Rikuzen Takata

Wow, what a busy 4 days! Sorry for the delayed update but we were traveling for two days and then two packed days in Tokyo.

Tuesday -  We took the bullet train north towards the areas hit hardest by the Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in March 11, 2011. Our first stop was the Tokai Shinpo newspaper. In 1953, the town was hit by a tsunami triggered by an earthquake in Chile, which destroyed the paper’s offices at the time; the current building is built on a hillside above the town with backup generators for the printing machines. The paper was able to publish an edition on  3/12 thanks to this contingency planning even though nearly every person on the staff had lost their homes and loved ones. Over the next few weeks, the paper took the lead helping survivors find family members and focused on writing the paper with a theme of “children smiling.” Not having lived this disaster, I can’t criticize the decision but it makes me wonder when people were supposed to grieve. I wonder how I would have felt if I had lived the tsunami and lost family and friends, to then see my newspaper printing images of smiling children just a few days after the disaster. Perhaps it was therapeutic but I could also imagine people being privately frustrated if they sensed a lack of grief and space for grieving. Regardless, I was impressed with the editor’s dedication and pride in the paper’s ability to resume publication on 3/12.

Our second stop of the day was with the CEO of Yagisawa Shouten, a soy sauce company in nearby Rikuzen Takata. Similar to the paper, his company had developed their own tsunami evacuation plan to be followed after an earthquake and only one employee was lost. In addition, following the workers’ evacuation plan saved many family members and friends.

One interesting thing that I hadn’t known before was that there was an earthquake with a tsunami warning two days before the major earthquake. In Rikuzen Takata, all of the businesses, schools, and government had evacuated at that time and luckily, the tsunami was less than a meter high and was blocked by the sea wall. A few speakers speculated that lives may have been lost because people may not have evacuated as quickly following the non-event on 3/9, but they also used it as an example of how well prepared everyone was and how every threat was taken seriously.

In Rikuzen Takata, the tsunami was 15m high. It completely submersed all buildings less than 4 stories. More than 1,600 people (nearly 7% of the population) were killed including the mayor’s wife, a third of the city’s municipal employees, and 50 firefighters who were trying to close the town’s tsunami barrier walls. After the soy sauce factory, we went on tour of the affected area. The only remaining buildings are scattered among the hills ringing the valley. Essentially everything on the valley floor was swept away. It is now an eerie plain with roads cutting through fields of grass and weeds with foundations visible along the road and occasional reminders of what used to be there. A five story building still stands alongside the road with the top 2 floors looking relatively undamaged and the bottom three floors missing doors, windows, covered in rust, and falling apart. Near the sea, there’s a massive serpentine elevated conveyor belt that spans at least a hundred acres – the town is rebuilding on top of the surrounding hillsides but they must first lop off the top of the hillsides to create a level surface. The conveyor belt is for removing the soil. According to the deputy mayor, it is supposed to start running next week. Unlike where we went on Wednesday, the majority of the rubble has been removed, but this also gives the landscape an eerie emptiness. Our guide shared his moving story of his own actions on the day of the Tsunami. In addition to saving his two uncles, he also helped at least one other woman to safety as the waters rapidly rose. He escaped to a shinto shrine on a small hill overlooking the valley, and he was stranded there for a few days with 90 other survivors. He also shared some amazing videos he had shot from that day from the top of the shrine - I'll link to it on youtube once I'm back in the US.

After this heart-wrenching tour, we met with the deputy mayor of Rikuzen Takata, a young politician from Tokyo and his assistant for "global outreach," who is an American woman from Boston.

The night ended, as all wonderful Japanese nights should, with enthusiastic karaoke and a refreshing naked hot springs bath at the hotel. I will spare you the details but needless to say, I think my karaoke skills should be limited to dance with a muted microphone. And yes, I could do a hot springs bath every other night if given the choice.