A Walking Tour of Baba Nakayama

On August 8, 2013 I participated in a walking tour of Baba Nakayama, a small fishing community in Minami Sanriku, Miyagi prefecture. A local resident, Mr. Kaoru Chiba, organized the tour to show visitors the effects of the March 11, 2011 tsunami and subsequent efforts to rebuild the community. The 90-minute tour took us along the small fishing harbor and up a series of hills, where we saw things like the proposed site for new housing and the small community center that sheltered about 200 residents in the aftermath of the disaster and became a temporary home to those whose houses the tsunami destroyed. We stopped briefly to talk to local residents who have been involved in reviving the local seaweed fishery. The tour ended with a cold drink at a café run by Kaoru’s wife, Kanae. The Chibas were wonderful hosts. Kaoru was born and raised in Baba Nakayama and thus knows the community intimately. His life was transformed by the disaster, but he did not experience the traumatic loss suffered by many other people. (Indeed, only a handful of residents lost their lives in the tsunami.) As a result, I felt he was able to narrate the disaster in a way that was personal but not focused exclusively on his own personal hardship. He spoke of (and for) the whole community. Kanae came to Baba Nakayama as a volunteer in the aftermath of the tsunami and eventually settled down. Although we did not have the opportunity to spend much time with her—she was busy with the café—it was clear that the two of them make a great team. Along the tour, Kaoru shared his experiences during and after the tsunami, and showed us a number of before-and-after photographs of the Baba Nakayama area. These gave us a good sense of the scale of the destruction. He also showed us a brief video of the tsunami he had taken from the vantage point of the community center. Needless to say, it was chilling to see the footage while standing at the same place. Baba Nakayama is small enough that an hour or two is enough time for a visitor to get a sense of the scale of the destruction and grasp some of the practical problems of reconstruction. Almost all of the debris is long gone, but the landscape clearly shows the scars of the disaster in the form of a few skeletal buildings, vacant lots on which houses once stood, and crumbled concrete along the shore. At the same time, there is new construction that hints at the resilience of the local residents. Baba Nakayama is far from the most shocking site one can see in Minami Sanriku. Other communities were completely obliterated. But because it was not wiped out, I felt that I got a nuanced sense of the disaster and the everyday struggles of the people who are still trying to rebuild their lives two-and-a-half years after the tsunami. The scale of the place and the destruction made Baba Nakayama comprehensible. I was particularly moved by a local woman who pointed proudly to the reconstruction, but confessed that she lived in fear of the next tsunami, which could of course come at any time. David Howell