"I wish there was no ceremony here," someone told me in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, where I went on March 11 to cover an event marking a year since the Great East Japan Earthquake. "It means after tomorrow, people will forget this place."
"I wish there was no ceremony here," someone told me in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, where I went on March 11 to cover an event marking a year since the Great East Japan Earthquake. "It means after tomorrow, people will forget this place."
Looking around the traces of the town, leveled by bulldozers after nature had done its work, I think I understood. The ceremony would be a curtain to Act I, a message to those there to move on from the catastrophe. What I felt was a sort of gratitude: the past year gave me an opportunity to see and feel on.
Last year, two weeks after the tsunami, I toured, in a minibus driven by an over-exuberant Iranian filled with other foreign sightseers, the ravaged Sanriku coast. This year's mission was to file a series of stories about non-Japanese in the disaster zone.
Yet it isn't international volunteers or Filipino wives of local fishermen I remember: Instead it's the sandal seller holding a 3/11 sale; the keeper of a ryokan inn, open in the ruins of Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, where the flood waters, eerily, froze the old clock at 3:10.
Sad, resigned, determined, and in a quiet way, noble. Together these characteristics coalesced into the stoicism that the world witnessed last year. But I think mostly it was resignation, a very Tohoku resignation.
The quote at the start comes from a volunteer from Tokyo--so an outsider. A native of the Sanriku coast may say the same thing-- for the benefit of the press--but deep down would expect to be forgotten.
It's only natural, through decades and centuries they've forgotten themselves.
Yudan, "inattention," "letting one's guard down," was a word I heard often from survivors last year, as they tried to make sense of nature.
Many could remember the previous Chile tsunami, of 1960, or the one before that, in 1933, or relatives who lived through or died in even earlier ones. It seemed natural to me that, during the moment of silence, everyone instinctively turned toward the sea.
This year I was surprised by vending machines, appearing like glowing mushrooms among the ruins, and prefab shops and "konbini" (Japan's ubiquitous convenience stores) in the muddy fields--including one selling crystals and power stones in Rikuzentakata.
I admit that my own response to the Great East Japan Earthquake has been an aesthetic one. Staying in a creaky ryokan (Japanese inn) along a row of prewar, gutted out buildings as snow blew outside is a rare--unreproducible--experience for Japan. Kesennuma was such an atmospheric, historical town, most of which will be torn down and rebuilt.
"No one has the time right now to think about preserving the look of the town," someone told me. "People still have to get their lives together first."
Besides, Kesennuma was not as old as I imagined it was. The entire port was destroyed in a fire eight decades ago--and rebuilt.
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