With a disaster like 3/11, there is no manual for putting communities back together.
With a disaster like 3/11, there is no manual for putting communities back together.
In the shattered Tohoku region, signs of devastation are everywhere. There are still so many unknowns.
But with the energetic efforts of people like Akemi Yamauchi, who was born and raised on a farm in Minami-Sanriku, Miyagi Prefecture, and later worked in Tokyo, there is hope.
Yamauchi, 36, has returned to her hometown to confront the problems facing northeastern Japan as a specially appointed researcher at Miyagi University’s Minami-Sanriku Fukko (reconstruction) Station.
The station will seek solutions to the local problems, such as depopulation.
Following are excerpts of an interview with Yamauchi by The Asahi Shimbun:
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Miyagi University's Minami-Sanriku Fukko Station, where I work, was set up in an elementary school, which was closed before the earthquake, in the mountains. It's my old school. After the earthquake, the school served as a temporary police station. I research modern history. Now I'm working with people in this town to try to build on the community's inherent resources and value to revitalize the community.
First we want to try to be self-sufficient in energy so we won't place a burden on somewhere else, like Tokyo did with Fukushima. We want to rebuild the town so that it is self-sustainable in the long term. That's our goal.
I'm not an ecologist, but there's lots of energy yet to be found in the Tohoku region. After this traumatic experience, it is my hope that we can use the energy we have right here. Of course, I'm not saying that everybody across the Tohoku region should use charcoal or firewood. I'd like each place to find its own energy and work with what it has. If you have the sea, use what the sea has. If there are mountains, then use their resources. That's the first step.
Women have a tough life in the fishing villages of the Sanriku region (Aomori, Iwate and Miyagi prefectures). For example, they shuck oysters on the beach in mid-winter. They work in the freezing wind with cold water so that the fresh oysters can line the shelves of supermarkets in cities. It is these women who make it all possible. The Tohoku region was becoming more cosmopolitan before the earthquake. I want to get the word out that the Tohoku village society everybody praised as "truly Japanese" has a lot of foreign women now.
I can't forget the damage caused by the abnormally cool summer of 1993. In a normal year we can harvest 550 to 600 kilograms of rice from each paddy, but that year it fell to just 20 kilograms. I was in my third year of high school. It was a shock. I cried in the rice field. We ate store-bought rice for the first time ever. My relatives said to me, "In the past your parents would have had to sell you (into prostitution)."
In modern times, Japan used the land for military exercises and survival training. Before World War II, people who were planning to emigrate to distant shores (such as Manchuria) drilled all over Tohoku (to get accustomed to a cold climate).
The Death March in the Hakkoda Mountains (when Imperial Japanese Army soldiers on a training exercise became trapped in a blizzard in 1902) before the Russo-Japanese War is symbolic of the role that Tohoku has played.
The people here came to accept rice cultivation and nuclear power plants, believing that they would "make us rich" and they were "at the cutting edge of our time." For a moment, we saw our dream of escaping our long history of subordination coming to fruition. But then there was too much rice. Th government told us it didn't want it. And then the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant exploded and spewed radiation everywhere.
But there is hope. There are young people who came back from Sendai or Tokyo after the quake to start businesses here. While the exodus of people from Tohoku caused a sense of crisis among these young folks, they are also bracing themselves to make a new life here.
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Akemi Yamauchi is a specially appointed researcher at Miyagi University's Minami-Sanriku Fukko Station. She went to Keio University to study after doing temp work at the town hall. Yamauchi took up her current position while still enrolled in a doctoral program at Hitotsubashi University graduate school. She has co-authored "Tohoku Saisei" (Tohoku rebirth) and "Henkyo kara Hajimaru" (Starting from the "frontier").