it’s not an omen). For instance, they were much quicker to call out the army (sorry, the Self Defence Forces), and much more willing to accept foreign assistance.
So many questions though.
How is it that people were left stranded without food and water and warmth for so long?
Why did the petrol shortages start after just a couple of days?
Why is it taking so long to get power to the reactors, let alone to restore power and gas to the towns and villages?It’s clear that the scale of the disaster took everyone by surprise. Japan is rightly famed for its disaster readiness and training drills at the local level, but the national government simply wasn’t prepared for something on this scale. For example, the 300,000 odd evacuees from the Kobe earthquake were housed in about 1,000 locations concentrated in a relatively small area; this time a similar number of evacuees is spread around more than 2,000 shelters along a massive stretch of northeastern Japan. The logistics of it were simply too much. Another example: the Fukushima power plant had separate emergency plans for an earthquake, a tsunami, a total loss of power and major explosions — but not for all four happening at the same time.
Though I still don’t understand the petrol shortages. Fair enough, the disaster disabled three major ports on the northeast coast as well as several refineries, but surely a nation so totally dependent on foreign oil must have reserve supplies stashed away somewhere for just this sort of contingency. And why has petrol been freely available down south the whole time? Why aren’t we rationing it and sending it up north?
Meanwhile at the individual level there are even more questions. Let’s assume you’ve survived the disaster, you’re safe in an evacuation centre, you’ve finally got food and water thanks to the army of volunteers. But the cold hard reality is that your home and workplace have been obliterated. So once the army leave and the volunteers drift back to their homes and the centre reverts to being a school gymnasium or community hall, where to next? How do you go about earning the money to live, let alone rebuild? How do you go back to work? If you worked at the local council would they keep paying your wage when there’s no council building to go back to? What if before last Friday you used to run a small business in town; who’s going to rebuild it? And if you had a house in one of those villages that got washed away, is your land worth anything any more?
I can’t even begin to understand what people would do in this situation. The only thing I can imagine is that you would seek help from close relatives, but there must be plenty of people without close relatives to rely on.
At the personal level I guess the thing is that I can’t possibly imagine how I myself would cope in this situation. I reckon I’d be a complete shambles, although maybe you only discover what you’re capable of when it happens to you. Even so, I suspect I’d be no match for your average Japanese. For Japan is the land of stoicism and resilience, where coping with hardship is cherished as an important character trait. If ever there were a nation with the Right Stuff for bouncing back from adversity it would have to be this one.
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Utter chaos
It just goes from bad to worse.
After several days of saturation footage of roaring walls of water tossing boats in the air and tearing houses apart, the focus now turns to the humanitarian tragedy that’s emerging here in Japan.
Every night the television brings us scenes of unbelievable personal tragedy. A man goes from room to room in the evacuation centre searching for his wife. An elderly couple search through the debris of the town for their son, calling out his name as they clamber through the ruins of the post office where he was working just last Friday. A woman shakes uncontrollably as she tries to talk to her family on a public emergency phone.
Nearly half a million people have been displaced. Only some of these have lost their homes to the tsunami; many are fleeing from regions that have been cut off from gas and electricity until further notice and quite a few have decided to put a bit more distance between themselves and the ex-nuclear power plant at Fukushima until such time as the situation stabilises.
And some have even managed to survive right in the middle of those villages and towns that were swept away by the tsunami. Several groups managed to scramble to the top of large concrete buildings such as hospitals that withstood the surge. And now, having miraculously survived the tsunami, they find themselves comprehensively stranded and running out of food, water and heating oil and fighting for their survival once again.
The weather has taken a turn for the worse over the past few days and it’s snowing during the day and below freezing overnight. The evacuees are huddled in enormous concrete school gymnasiums and public halls with no heating and dwindling food supplies. It’s hard to believe that this wealthy and powerful nation, which dragged itself up from the ashes of World War II to become a major superpower with the economic clout to buy up large tracts of America, with technological resources that are the envy of the world, is unable to save its own refugees.
Already the first reports have come in of deaths in evacuation centres, mainly old people whose bodies have succumbed to the cold. Where is all the aid, the relief, the helicopter drops? I hear that there’s some regulation in Japan that says helicopters aren’t allowed to drop relief parcels; please tell me it isn’t true. The Self-Defence Forces (the Japanese army in all but name, since they’re not supposed to have an army under the post WWII constitution) are busy clearing roads through the rubbish but that takes time–wouldn’t a helicopter drop be quicker? Unless, of course, it’s prevented by regulation.
Eku tells me the story of how, one day several years back a fire broke out in a number of houses directly across the street from the local fire station in her home town. Though they could see the fire right in front of them, they couldn’t go and put it out because the official order hadn’t come through from headquarters. By the time the order eventually came through the fire was already well advanced and the houses were completely destroyed. I wonder if the employees at the Fukushima power plant were bound by similar sorts of regulations.
Meanwhile, we’re now starting to see the staggering flow-on effects of this single earthquake event on a huge swathe of northern Japan. For a start there are the rolling blackouts that have been necessitated by the chronic shortage of power. A huge area spanning Tokyo and several prefectures has been divided into five blocks and each block loses power for three hours per day. This is expected to continue until early April at the very least. Other areas have been losing power without warning. Some regions are still without power at all.
Then there’s the lack of petrol. In Tokyo and throughout the north, even in prefectures unaffected by the disaster, there are long queues at the petrol stations and each car is only allowed ten litres. People are too scared to go too far away from home in case they haven’t got enough petrol to get back again. Well-intentioned distribution companies in Tokyo want to send supplies to the disaster regions but can’t guarantee getting their trucks home again. It’s paralysing the nation.
The government has ordered hospitals to treat patients without asking for money or health care cards. Banks have been ordered to dispense money on a name and address basis without requiring ID cards. It’s a full-on crisis.
On the television news we hear absolutely heartrending phone messages from people at shelters begging for food, water and heating oil. We even see live interviews with them. (How is it that the OB van can get there with full camera crew to interview a half-starved evacuee then turn around and go again? Couldn’t they bring a convoy with them?)
In one interview, the head nurse calls in from a nursing home that’s located outside the 20 km evacuation zone from the nuclear reactor but within the 30 km “we advise you to stay indoors” zone. The nursing home has only a couple of days worth of food and supplies left. All the shops in the local area are shut, and they can’t drive further afield to look for food because even if they do manage to track down a supermarket they don’t know if they’ll be able to find enough petrol to get back again. The town is not damaged, they have power and the phones are on, yet they’re effectively stranded until someone comes to help them out.
Later on, the mayor from a town in Fukushima prefecture that’s located well away from the nuclear plant rings to say that his town is running out of supplies because truck drivers are refusing to stop anywhere in Fukushima prefecture given that the mere mention of the word “Fukushima” is enough to strike fear into everyone. He pleads for food and petrol supplies to keep his townspeople alive.
I find this situation incredible beyond words, and saddening beyond belief.
And the really weird thing is that down south, life continues as normal. The power stays on all day, I can go to the petrol station and fill up whenever I like, the shops are full of food, our house is nice and warm inside. How can people be starving and shivering and dying just up the road? Why, for instance, are we not saving power sharing it with the north? [Answer: Japan is divided into two distinct regions with incompatible power supply systems.]
And people down here seem strangely unperturbed. I expected that the talk would be of nothing else and that everyone would be ashen-faced but I’ve been startled at what I can only describe as a general air of disinterest. Or is it resilience? Or perhaps a coping mechanism? I guess those older folk who suffered through the war and the A-bomb and then helped Japan rise from the ashes, they’ve probably got a better perspective on it than the rest of us; but that doesn’t explain the others.
I just can’t get my head around it at all.
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Day 4
I saw a funny thing on the telly last night: an ad. After blanket coverage of the earthquake and tsunami for three days on all channels, it seems the commercial networks have finally decided that it’s time to generate some revenue again with normal programming. In some ways this seems a bit crass, given the scale of the disaster. But then again, when is an appropriate time to bring back the quiz shows, the baseball games, the wacky game shows? At what point do you decide that the nation’s biggest ever natural disaster is no longer sufficiently interesting? Meanwhile the public broadcaster NHK maintains its round-the-clock coverage, which is kind of comforting: when I turn on the TV (as I have been rather alot over the past four days) I’m used to seeing what’s happening right now, not waiting until the next news bulletin.
The nuclear shenanigans continue, though once again we are so far south that I doubt that we would be affected even by a Chernobyl type catastrophe, which seems highly unlikely to happen (see the article “Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors” here). Naturally there is a fair bit of concern in some quarters about the possibility of nuclear meltdown, particularly because the nuclear authorities in Japan are not known for being forthcoming about their mistakes. The classic incident several years ago where it was discovered that workers had been carrying around radioactive material in plastic buckets comes to mind. So the head of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operates the reactors, gives these press conferences where every comment is prefaced with “we’re getting reports that …” and “it would appear that …” and I’m thinking: hang on, it’s your reactor, you run the place, you must know exactly what’s happening in there. What’s with all this third-hand reporting business? If you don’t have a precise handle on the situation then who does? A handful of stranded workers with plastic buckets?
As a translator I was interested to discover a uniquely lexicological (sounds good doesn’t it?) slant to the nuclear panic. It goes like this: the word for radiation exposure is hibaku. Now it so happens that the word for being bombed with a nuclear bomb (or suffering the after-effects of a nuclear bomb) is also hibaku, but it’s written differently, using the baku character for “explode,” whereas the baku character in the first one means “exposed”. So when Japanese people hear the word hibaku on the news or in conversation, given their history they naturally associate it with the suffering of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the hibaku that they’re actually talking about at the moment is the first one, the simple word for exposure that applies even to the smallest levels of radiation. As I’m sure you’ve seen, the actual measured levels of exposure thus far have been negligible, the equivalent of three X-rays worth or something—but this is still hibaku. Just to add to the confusion, the character used in the first (exposure) hibaku has been excluded from the government’s list of approved kanji characters (yes, they have a department for this) and so even when this word appears in print, in the newspaper or on the telly, the character has been replaced with hiragana (phonetic) characters, so that your average Joe still wouldn’t be any wiser as to which hibaku they were talking about. I only found this out the other day courtesy of a professor on the telly, one of the legion of experts wheeled out to provide special comments on a never-ending basis.
At times like this I find it hard to disagree with those who say that Japanese is a ridiculously complex language, although my usual response (and I’m still sticking with this now) is: how about all those stupid English spellings?
As you can see, life continues as normal down in sleepy Hiroshima and I clearly have too much time on my hands.
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The Big One
I remember when I was in Tokyo in the 1990s there was endless talk of the when the Next Big One would hit, based on some vague theory about major earthquakes operating in 70-year cycles. Well it may be 20 years overdue, but it would appear that the Big One has finally arrived.
The first thing to say is that we’ve been very fortunate down here in Hiroshima. We don’t get many earthquakes this far south anyway, and on this occasion nobody felt a thing. The first I heard of it was when friends and family started emailing from Australia, where it was close to dinner time and people were obviously watching the news. So we’ve been spared. Then again, the aftershocks are apparently heading down the length of Japan and we may yet cop a bit of shaking at some stage so I probably shouldn’t get complacent.
There was actually a tsunami warning out for Hiroshima but it was only 0.5 metres and in any case we’re cosseted safely among the islands here in Sunami so there didn’t seem to be any danger. Usually if something’s up the local loudspeakers will start blaring out announcements and warnings but we didn’t hear anything. So last night, life continued as normal. Ruby went to soccer practice as usual and I picked her up from the station at 9:30 as usual and we drove back along the coastal road as usual and saw nothing out of the ordinary.
Which was almost surreal compared to what I’d been seeing on the television in the afternoon and evening. I was meant to be working but I couldn’t concentrate. I’m sure you’ve all watched the reports, so I won’t comment except to say that I still can’t get my head around those images, like that wall of water spreading across the fields, a chaotic jumble of cars, containers, boats, sheds, houses and endless debris engulfing everything in its path. Staring at the telly with my mouth agape: it was like 9-11 all over again.
It’s amazing how much coverage there is to look at. I remember my mum saying about the first moon landing she was not so much impressed with them getting a man on the moon as with the fact that they were able to televise the entire thing live, and it’s like that now. Within an hour or so NHK (the national broadcaster) had helicopters up in the sky and we could see the tsunami wreaking its terrible destruction right before our eyes.
Tokyo seems to have been spared the brunt of the damage, but all the rail services completely shut down while the workmen checked the tracks and tunnels for damage, as a result of which the place descended into chaos. The local councils started throwing open schools, halls and gymnasiums so people could sleep the night; given that most commutes are at least an hour long there was little hope of getting home. In any case the authorities were advising people not to attempt to walk home so as to prevent the streets from getting clogged up with a sea of humanity.
A couple of the nuclear power plants up north also went into emergency shutdown and residents were evacuated within a radius of several kilometres due to fears of radiation leak. This caused the power to go out across nearly six entire prefectures, leaving 4.4 million households with no heating in some of the coldest parts of Japan, places that are still trying to come to terms with the record snowfalls of the last few months. In one place, an entire village was shown burning out of control apparently after the tsunami brought a flaming oil slick with it. If there’s anything closer to real-life Armageddon I’ve yet to see it.
Adding to the tension and drama on a personal level, yesterday was the day that our dear friend Eku was coming down to visit us from Akita prefecture. The earthquake hit when she was on the bullet train just south of Tokyo and the train was stuck for three hours without power. They couldn’t even use the toilets! Luckily there was no damage and services were resumed and she made it down here before midnight when the trains stop running, but she was naturally very concerned about her friends and family up north, particularly since the lack of power meant that all the phones were out too. She was contemplating heading straight home but the bullet trains are all out north of Tokyo which means that the only option is by plane and there probably won’t be a spare seat for weeks. Eventually she got in touch with her sister who advised her to stay put. So, shameless as it sounds, we’re going to take her sightseeing in Hiroshima for a few days. Hopefully it will provide some balance to the carnage on the television.
What with the record snow in northern Japan, the typhoons and floods in Australia, the earthquake in New Zealand and now this latest disaster, I feel like I’ve witnessed a lifetime’s worth of too-close-for-comfort natural calamities in a matter of months. Here’s hoping that things start to settle down soon.
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Update: No tsunami in Sunami
Hi all.
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Just a quick note to let you know that we’re all OK down south in Hiroshima prefecture.
Unbelievable stuff happening up north though… I’m sure you’ve all seen it.
More info later
This blog is about the adventures of a family of Australian barbarians spending two years in the islands of southern Japan. Stay tuned for regular updates on the food, the culture, the earthquakes, the wacky festivals, the school system and more. 
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