3.11 - Student Voices (Part 1)

My sophomore summer was marked by a stint at Sendai’s local newspaper, the Kahoku Shimpo. The Bousai Kyoikushitsu where I worked was responsible for memorializing and keeping up with the diverse local responses in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. A week after getting my feet wet, Mr. Takeda, my supervisor, guided me and my colleagues through some local disaster sites. Each was a lesson in tragedy, humility, and hope.

Kahoku Shimpo -> Okawa Elementary School

Namida-ame, “tearful rain,” was dribbling, then pouring down the windshield as we made our way up to perhaps the most infamous preservation site in Japan, Okawa Elementary School. Seventy-four children and ten teachers disappeared after a delayed decision to rush towards the bridge, towards the oncoming waves.

Walking back to the car, I snapped a picture of the empty parking lot across from the school. Mist swirled above the nearby river and the New Kitakami Bridge.

Okawa Elementary -> Togura Elementary

After weaving through a maze of sawed-off hills, I was surprised to see replicas of the Easter Island monoliths. Built in commemoration of the global devastation wrought by the Great Chilean Earthquake of 1960, the Moai statues’ precautionary message was felt by local tsunami veteran, Ms. Saito. On March 11, 2011, she urged Togura Elementary School’s headteacher, Mr. Asokawa, to take students up a nearby hill instead of the designated evacuation zone. Her advice and his flexibility saved the students.

A shrine greeted the group at the end of their climb, marking the grounds safe from the throes of the ocean. Their school did not make it.

Togura Elementary -> Onagawa

Towards the end of our journey, Takeda invited us to take a brief respite at Onagawa, whose survivors had stood on rooftops, constructed houses, and created social architecture to foster new bonds within the community. The New Onagawa Train Station and boulevard, just a few hundred meters from the coastline, was one of many sweeping architectural changes that took place after the tsunami.

Walking through the new marketplace, I was struck by the revitalizing variety and humor of the local artisanal work, which ranged from giant watermelons to cardboard sports cars.

Onagawa -> Kahoku Shimpo

When we were not visiting memorials, my colleagues held events like the Jisedaijuku to commemorate The Disaster. At one, Mr. Miura, the sole survivor from his office, described how he miraculously managed to cling onto a tatami mat as the waves swept through his building, and he drifted to safety. He now always carries a lifejacket with him, either in the back of his car or at the office. Months after returning to university, I could not forget his determination to, in his words, “live and smile as much as possible.”

The following summer, I returned to Northeastern Japan to get a better understanding its lands and peoples. In Kesennuma, I spoke with Mr. Hatakeyama, an oyster farmer who led thousands of volunteers to the mountains in a series of tree-planting exercises after The Disaster. This ritual, steeped in hundreds of years of tradition, not only provided a better nutritional baseline for oysters, which suck up all plant matter that flows into the ocean, but also instilled reverence for the natural world among its participants. With whimsy and ecology, Hatakeyama encouraged me and his devotees to develop a holistic appreciation of the environment with the phrase, Mori wa Umi no Koibito: “The Forest is the Lover of the Sea.”

Ten years later, stories about the disaster are still as contradictory and diverse as ever: they are uniquely devastating, uplifting, subtle, explicit, predictable, and impossible. In my experience however, the people who tell those stories are consistently inspiring. Takeda, Saito, Asokawa, Miura, Hatakeyama, and countless others continue to live purposefully, forging new relationships with the ocean and their communities, reminding us of the unforgettable.