Rikuzentakata, part one: an interview with Mayor Toba Futoshi

Rikuzentakata, 8/9/12

The bus ride from Sendai to Rikuzentakata takes a little more than three hours, following a rather indirect route along the saw-tooth coastline of northern Miyagi and southern Iwate Prefectures.  In better times, I could have taken the train and arrived in less time, but as with so many other towns along the coast, the tsunami washed away much of the rails serving Rikuzentakata, as well as the station, even through it stood roughly half a mile from the shore.

As the bus winds its way down into the plain at the mouth of the Kesen River on which the town once stood, it is hard to believe that this was once a city of 25,000 people.  As with most communities that were pummeled by the tsunami, but even more so than most, the vast majority of buildings that stood here have been reduced to rubble, if not yet completely cleared away.  What remains are a handful of larger structures – such as the city hall, and a multi-story shopping complex – which stand gutted, revealing the horrific force and height of the waves.  Upon closer look, though, the fractured concrete foundations of a whole city cover the ground, and here and there artificial hills of collected debris disrupt the flatness of the coastal plain.  All of them seem to be losing a battle for visibility to the relentless onslaught of weeds that set root everywhere.  Nature, or rather a peculiarly opportunistic and feral form of it, is retaking the plain upon which the heart of the town formerly stood.

The bus lumbers up an incline out of the plain and stops before the temporary city hall compound – “temporary” because this is not its original location.  The prefab buildings look like over-sized cubicles with roofs, bolted together in haste against the weather.  I cross the road and enter the one standing at the edge of a small parking lot.  It’s hard to tell how far above the bay it is here; the water is nowhere in sight and it appears that we are well inland.  A glance down and along the road that the bus just climbed, however, reveals the desolation left by the tsunami in the distance.

I still have a bit more than half an hour until my appointment with the mayor, so after confirming where I will meet him, I leave the city hall and begin walking down the road that the bus brought me up.  Not too far along, I come upon a prefab structure of similar construction as the city hall.  A sign informs me that this is “Tochigasawa Base,” and that it is now home to several businesses.  The one furthest from the road is a soba restaurant.  I decide to grab a bowl of something for lunch here and duck under the short noren curtain in the entryway, only to find that the place is full of diners already.

Since I’m not really hungry, anyway, but looking to kill time, I move on to the shop next door – Iwai – which appears to specialize in pottery, a variety of items that could be nice souvenirs of the area, and a selection of the local soy sauce and saké brews, all so tastefully displayed that it’s easy to forget that these are, after all, emergency quarters for the shop.

I select a couple bottles of a local brew, Kesen (named for the river and the region), and a tee shirt for my son.  The woman at the register asks me where I’m from and what brought me to Rikuzentakata.  I am the only customer in the shop, so we strike up a conversation.  I ask her where her shop was located before 3/11.

“We were located close to the center of town,” she says, motioning as she does so into the back corner of the shop, beyond the walls of which I know lay the shattered ruins of the town.  “That’s what our neighborhood in Rikuzentakata used to look like,” she adds, this time pointing to the wall across from us, which bears snapshots lined up to create a continuous panorama of a now lost shopping street.  One of the photos is marked as the original “Iwai” shop.

“It must have been tough for you,” I say as I look over the photos – more to myself than to her.  But she is standing right next to me now, looking over the same photos.

“It was very difficult for us.”  She seems to say this less to me than to herself, as if reconfirming the fact.  Then, this time to me, “we lost everything in the tsunami.”

There is so much I want to ask her about that day, and what she has gone through since.  And I get the sense from the tone in her voice that she would be willing to talk about it – maybe even that she is hoping I’ll ask.  But my time is running short.  Feeling awkward, full of thanks and apologies, I leave the shop and begin walking at a brisk pace back up the hill to city hall.  I glance back at Iwai after a few strides and see her waving from the entrance.

A Meeting with the Mayor

I arrive back at city hall with a few minutes to spare – enough time to stop sweating from the march uphill.  A packed cluster of gray, metal desks with people at them who seem tremendously busy stands between me and the door to Mayor Toba’s office, along the far wall.  A woman at one of the desks rises, knocks on the mayor’s door, and enters – emerging after a few minutes with a group of people in business suits in tow.  They exchange farewells, thanks, and bows with the mayor, who seems to be standing just inside the doorway.  Then the group departs.  I imagine that these visits go on throughout the day, and now I’m next.  After a few minutes the same woman approaches me and informs me that Mayor Toba will see me now.

He greets me with an easy-going handshake as I enter the room.  He’s a bit shorter than I had expected – it’s interesting how our mental image of people who do tremendous things in the face of adversity sometimes takes on an almost cartoonish physicality in our minds.  The man standing before me – if the American media’s spin on the political situation in post-3/11 Japan is to be believed – is Japan’s “angry mayor”: a firebrand outsider calling for fundamental reforms in the way the Japanese government deals with reconstruction from disasters, in a way that challenges deep cultural attitudes of deference toward those with more power.  I have also read the book he authored in the early months after the tsunami – Hisaichi no hontō no hanashi o shiyō, masterfully translated into English by Amya Miller as Let’s Talk About It: What Really Happened in the Disaster Area – and his sense of frustration at bureaucratic ineptitude and red tape is palpable on many pages.  Still, the man standing before me in a tieless short-sleeved dress shirt, with a smartly trimmed chin beard, doesn’t look like a hell-raiser, nor does he seem at all worn down under the weight of adversity and frustration; on the contrary, he seems to radiate a welcoming sense of optimism and confidence.

I won’t attempt to summarize his entire story in this posting.  Those who are interested can obtain a copy of Amya’s translation of his memoir here – it’s definitely worth the price of admission.  This is the man who watched the town he had just recently become mayor of get washed away on March 11^th, 2011.  He had spoken to his wife for what turned out to be the last time just moments before the quake that triggered the wave hit.  He and others clung to an antenna on the very highest roof of the city hall and watched the tsunami rolling in from and then back out to the bay, pulling countless unfortunate neighbors out to an icy death at sea – all the while unable to do anything to save them.  This was the man who was so overwhelmed by the responsibilities of his position in the early days after the disaster – and so conscious of the fact that the survivors were counting on him to do whatever he could to help them – that he never reported his wife missing to the local authorities.  His eldest son did so instead, without being asked to or even telling his father that he had filed the report.  Out of the sheer weight of his responsibilities as mayor in a time of crisis – as well as the enormity of telling a small child that his mother had been found, but dead – Toba did not tell his youngest son the news until the day of her funeral.  It’s hard to comprehend that kind of pain – the scars of trauma it must leave on the hearts of parent and child alike – yet I realize that it was by no means uncommon in areas along the Tohoku coast after March 11^th.

I have an hour of his time.  It’s always difficult for me to interview busy people like this; I can’t help thinking that they might be wondering why they are wasting their time with me instead of doing something important.  I push the thought into the back of my mind and start at the beginning, no doubt covering some of the same ground Toba did in his book.  The first question, though, is about him, before from Rikuzentakata and the tsunami.

Mayor Toba is not actually a “native” of Rikuzentakata, after all.  His father was born and raised here, but Toba himself was born in Kanagawa Prefecture, in 1965, and raised in the megalopolis environs of the Greater Tokyo Area.  He came “back home” at his father’s request, after Toba found himself “downsized” out of his salaryman job in Tokyo in the economic fallout of the infamous collapse of Japan’s “bubble economy.”  His father had returned to Rikuzentakata years before, and had even gone into local politics.  After his return, Toba also began to consider this path, eventually winning a seat as a city council member.  More than just following in his father’s footsteps, though, as someone who had been raised in the urban environment of Kantō, Toba wonder why it was that the people of Rikuzentakata, living in the lap of such natural beauty, didn’t seem to take pride in their city.  He felt that through public service, he might be able to change that.  To that end he ran for the office of mayor and was elected in February 2011 – roughly a month before the tsunami.

I move on to questions about 3/11 and the immediate days that followed.  These are hard questions to ask – and to answer; how can one really ask, casually and in good conscience, about the worst experience of one’s life, and how does one go about answering such a question?  Toba has written about this and obviously answered the “what happened” question many, many times.  I’m more interested in how he felt – and how everyone around him did – through it all.

“Of course, we knew what had happened – we’d been hit by a tsunami – but we were at a loss for what to do.  Should we look for survivors?  We did at first, but the Self Defense Forces came and took the lead there.  Problem was that in a tsunami, unlike just an earthquake, there really aren’t many survivors.  So, should we gather blankets and other supplies for the survivors? We did, but the amount that we could gather was really limited.  We didn’t know what we could do that would be of help to anyone.

“Everyone was just in a state of shock.  That’s why no one cried out when the tsunami hit – we just couldn’t believe this was real.  In the days after, it began to sink in, but slowly at first.  On top of that, though, there was the anxiety and a real sense of hopelessness.  Everyone was feeling that.

“But one thing I realized was that, even in a situation like that when everything is uncertain, you can’t let that anxiety show.  It doesn’t help anyone to do so.”

Toba’s vision for Rikuzentakata

The mayor seems much more interested in talking about the future of the city as a whole than about his own past.  When he begins to describe to me what an ideal Rikuzentakata would be like, his enthusiasm is obvious.  We get on this topic when I ask him what the omnipresent, post-3/11 term fukkō (reconstruction, revitalization) means to him in regard to Rikuzentakata.

“On the most concrete level, simply rebuilding what was here before – that’s what is really called fukkyū in Japanese.  That replaces what was lost, certainly, but doesn’t really do anything to address the problems that were there prior to the disaster.  In the fullest sense of the term, fukkō does just that – takes account of the problems that the city had previously, and deals with them through the reconstruction process.

“For example, one of the biggest problems that Rikuzentakata faced before the disaster was the loss of population, particularly among younger people.  They’d leave town to go to universities or to technical colleges, or find jobs in Sendai, and thus never come back.  This led to a vicious cycle, since fewer young people of working age meant fewer children in the area, and also fewer companies here that would employ young people of working age.  But it doesn’t have to be that way; I think that Rikuzentakata is a great place to raise kids.  If there is a way to bring jobs to the city, and to promote the benefits of raising a family here to younger people, we might be able to stop and even reverse this population loss.”

Another key component of Toba’s vision for rebuilding Rikuzentakata is to make it a comfortable, “barrier free” city for the physically challenged.  “If you think about it, since we lost everything – restaurants, shops, schools, even the city hall and all of our other municipal buildings – we can achieve this as we rebuild.  We can build buildings that are completely wheelchair accessible.  The whole town could be set up this way.”

I find this surprising, simply because, in general, the handicapped are not as visible in Japan as they are in similarly developed countries in North America and Europe.  In light of this, why was the mayor of a city in a very rural (and thus supposedly “traditional”) town so interested in this?

“When I was about 20, I spent three years in Tampa as a college exchange student.  I remember one night, shortly after I had arrived, when I was in the library studying: as I was waiting to get on the elevator, the doors opened and two people in wheelchairs got off.  Neither of them had legs.  This surprised me, because you didn’t see people like that in public places in Japan back then.  But I got to know quite a few people with disabilities like that while I was in Tampa.  They were friendly to me and very out-going.  In fact, after I was there a while, I saw all kinds of people regularly. You’d go out to a bar on a Friday night, and people with disabilities would be having a good time just like everyone else. They all seemed very independent and comfortable in any social situation.  This was new for me at first, because there was nothing like it in Japan.  Here, people with disabilities are made to feel like they have to hide the fact from public view – or even hide themselves.

“So, I thought: what if we could make Rikuzentakata a place like that – a place where people with disabilities could come to visit or live and feel perfectly accepted, a place where they wouldn’t have to worry about people judging them?  To that end, I’ve been thinking: The London Olympic games have just ended and soon the Paralympics will start.  Wouldn’t it be great if someday in the future Rikuzentakata could be the home of training facilities for Japanese Paralympians?  We’d have to build facilities for it, of course, but if we could realize something like that, the town would really make a name for itself as a place that overcame such extreme adversity to really do something new, important, and unique.  I think there would be economic benefits as well to doing this.”

But how would a local economy to support such unique facilities take root in a place like Rikuzentakata?

“If you think about it, no one is going to build something like a parts factory in a place like Rikuzentakata, because it’s too remote – everything would have to be shipped over land of sea to get to market, or to the point of assembly, adding cost to the process, right?”

Rather than struggle at the periphery of the Japanese production network, Toba sees the town’s future in capitalizing on its location and environment.  Certainly IT sector jobs could be brought to Rikuzentakata, as well as revitalizing its agricultural and marine products sectors.  He also feels that the climate, the abundance of nature, and the easy-going lifestyle afforded by its location make it a potentially attractive place for development as a retirement place for people in the northeast.  This, in combination with the idea of making Rikuzentakata into a progressive lifestyle center for the physically challenged, would bring health care and social service jobs into the community.

Rebuilding, and Red Tape

So, what stands in the way of achieving all this – or even part of it?  The mayor becomes very emphatic in his speech and gestures as he begins to explain this to me.  Obviously he has given this same information time and time again in interviews, and I imagine he is as tired of talking about it as he is of the situation he feels compelled to describe.  Even so, I’m greatly impressed by both his patience and his passion.

Toba tells me that his frustration with bureaucratic red tape has not been lessened in the year since he wrote his book.  Laws, rules, and regulations seem to stand in the way of every measure needed to bring about timely reconstruction and the possibility of revitalization.  As an example, he brings up the problems involved in developing the higher ground of the hills overlooking the former city into residential areas. “We’d like to develop the hills right behind this spot and put up a high-rise building with enough living units for 300 households.  We drew up the plans for this back in October of last year, but we haven’t managed to even break ground on the project yet.  The first problem is that it involves clearing the forest, which means we have to get special dispensation for the plan under the stipulations of the Forest Act (shinrinhō).  After that, we need to get official clearance to level the land, and then to build anything on the wide area that the city would gain as a result of that leveling, since it would be classified as a major development project (dai-kibō kaihatsu).  In addition to this, the town’s plans for rezoning and reconstruction to mitigate the loss of life in the event of future tsunamis have to be approved by various agencies at various levels of government.”

And this is where Toba voices his greatest sense of frustration: at every turn, the process seems to get bogged down by the time required to receive bureaucratic approval.  The typical response from the agencies of the central government to any petition is that it will take at least six months to obtain approval.  With a little cajoling, Toba says that the same bureaucrats are capable of greatly accelerating the approval process.  What frustrates him is the fact that they never say so up front; a lengthy negotiation is always involved. The problem is that there is no coordination between agencies with different realms of authority and conflicting rules and regulations, nor is there much evidence of a will to think creatively in order to coordinate and streamline the process.  There are natural obstacles, but it is the man-made ones, the red tape in particular, that are the most vexing.  “Do they really what to help?  What the hell do they really want to do?”  The establishment of the Reconstruction Agency (Fukkō-cho) within the central government, a development that occurred since the publication of his book, was designed to streamline the process by coordinating the actions of the various government ministries and agencies involved.  But Toba tells me that it has fallen short on this score: the Agency hasn’t made the situation worse, but it hasn’t improved things much, either.  Despite the idea behind the new agency, most of the bureaucracies in the central government that are supposed to cooperate with it have no interest in giving up any of the authority they have over their specific jurisdictions.

All of this is frustrating to Toba not only because his town is slowly dying as the bureaucrats drag their feet, but also because it presents a missed opportunity for Japan as a whole to redeem itself on the stage of international image politics.  Here is where Toba’s regional pride and a sense of national patriotism link up: “The sooner reconstruction is completed, the sooner the world will have a better image of Japan.”  Toba mentions how Japan’s position in the global economy and, with it, its reputation and importance in the world, have declined.  The bursting of the bubble was one element of this, but the problem also involves the fact that the very things that the Japanese were once so highly regarded for – the quality of their cars and electronics, just to take two examples – are now being equaled by neighboring countries like Korea.  Japan had been left by the wayside even before March 11, 2011.  But the disaster also provides Japan with a means of impressing the world and regaining its reputation.  “Rikuzentakata has become very well-known due to the destruction we suffered.  Now, if this city gets rebuilt in ten or fifteen years – well, you’d expect that, right?  But, what if the reconstruction could be achieved in five years, and the new Rikuzentakata was a very different and better place to live?  The world would notice. ‘A place that was so badly hit recovered so quickly?  The Japanese are really incredible!’  People all over the world would see us that way.”

This too is the kind of vision that the bureaucrats in the central government don’t seem to have; their aim is to replace infrastructure, not to create something new, like Toba’s idea for a city that would be welcoming to the physically challenged.  This is another reason why he has put his hope in the private sector.  “These people are the innovators – there is more imagination there.”

Rikuzentakata’s “master plan,” and the problems of population and demography

At present, the survivors are in residential limbo.  Toba tells me that there are about 2,200 kasetsu jutaku (temporary housing units) in Rikuzentakata – and they are all full.  “The hardest thing for the people to take is waiting to see some sort of change – nothing seems to be happening, and it frustrates them, just as it frustrates me.  Maybe it’s worse for them, because they don’t have any way to try to push things along.  All they see is that nothing is changing, despite the plans we have made.”

Those plans are tremendous – even without implementing Toba’s “barrier free city” concept from the very beginning.  To explain it to me, he directs my attention to a survey map of Rikuzentakata from prior to the disaster.  Pointing to the southwestern edge, near the mouth of the Kesen River and the site of the “miracle pine” (the only tree among a coastal forest of thousands, originally planted in the Edo period, to remain standing in the wake of the tsunami), he tells me that here the water reached a height of 13.8 meters (45.3 feet).  This easily breached the 5.5-meter high wave wall that stood between the town and the ocean at the time, and would still surpass the height of the 12.5-meter high wall that will be built to replace it.  The wave was even higher on the eastern side of town, reaching 18 meters (59 feet).  The planned 12.5-meter wall will probably be more than sufficient to protect the town against most tsunamis generated by seismic activity off the coast, but there is of course no guarantee that another monster tsunami won’t strike in the future.  The plan is thus to create separate zones for industrial, commercial, and residential use, with the last being located on top of the hills surrounding the plain on which the original city stood.  The earth that will be removed from these hilltops in the process of leveling them for construction of dwellings will then be used to raise the height of the areas closer to the coast by 5 meters.  Areas closest to the coast will be zoned for industrial development – the idea being that people will only be at work there during the day, when it will be relatively easy for workers to head for higher ground in the event of a tsunami warning.  Further inland from this zone, another zone will be for commercial use.  Here, shopping districts will be rebuilt on artificially raised land.  The idea here is similar: these areas will primarily be frequented during the day, when the people in them can evacuate quickly in the event of a tsunami warning.

Toba admits that the leveling of the hilltops to create the residential zones will change the shape of the community, making it more compact.  While he doesn’t believe that high-raise “mansion” apartments will become the sole form of residence, people who wish to build a single-family home will have to purchase the land on which to do so, which will be at a premium due to the demand for space cleared at such difficulty.  Many in the community won’t be able to afford this expense, and will thus have to move into the “mansion” style apartments, no matter what the nature of their living situation was prior to the disaster.  Still, this will be a great improvement over the crowed conditions in the kasetsu jutaku facilities.

I ask him how large a population he thinks the new residential zones should be built to accommodate.  He acknowledges that the city has lost population, both due to the disaster and the exodus of people leaving the area in search of jobs and a more stable lifestyle since. Be that as it may, he feels that the city should be prepared for future growth, within realistic limits.  Thus, the residential zone would ideally be able to accommodate around 25,000 – essentially the same population as Rikuzentakata contained prior to the tsunami.

The key to bring population growth back is of course to bring jobs into the area and also create a town in which young families will want to raise their children.  Toba thinks it is possible to do this, as he said before, but acknowledges obstacles to too much change from within the community itself.  “In and area like this, with a fairly high percentage of elderly residents, their opinions obviously carry a lot of weight.  These are the people who, more than anything else, really just want their old town back.  Younger folks in the town are more open to new ideas, but they sometimes find it hard to speak up when the older generation voice their opposition with a kind of ‘village elder’ authority.”  Be that as it may, however, time is on the side of the forces of change, provided that younger residents remain to see it through.  “Let’s say it takes ten years to rebuild the town.  In that time, a 16-year old high school student in town today will become a full-fledged adult, maybe even with a family of his or her own.  If they stay, they will become the mainstays of a new Rikuzentakata – but the trick is getting them to stay, and getting new people from outside to settle here as well.”

On the question of young people leaving the area, I ask Mayor Toba if Rikuzentakata is experiencing the same kind of loss of younger people that I have heard is the case in other coastal communities in Tohoku – exacerbated and accelerated since the tsunami as working age folks leave in search of jobs, normality, and new lives.  “I know it’s happening here, too,” he begins, “but at the same time, there are young people born and raised in Rikuzentakata who have returned from college or from working in places like Tokyo after seeing the destruction here.  Some have set up NPOs and are volunteering their time and effort to help the people here out in any way they can.  If you think about it, this is really surprising: if you’re young, you’ve got the best years of your life ahead of you – why not move to a place like Sendai or Morioka, where it’s easier to live comfortably and enjoy yourself, right?  But these young folks have decided to come back here – at a time like this, with things as bad as they are – and make a new life here.  The power of love for one’s hometown is pretty incredible…I really hope they will stay.”

The mayor’s “three wishes”

My hour of the mayor’s time is winding down – a fact that I barely took note of while being drawn into his ideas.  With time pressing, I decide to end with three more questions:  The first is rather corny in format, perhaps, but I figure it is still worth asking:  if the mayor could be granted three wishes from the central government, what would they be?

As silly as the question is, he answers it without pause:

“The first would be to really think about the situation of the people now living in the devastated areas, and what their feelings and needs are.  Every so often you see TV reports on the plight of people in the kasetsu jutaku, and the things that they long for.  So, why haven’t these needs been addressed?  Why is it necessary for them to be announced on TV like this to make them known?  It’s because the people in charge of taking care of the situation – the folks who make the rules – really don’t know what is going on in the hisaichi.  They don’t know what life is like here, what people are struggling with.  Just to give an absurd example: we get a budget from the Finance Ministry to address various needs in the community.  Great, right? The problem is, we can’t use it to do the kinds of things we need to do, because there are numerous rules and stipulations attached to how the money can be used, and for what purpose, etc.  So, most of it gets left untouched.  And this is all because the guys who make those rules and stipulations just don’t understand what’s going on here – what it’s like to actually live in the middle of all this.  So, first of all, I wish for them to stand in our shoes, and to really learn to think about how the people of Rikuzentakata look at things in the here and now.  To be able to figure out for themselves something like, ‘ah, winter is coming – I bet they’ll probably need warm clothes and blankets’…that’s what I wish they could do.

“Other than that, I guess my wish would be – and this is related to the first, of course – that politicians not forget about us in the course of their constant party and factional struggles.  The political parties of course don’t want to lose face – and at the same time they want to do everything to make the opposition do so.  Because of this, it’s been a year and five months now since the disaster, during which time the situation in the hisaichi has been used as a pawn in a game of chess within the factions of the Democratic Party of Japan, and between the DPJ and the LDP.

“The third is of course the problem created by the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant.  We’re quite a ways from it, so it hasn’t really affected us directly – but that’s not to say that it hasn’t done so at all.  The reputation of the whole Tohoku area has suffered because of it – people don’t think it’s safe here.”

I mention the problem with the Gion Festival in Kyoto last summer as an example – how logs made from the fallen coastal pines of Rikuzentakata were rejected for use in the bonfires of the famous Kyoto festival due to fears about radioactive contamination of the wood.  Toba agrees.  “The problem is that politicians and their parties aren’t really doing anything to address this.  You’ve got a disaster on your hands that threatens the survival of an entire region, and on top of that, you’ve got a manmade situation that threatens the entire nation – but is every single politician in the Diet giving these problems the kind of attention they deserve?  No.  Instead, these people are squabbling about whether taxes should be raised to pay for taking care of it, and if so by how much, and from where, etc.  And what they’re really worried about is how all this will affect their chances of getting reelected in the upcoming general election.  The people of Fukushima in particular have been forgotten and abandoned in the process.  The country – the government – bears some responsibility for the situation at Fukushima.  In any case, it is up to the government to bring it under control.  I’d like to see the government and the politicians own up to this, and do something about it.”

At this point, Mayor Toba’s trans-Tohoku regional pride, in opposition to the typical way that the disaster gets nationalized in the foreign – and even the domestic – press, truly comes to the fore:

“In the case of Fukushima, it’s Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), but up here were have Tohoku Electric Power Company.  They operate nuclear power plants, too, and do so much like TEPCO does in Fukushima.  Fukushima is really part of Tohoku, after all, and if you look at the region and its history, there are a lot of small, poor communities – places that embraced the power plants when they came in because of the benefits to the local economy.  TEPCO built in Fukushima instead of closer to Tokyo for reasons that should be clear.  But think about it – if a nuclear power plant had been built in a heavily populated area like Tokyo or Osaka, and then the same kind of catastrophe occurred, would the government just leave it alone for a year and five months, like they’ve done with Fukushima?  Japan would collapse if it did.  One could say that it’s all about population and amount of political influence, of course – and that’s true.  But the people living in the countryside – in iinaka – places like Fukushima or here, are also Japanese.  But most ministers and politicians don’t think of it that way – they think in terms of political and economic ‘weight,’ and what each region means in that sense.  And we don’t mean much, I guess.  We get a lot of politicians and bureaucrats up here, but it’s very rare to see them moved to tears by what they find.  I’m thankful even for those who do little more than shed tears; the others say their pretty words, but they probably forget about us as soon as they are back in Tokyo.”

Volunteerism, disaster fatigue, and the need to be remembered

My second to last question concerns the state – and fate – of volunteer involvement in Rikuzentakata.

Toba says that at more than a year beyond the disaster, the numbers of volunteers arriving in Rikuzentakata from foreign countries has dropped to almost nil.  Japanese volunteers, however, continue to arrive in significant numbers – sometimes as many as 300 a day.  The city has established a volunteer center, through which over 100,000 people have done volunteer work in the city since its establishment.  He admits that in this area, Rikuzentakata is in a better situation than many smaller towns that were hit by the tsunami. Toba has also taken to YouTube – not only to promote volunteering in the city, but even short of that, to encourage people to visit, if only out of sheer curiosity.  In essence, he is promoting “disaster tourism,” or even “gawking.”  While I’m somewhat surprised to hear this, his reasoning is convincing: “Even if people just come here to look at what happened, they’ll learn something, form an impression, and take that back with them – which may develop into something more helpful in the long run.  At the very least, if they buy even as little as a can of soda while they are here, they’re contributing to the local economy in some way.  Even in Japan, the media doesn’t pay much attention to us anymore, so if we don’t welcome whoever is willing to come and let them see what happened, we’ll end up being totally forgotten.”

Toba says that the sense of isolation and abandonment that the people of Rikuzentakata feel as the disaster fades further into the past for most of the rest of Japan is a source of increasing discouragement.  “People in the kasetsu jutaku watch TV, and at the end of the year they see all of those programs, like the annual ‘Red and White Song Competition,’ which are usually big family viewing events.  Sure, many of the artists and entertainers on the program last year performed songs dedicated to the people who died in the tsunami, or made encouraging statements to the survivors, but the whole thing really suggests that life moves on.  The gap is just too big.  And the folks living in the kasetsu who lost loved ones in the tsunami watch this and are forced to realize again just how much they have lost.  It’s absolutely heartbreaking.  So, when the volunteers come and wish the people here ‘good luck,’ or say things like ‘hang in there,’ it may not seem like much, but for the survivors here it is reassuring in a way – they realize that they haven’t been completely forgotten by the outside world.

“This is a kind of psychological dimension of the situation that may be very characteristic of the Japanese – I’m not sure.  But for many people, the knowledge that they haven’t been forgotten seems to help them keep themselves together.  That’s why we advise younger volunteers to at least say ‘hello’ when they see folks from the town – especially in the case of the elderly.

“I heard this from one of the old men in town.  He ran into a group of volunteers who were students at a university somewhere, who greeted him warmly.  It’s not like they had a whole lot of time to talk with him, but he said that even so, when they parted he felt sad.  At the same time, though, they wished him the best and said they’d come again.  This seemed to give him hope – it was something to hang on for…that kind of experience is as important as anything else that the volunteers can provide here.  There are survivors here in town who are in their 80s, and who lost a spouse with whom they had lived most of their lives until March 11, 2011.  What are they supposed to hope for, to go on living for?  Even if for only a few moments, the chance to meet and talk with young volunteers who are concerned, but also positive, seems to ease their burden.”

What the mayor has gained

My final question is the same one I asked Kato-san in Kesennuma – the awkward, seemingly insensitive one about what – if anything – positive was gained from the experience of the tsunami and its aftermath.  This is especially hard to ask a man who lost his wife in the deluge, and I almost balk at asking it for that very reason.  I do in the end, apologetically, if only for consistency’s sake.  Again, Mayor Toba answers with reassuring readiness:

“When I became mayor, right before the disaster, it really hadn’t occurred to me just how important it was to rely on the people around me and to seek out the advice of others and learn from them.  Right after the disaster, there was so much that needed to be taken care of, and so much information I needed to obtain to do so, and so much to process even when I got it.  There was no way that I could study enough on my own to figure out what I needed to know to make the best decisions.  So, I learned to reach out to others for advice and help, and to grasp the opportunity to meet more people who could help.  I started to get around more, in order to meet all kinds of people, listen to their opinions, and seek their advice.  To do this, I needed to be open and honest with people.  I guess the typical image of a mayor is of somebody who has it all figured out – or at least pretends to – and doesn’t seek advice from too many people.  I couldn’t afford to be like that, even if I had wanted to.  I had to rely on anyone who was in a position of offer help.

“Also, I came to realize that putting on a show of fortitude – a brave face in adversity, like none of this had phased me – was pointless.  I had to be honest and up front with people about how I felt.  That, anyway, was the only way I could make the kind of friends I could really rely on.  Rather than being stand-offish with people, and suspecting some sort of ulterior motive on their part for wanting to get to know me, I found that it’s better to get to know as many people as possible, because in this line of work, you never know where you’re going to find people who can really help you out.  In this job I get to meet a lot of people all over Japan, but this is the same attitude I approach them with wherever I go.  I’ve gotten to know a lot of people all over the country this way – people that I never would have gotten to know so well if I went around overly conscious of my status as a mayor.”

Just as he finishes his answer, the same woman who brought me into his office knocks and enters with the news that the mayor’s next appointment is waiting.  I wonder if he ever manages to get out of this room during the course of a day for more than a bathroom break.  In gratitude or his time and insights, I leave him with three Boston Redsox caps – one for him and one each for his two sons.  He accepts them with genuine enthusiasm, shakes my hand warmly again, and sees me to the door.

As I leave, I hope that some day soon I’ll be able to make a return visit to the kind of Rikuzentakata that the mayor envisions.