Five Minutes and Thirty Feet Later

In 2010, the last time I posted regularly on this blog, I wrote of leaving Sendai that April: of my fondness for it and of its beauty and character.  Less than a year after stepping onto the flight at Natori Airport which took us away from Sendai, a wave from the sea washed away the village of Natori, and over the landing strip of the airport, changing everything.

This summer we returned to Japan.  Natori airport seems as usual, but in that short stretch between the airport and the sea there is just one abandoned house.  The same emptiness stretches miles and miles, northward and southward of there, to a distance of about five miles inland, depending on the shape of the coast.

I was reminded at lunch today that the seafloor under the coast of northeastern Japan fell by ten meters on March 11 of 2011, the day of the tsunami that killed ten thousand people and has left untold hectares of land a wasteland.  My friend Miki says that the temblor, a nine-plus on the Richter scale, lasted for five minutes. 

Ever lived through a fifteen-second earthquake?  Seemed way too long, didn’t it?

These are both facts to boggle the mind: imagining an area the size of Texas suddenly falling thirty feet over a period of just five minutes.  The volume of displaced water, splashing back from such a vast, sudden movement, was correspondingly enormous, of course, and all of you have seen some sort of footage of the result.

Surviving friends tell us they were on the coast, but needed to run inland to the gas station, or that they were far from their coastal home, safely stuck in freeway traffic, or that they were at the Institute office, foolishly clinging to computer terminals as the computers themselves slammed to the floor, glass from the windows raining all around.  People walked forty minutes across town to their houses, gathered up belongings, took a four-hour bus-ride to a city on the west coast, and thence a train to Tokyo.  People called their husbands, moments after the shock, and got through, only to lose contact twenty minutes later, as the tsunami took out the telephone towers. 

For a month or more afterwards there was electricity but no natural gas, meaning no hot-water heaters in chilly March, so no bathing for the world’s cleanest people.  Businesses stopped requiring workers to wear their good black suits; people wore hats a lot, and flu-masks; “it was like just after the War,” people said.  These are also the world’s most self-reliant people, who scorn assistance and would rather starve than admit to their neighbors they lost their job, now needing help. 

These are people who carefully plan what to do in case of disaster, and just where in the neighborhood to meet…only to have those meeting places washed way, and themselves along with them; people who built seawalls of reasonable size, only to have the walls themselves sink and the wave itself rise unimaginably high to overwhelm them.

What will we see, when we go back? we wondered, wanting to see and know, but not wanting to look or ask.  Would the places we were fond of still exist?  What would be different? In Shiogama and Matsushima, though there were subtle changes, nearly every place we knew had cleaned up and kept on going, but then again, on shallow Matsushima Bay, they had only had chest-high water.  Only chest-high!  A year later, the worst-hit were still shuttered.  But Ishinomaki, right on the Pacific Ocean, was a different story, one for later pondering in this blog.