OFUNATO, Iwate Prefecture--The wisdom of people long dead spared a seaside community here the calamity that befell coastal cities and towns in northeastern Japan when a massive earthquake hit in March 2011, generating towering tsunami.
OFUNATO, Iwate Prefecture--The wisdom of people long dead spared a seaside community here the calamity that befell coastal cities and towns in northeastern Japan when a massive earthquake hit in March 2011, generating towering tsunami.
The advice learned over generations boiled down to this: Don’t build on the coast, move to higher ground.
Like elsewhere in the Tohoku region, the city’s Yoshihama district, with a population of around 1,400, was overwhelmed by wall of water triggered by the magnitude-9.0 offshore earthquake.
But unlike the other places, everybody but one--a man closeted in his workshop near the beach--survived.
All 480 or so households in Yoshihama are situated 300 meters or so inland at between 16 and 20 meters above sea level. The center of the city, situated in a narrow bay, was largely destroyed.
The decision to build at higher elevations was no coincidence. It was the collective resolve of residents to adhere to warnings passed down over the years after devastating tsunami in 1896 and again in 1933.
Heizaburo Kikawada, who is 79 and makes a living farming and catching sea urchin and abalone, said that in his younger days he walked 15 minutes each way from his home carrying the bamboo poles and other equipment he needed for fishing. He switched over to a small tractor in the late 1970s to ferry the items back and forth.
Other fishermen also built their homes away from the port.
All along the Sanriku coast, fishing communities viewed Yoshihama’s decision to build on high ground as nothing less than a nuisance for the residents. But it turned out to be a lifesaver.
The March 11 earthquake and tsunami claimed close to 20,000 lives, mostly in communities that took little heed of the past and built on low ground along the Pacific coast.
Given the region’s history of tsunami, many localities are now scrambling to erect or rebuild gigantic sea walls to protect property and life.
Kikawada is skeptical about the effectiveness of such projects.
“We cannot beat Mother Nature, no matter what sea walls we build,” he said. “People who believe they will be safe with high break walls lack judgment, in my opinion.”
After the 2011 disaster, many Yoshihama residents moved to even higher ground.
“This was what we had been told to do since the old days,” said Kikawada.
Local beaches are blanketed with chunks of the breakwater that broke up in the tsunami. Adjacent areas that were once rice paddies now lie idle.
The Yoshihama district used to be the center of a village by the same name that was flattened in the Meiji-Sanriku tsunami just over a century ago.
“Many people lived in the area,” said Kenichi Azuma, 66, who is in charge of a community hall. “But nobody returned to the area near the beach after they moved to higher ground, based on what they had learned from their ancestors.”
The Meiji-Sanriku tsunami claimed the lives of 200 or so villagers, or 20 percent of the population.
Buemon Niinuma, who was the village chief, pushed for the relocation of homes and trunk roads to elevated ground.
According to Masatsugu Kimura, 66, a chronicler of local history, some villagers stayed put because they were too poor to buy new homes.
Those who stayed behind lived less than 10 meters above sea level. They paid a heavy price for their decision 37 years later, when the Showa-Sanriku tsunami hit, killing 17 people. Four were villagers and 13 were migrants who lived near the mouth of a river.
“The tsunami inflicted damage on the village, but it was smaller compared with the Meiji-Sanriku tsunami,” Kimura said. “It proved that moving to higher ground is the right thing to do.”
Ushitaro Kashiwazaki, village head back then, was credited with ensuring that the community was mostly unscathed.
Naka Kashiwazaki, who is 98 and the granddaughter of Kashiwazaki, said that he would never budge even when villagers showed reluctance to moving away from the coast, citing the distance from the sea.
“I hear that my grandfather told those villagers that ‘You can set up homes where they used to be, but I will never take care of you even if your homes are washed away next time,’” she said.
Her grandfather learned the importance of living higher up the hard way when the Meiji-Sanriku tsunami struck.
He lost all of his kin, including his wife, parents and offspring.
“My grandfather was in Kamaishi and safe, but the experience (of losing his family) must have led to his unwavering resolve to never let one’s guard down against tsunami,” Naka said.
Kashiwazaki was a lumber dealer with about 100 people on his payroll. He became the village head in 1924 at the request of villagers.
Kashiwazaki decided to transform a desolate tract of land near the beach into rice paddies. The land area, more than 2.5 times that of Tokyo Dome, had been left barren because of the 1896 tsunami.
Kashiwazaki figured that would stop villagers returning to the area while offering them a way out of their grinding poverty by growing rice.
Today, children living in the Yoshihama district are proud of their ancestors’ legacy and are ready to pass it down in their own fashion.
Last month, sixth-graders at the Yoshihama Elementary School performed a play they wrote on the theme of the relocation of their forebears to high ground as a precaution against tsunami.
The children researched local history while working on the plot.
“It is amazing that people managed to reduce the risk of damage from the latest tsunami to the minimum by continuing to live on higher ground, despite the inconvenience,” said Ako Chiba, who heads the student body and played a role of a villager in the play. “We are determined to never forget this lesson.”