3.11 - Student Voices (Part 3)

My summer after sophomore year was spent in a city called Ogatsu in Miyagi prefecture, Japan. I was an intern at a summer camp facility working to bring energy back to a region still recovering from the 3.11 disaster.

My interest in the internship came, in part, from my own background. My mother's family is from Kobe, a city scarred by the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake. Through summers spent at my grandparents' house, I had seen the lasting damage natural disasters can have on even the liveliest of cities– the image of shuttered shopping streets and stories of how Kobe used to be are prominent in my memory.

Ogatsu is a city that is both tucked back in the mountains and nestled against the sea. I spent several days during my internship meandering the forests and searching for lookout points over the vast ocean. I would walk the dim and serene forest until it opened up to a dramatic cliff with waves crashing several meters below.

On other days, early in the morning, I would walk down the hill where the intern house stood, toward the shore where our neighbors were peeling and packaging sea urchins for the market. Ogatsu is a fishing village and in the summer, urchins are a big seller. If I asked, I could sit in the urchin assembly line and learn the ropes. I would sit in my rubber boots with my hands in the salt water, putting my brain in overdrive to try to understand the thick Tohoku dialect being spoken to me.

Very often, the topic of conversation would end up at 3.11– how much easier it used to be to go shopping, before main street got completely erased by an ocean wave; how much livelier the local community used to be with children around; shared fear and worries about how or whether Ogatsu would recover. This was in 2018, 7 years post-disaster.

Something that I ended up thinking about a lot was the ocean, both because it was always in view and because it was always being talked about. The ocean in Ogatsu is beautiful, and it is well-loved and well-utilized. At the same time, it is what brought irreversible destruction to the city that had thrived off its gifts for generations.

I remember a few people told me the same thing about the ocean, that they had become afraid of it. I remember sitting with the old woman living next door and looking down at the shore below together. She seemed sad when she told me that on stormy days, she won't dare look that way, that it is too terrible to bear.

I took photos of the sea's different expressions– pale, pink mornings and blinding, blue afternoons; grey, wet days and angry, turbulent ones. The different scenes were beautiful, but I could not shake the fear that had been shared with me by the Ogatsu residents I'd met.

Standing at the edge of a forest at the top of a rocky cliff, looking out at an incoming storm, I tried to imagine how that day might have felt. I'm certain it's impossible for me to truly know.