16 Months After the Tsunami

I went to three towns along the coast where the tsunami hit last year:  Sendai, Kesennuma, and Kamaishi.  It was important for me to get some sense, in person, of what the area was like and to pay my respects to the strength of the storm and the people who lived through it.  I only saw a little bit, what I could see by foot after getting off the train.  After Sendai, I had to base myself inland, as there was no way to go up the coast by public transportation.  So my impressions are quite incomplete.  To augment it, I strongly recommend you go to YouTube and type in any of the towns’ names and the word “tsunami”.  You will see some very powerful footage.

Sendai.  Like all the towns I visited, Sendai sits up on a hill, descending down to its port.  Aside from the port, Sendai is little changed.  It looks and behaves like any other Japanese city to my innocent eye.  I didn’t figure out how to get down to the port, though I a woman I met who works down there said it’s in pretty bad shape. 

I saw a little bit when I went to Matsushima, the bay north of Sendai that is one of the three most beautiful scenic areas in Japan.  It is indeed lovely, with dozens of tiny rocky outcroppings of islands, all dusted with pine trees on the top.  I came by ferry from a nearby town, Shiogama, which had a pile of debris on the shore still to be carted away and was rebuilding its port.  As I walked along the main street, there were still a few buildings being repaired and one of the bridges to a nearby island had not yet been rebuilt.  But Matsushima is a big tourist area, so repairs were made quickly where the tourists would be.  At least for Sendai and Matsushima, whatever damage that still existed was not where a traveler like me would go.

Kesennuma.  Kesennuma is about 60 miles north of Sendai.  I was several blocks down the hill from the train station before I saw individual empty lots with only a building’s foundation.  Then I noticed that, while there were shops in the first floor of some buildings, they seemed new, spare.  In one there were a group of men and women at tables, making baskets for sale.  As I got closer to the port, I saw more vacant lots, more empty damaged buildings, and then buildings being torn down by giant cranes.  It was interesting to watch:  scaffolding and tarp protected the street sides of the buildings, and behind a crane with Pac-man-like jaws would pull the walls down, pick up pieces, or snap through an I-beam. 

The port and the immediate area around it had been destroyed. There were still some piers angled into the water, and the boats tied up sideways to the quay.  Some buildings remained standing, but they were empty, debris inside, gaping holes in their facades. Pictured here are two that struck me most:  an old copper-clad building in the billboard style I’d seen at an open-air museum, propped up because its first floor had been destroyed by the tsunami wave, and another stone building that had lost its first floor or two entirely and was sitting tilted on the ground.

There was new construction.  There was a new road down to and around the port, a bit higher than the old, so you slid down gravel to the old sidewalk. The only new building I saw down by the port was a three-story parking garage. You could see some temporary housing that looked like container boxes, one housing the police station.  Up the hill, there were some new buildings, or perhaps more accurately newly sided buildings.  In one, I saw men putting in an entire new floor at street level, working around the old woodwork and stairs that led up to the second floor.

I didn’t get a sense of how the townspeople were doing.  They seemed to be going about their business and stores were open.  I saw a number of Japanese walking around, taking pictures as I was.  But generally you heard the noise of the cranes taking down buildings, one by one.

Kamaishi.   A little more than 35 miles further up the coast lies Kamaishi, where I saw much greater devastation than I had seen in Kesennuma.  That may be because the town, which gradually slopes up the hill, lies at the end of a bay with a narrow opening to the sea, which may have added to the tsunami’s force. 

The devastation was extensive, complete, and immeasurable. I'd watched a YouTube video of the tsunami there, even took a picture of what I think was the promontory where it was shot (see right).  Everything was torn up, pushed off its foundation, or gushed through. Even if a building was left standing, its first floor was destroyed, and that meant the supporting pillars might have been weakened and it would have to be taken down.

Vinyl floor of a building

The downtown area and the port were virtually empty, though cars and trucks were traveling through.  The only people walking around besides me were construction workers or engineers.  Amongst the vacant blocks, I saw one or two new buildings and a number standing silently empty, some marked with an X for demolition.  Some structures were being demolished; a concrete foundation was being broken up to be taken away; and in one lot an earth mover was tamping down fresh earth in preparation for laying a new foundation.  In a couple of buildings I saw repairs going on.  But it will take years before there is a downtown again.

The enormity of reconstruction hit me here. There were tons of debris from the tsunami that had to be carted away, and then more debris as the damaged buildings and foundations were cleared.  Much of the town’s infrastructure had to be replaced:  telephone poles and electricity, roads, perhaps the sewer system and gas lines, places for the police, fire, and other government agencies to operate, bus stops and traffic lights.  Meanwhile, the townspeople needed places to live, work, sell their wares, and some reason to feel there was a future worth living.

But renewal had begun.  There was a new main road into town that extended from the railroad station down the hill. The sidewalks looked new or reused. There were new telephone polls and a few old light posts, bent askew. There were new bus stops and even little gardens set into the sidewalks, planted with colorful summer flowers. 

 

In what I thought was a brilliant move, the town had built a three-story box of a building next to the train station.  There, townspeople set up their shops so they could continue their businesses. There were markets, a bookstore, the obligatory omiyage (tourist gift) shop, and upstairs a small Uniglo clothing store.  And there were places where people could gather, sit and talk.  There were three little cafes, all with people in them eating lunch and talking.  There was another gathering place in the middle of the building with long benches, TV screens and a little dais where there could be performances or community meetings.  There was a place upstairs with people to help answer questions related to the tsunami and reconstruction.  For the time being, this was the Kamaishi’s “downtown”.

I don’t think we’ve ever experienced anything as powerful, as vast, quick and destructive as the tsunami was in Japan.  The destruction in Kamaishi seemed so overwhelmingly complete that I am amazed the town could pick itself up at all afterwards.   And yet they and the people in other towns along the coast are doing just that, methodically cleaning up and starting again.   Yes, one could say the Japanese are stoic as they go about the rebuilding, for they have certainly been trained not to bother others or confront.  But I also think their behavior stems from long experience with the natural disasters that occur on this string of volcanic islands sitting on a fault line.   They know such disasters will occur and that you live with them and move on as best as you can.