Stepping Onto the Boat

It is June, and we are on the ferryboat from Shiogama to Matsushima, surging across what has been described as the most beautiful place in Japan, a land of beautiful places: Matsushima Bay, “Pine-Island” Bay, a shallow inlet of the deep Pacific, on the long, smooth curve of Sendai Bay.  We have walked to Shiogama from Taga-jo, where the iris beds are once again riotous with bloom.  It is a gorgeous summer afternoon:  clear, cool and sunny, with a gentle breeze.  The water sparkles, and all the perfect islands gleam.

Happy vacationers feed shrimp-chips to the seagulls as they always have, and the seagulls never nip a finger or otherwise fail to delight.

Yet if you know where to look, you will see the heaps of wreckage in Shiogama harbor, gathered from all the vanished communities of Tohoku, waiting to be loaded up and shipped to Kyushu, where sympathetic folk have donated landfill space to accept it.  You will also notice a few shattered pleasure boats, still littering a small section of shore, and the seaside promenade you passed on the way to the ship is still undermined and unsafe for walking, its stone markers tilted at crazy angles, and, mysteriously, the three tall smokestacks of the power plant are nowhere to be seen.

As the shore slips away, I wonder: how to express the sameness-yet-radical-difference of Tohoku, just over a year after the March 11, 2011 earthquake/tsunami?  The novelty of the disaster is long over, the voyeurs have gone home, yet the comfort and normalcy of March 10, 2011 is still irrevocably lost. 

Sorrow hangs in the bright air of Tohoku like the tones of a temple-bell, and like the repeated tolling of a bell it is renewed around each corner when a stretch of grass-grown field comes into view, with a shattered house in the center of it, or when we catch sight of an impossible stack of automobiles, rapidly to become rusted and dated, their masters lost to the sea.

People are still struggling to know how best to move forward:  should they tear down that damaged house or rebuild it?  Should they put down roots in a new place or return to a changed old place?  Should they keep on with a family business when the family is nearly all gone, or to start over with an entirely new venture?  When familiar landscapes are gone, along with the comforting routines that filled them, who can say what is right?

Tragedy changes us, and people suffer tragedies everyday, on a small scale:  a lost parent here, a sick child there; a fire destroys a house; a business goes bankrupt.  Friends and faith can help us absorb the shock; we adjust our lives in small increments, each day.  But when so many lose so much over such a short period, who is to comfort them, and how are they to adjust? 

It seems to me that we board a ship each morning, but when we return to the same port at night, the place has subtly changed, as have we.  Since we left port, there have been numerous small tragedies, but then again, people have fallen in love, people have married, children have been conceived, children born; ideas have been hatched, projects completed, boats launched.  Things are not just always dying, they are always growing, too, if perhaps in an unfamiliar, unexpected form. 

And when they do become familiar – if we let them become familiar – perhaps our grief will finally fade.