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.

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.