A lengthy introduction

In Japan, of course, the media attention to the aftermath of the tsunami was much more sustained; this, after all, was a matter of national importance.  There too, however, a gradual drift in focus could be seen; while the news through the rest of March and most of April featured the experiences of survivors and the problems they faced in putting their lives back together, amidst the emerging details of the nuclear crisis, by mid-May even NHK had switched to covering the worsening situation in and around the crippled reactors.  This news included the plight of those whose lives were now dislocated by the spreading modern miasma of radiation to the growing tally of featured victims.  These people joined the ranks of those dislocated by the tsunami, in a sense – and yet the ongoing plight of those who lost their homes, loved ones, and normal lives to the waves became less apparent.  This is not to say that the situation in Fukushima is not a heart-wrenching disaster – it is.  Whole communities of people have been scattered under government evacuation orders, and countless more continue to be exposed to radioactive isotopes released in the steam and seawater used to cool the cores.  As they grow up, a whole generation of children in Fukushima may well face the increased incidences of various cancers from absorbing these isotopes in their youth.  The Fukushima Daiichi disaster, though, is a man-made disaster, with its origins in the hubris of a mammoth, well-connected company and industry rather than the unavoidable path of a swift and powerful natural disaster.

According to statistics recently announced by the Fire and Disaster Management Agency (shōbōchō – FDMA), the number of dead and missing from the disaster stands at 23,539.  As of June – three months after the catastrophe –  1,220 people still occupied the sixteen temporary evacuation centers established in the city of Sendai alone.  Although Sendai is the largest city in the Tohoku region, it was by no means the hardest hit; in Ishinomaki, with a population of only 160,000 to Sendai’s 1 million, 5,417 people are presently still living in 85 centers scattered across the devastated city.  In these two cities alone over 6,000 people are still living in school gymnasiums and similar facilities, with limited access to toilets and showers, and only as much privacy as the makeshift corrugated cardboard barriers that divide the floor up into spaces for households can provide.  Media attention has moved on, but the situation has not progressed with nearly as much speed.

I became fixated on this situation for personal reasons.  My first experience living in Japan was in Sendai, as an exchange student from Macalester College back in 1986-87.  I lived there again for two and a half years in the early 90’s while completing a master’s in Education at Miyagi University of Education – the same university where I had been an exchange student.  Sometime during the first stay I met my wife, and during the second married her.  It is a place of many fond memories and good friends – far too many of whom, my wife and I realized only after March 11^th, we had lost touch with over the years.  I don’t claim to be unique in my affection for the city; although it grew enormously during the “bubble years” of the late 1980s, Sendai maintained a small, regional city feel to it.  Ask any of the students from Macalester who studied at MUE before or after my time, and you’d probably hear similar statements of nostalgia for the “city of trees,” even if development has increasingly encroached upon the forest surrounding it.

For at least a month after March 11^th, my wife and I were glued to the screen whenever news of the tsunami and its aftermath was broadcast.  Since we subscribe to NHK’s satellite broadcast, this meant that we watched image after image and story after story of destruction, loss, and tragedy, often for several hours a day, while remaining in the comfort of our living room in Connecticut.  We became disaster junkies, but each “fix” of news only made it hurt more. I finally had to draw a line for myself at watching YouTube clips of the tsunami’s onslaught, like the one below from the city of Kesennuma, because it was becoming a something of a morbid obsession that was cutting into my sleep time severely.  I still don’t really understand why I started doing this in the first place or how it became such a habit for a while, but I think I was trying to get as close to the experience of being there as I could in an attempt to more fully earn the right to be so emotionally invested in this, in spite of being so safely out of harm’s way.  That may not make much sense, but it’s a close approximation of what I was feeling as I watched such clips.

Limited electricity and phone service were restored to the parts of Sendai that were spared by the tsunami within two weeks of the quake.  We were at first happy to hear from friends who survived the ordeal unscathed, but that period soon gave way to heartbreaking news about others.  And then there are the others – the people we lost touch with years ago – about whom we have no idea even now.

And in the midst of that, we began to feel a growing dissonance, caused by being so emotionally committed to a tragedy unfolding so far away, which was of very little concern – apparently – to most people in the society in which we now lived.  At times the attitudes I encountered seemed almost callous, hyper-sensitized as I was to the situation in Tohoku.  I’m not referring to the glib commentary of certain right-wing pundits or the mean-spirited, often racist one-liners posted by on-line miscreants in response to videos of the tsunami on YouTube.  Perhaps even more aggravating were the well-meaning but equally glib comments from those whose job it was to put the disaster in perspective for their audience.  On March 14, David Sanger of the New York Times provided one glaring example of this in an interview he gave on NPR’s On Point.  Most of this particular episode, as well as the bulk of Sanger’s commentary, concerned the worsening situation at the Fukushima Daiichi Plant (and what it meant for us in the US, as well as for the future of nuclear power worldwide – the real story here, after all…), but he closed the interview with the following observations about the prospects for the Japanese to overcome their predicament.

Sanger: “On the recovery, you know, I spent six years living in Japan, and I have to say that the resilience of the Japanese people is pretty remarkable.  You see a lot of elderly who are up in Sendai, because many of the young people have left to the cities, and what you’re struck by is the fact that these are the same people who in their much younger days saw Japan rebuild from the firebombing and from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  So, at the beginning of their lives and toward the end of their lives, they have seen this process before.  And you go through Japanese cities that were firebombed during World War Two, and you wouldn’t know it.  And, you know, in some ways, tragic as this is, it’s also a great opportunity for Japan to rebuild yet again.”

This was clearly something of a throw-away statement, a cluster of bromides about Japan’s remarkable recovery from the devastation of WWII tied to a weak homily of hope for the future – all designed to end the interview on an upbeat note.  But the question that popped immediately into my mind was this: who the hell would want to rebuild their towns and cities, their whole society, and lives from the ground up, especially if they saw nothing drastically wrong with the way things were before?  Perhaps I am reading too much into it, but I find that Sanger’s praise for Japanese resilience and resourcefulness conceals another attitude about Japan – one that I find more than a bit arrogant, especially coming from outside observers: namely, it is the idea that present-day Japan has somehow lost its way, strayed from its proper path, and so irrevocably so that only a cataclysmic event like this will do to set things right.  There is an element of similarity in this to Glenn Beck’s more smug claim that the tsunami may have been a message from God that we are not doing the “right thing” (Beck didn’t bother to enlighten his audience on what was being done wrong, or what should be done instead, but in his defense, at least he didn’t single the Japanese out for heaven’s vengeance; it was a warning to “us” in general, and not just “them.”)  Or perhaps an even closer parallel would be the right-wing populist governor of Tokyo Ishihara Shintaro’s crass statement, made in the immediate wake of the tsunami, that the disaster was “divine retribution” visited upon a Japan that had become too materialistic.  As Murai Yoshihiro, the governor of Miyagi Prefecture, pointed out, as an outsider to the situation in Miyagi it was all too easy – and insensitive – for Ishihara to make such comments.  (Ishihara subsequently apologized – a rare occurrence in its own right.)

Aside from this, Sanger’s praise for Japanese resilience pulls on another common thread that weaves throughout American media impressions of Japan: the concept of gaman, or forbearance.  In present-day usage, the term means little more than to put up with an unpleasant or painful state of affairs, be it profound or mundane.  American (and maybe European?) journalists, however, have a tendency to see it as the cultural reverberation of a Zen-like stoicism.  In the aftermath of the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995, news analysts marveled at the apparent lack of looting and violent crime in the city of Kobe, and latched on to this term as a cultural-determinist explanation for why the Japanese were so well behaved in the face of adversity.  It has come into play this time as well.  While I have to give the people of Tohoku credit for their forbearance in resisting the temptation to give in to hysteria or desperation, the extent that the media in America has appealed to gaman seems to suggest a touch of Orientalism: the usual explanation for the lack of disturbances never seems to be that the Japanese understand that mass hysteria and violence would only make things worse.  Rather, gaman suggest that there is something deep-seated in the culture at work here, so deep, that they don’t even have to think about it – they just go into gaman mode whenever adversity strikes.  It is not a rational decision, but a conditioned response, engendered by education and a culture that prizes social order over individual expression.  Commentators on both the right and the left have seen in gaman the hallmark of a society in which individuality is sacrificed for the greater good – or for nothing in particular, in fact.  Ultimately, it is part of a complex that keeps individual Japanese from sticking out, questioning authority, and demanding to be heard. Thus, the American appeal to gaman in understanding the Japanese has its less than laudatory side as well.

I’ve always found this fascination with gaman curious.   The Japanese press hardly mentions it at times such as these, which some American commentators would only take as yet another sign of how ingrained it is in the Japanese psyche (ah, but then why would they even have a word for it in the first place?).  Wondering what people who were actually going through the experience of life in post-disaster Tohoku would make of this, I mentioned the American media’s preoccupation with gaman to my friend Hariu Takashi, one of the people we were overjoyed to hear from during the first two weeks after the quake.  Hariu-san and I went through the master’s program at MUE together.  At the time, he was teaching at a private high school in Sendai; now he works at a junior college in the city, where he teaches courses on child psychology and student counseling.  Hariu-san and his family survived the quake unscathed.  They live in a part of Sendai that was well beyond the reach of the invading wave.  Actually, though, it would be better to say that they survived the ordeal physically unharmed; he lost close friends and a few students to the tsunami, a fact he reported to me in our first post-quake phone conversation.   This, he told me, had become practically a universal condition of life for those living in the city.  “Everyone knows someone who died – or knows someone who lost someone close to them.”  What I found striking about this conversation was the flatness in his voice, a certain lack of energy that I had never heard from him before; under normal conditions, Hariu-san peppers his conversation with jokes and plays on words, sort of like a manzai comedian does.  This frenetic humor was now completely absent.

Hariu-san told me that he had been visiting some of the evacuation centers in Sendai, looking for students and other friends and acquaintances among the survivors.  This was when I mentioned the American media’s take on gaman to him.

“It’s not gaman,“ he said, “those people are still in a state of shock.  I don’t know what’s going to happen when they start to emerge from it.”

What happens when they emerge from the initial shock is part of what I wish to explore in this blog, as I spend the next few weeks in Miyagi Prefecture.  How do they come to terms with the situation they face and all that they have lost?  How does one go about rebuilding and, ultimately, recovering?  And, as people learn to cope with their situation, what sort of new difficulties do they encounter?  What sorts of tensions arise along the way?  While not meaning to be a cynic or take anything away from the tremendous fortitude that the people of the area have displayed in this disaster, I am particular interested in this question of tensions.  Is there a difference in the way that people in the Tohoku region view what happened to them (and what they are still going through) and the way that their plight is portrayed in the Japanese media – whose audience is largely Japanese who may have never set for in Tohoku?  Even within the region, are there any differences of opinion, interest, outlook, etc., between those living in areas that suffered the tsunami and those who lived further inland, where the temblor created pandemonium but the waves never reached?  How do local politics and long-standing hierarchies of privilege impact the situation?

These are just a few of the questions I hope to explore while there.  On a more concrete level, I’ll also be talking to a lot of people about problems relating to education and social welfare, as well as dabbling in a bit of history from time to time, since that is what I was trained to do.  That training, and my own particular interest within the field of modern Japanese history – being the study of marginalized groups, how they are formed, and why a difference between them and the “majority” becomes significant in the first place – are indeed what attract me to difference and conflict, I guess.  (Not that historians are the only ones to do so, of course.)  I probably won’t be pursuing any of these with the thoroughness I would like to however; there is so little time and so much to see, after all.   I hope that those who choose to follow this blog will feel free to draw my attention to pertinent facts and ideas that I have overlooked, and correct me when I am clearly off base.  I may not always be able to respond to the comments I receive (the logistics of getting connected to the internet in areas that have been recently devastated may make it hard to connect on a regular basis), but I would greatly appreciate constructive criticism and guidance.

I’ll also be spending part of the trip doing volunteer relief work in Ishinomaki with the Japan Emergency Network, an NPO that has been on the scene there since the earliest days of the crisis.  At this point, I don’t know exactly what my job detail will be, but I hope to provide a full report of the experience and the people I come into contact with through it when the time comes.

Here I must give credit where it is due: while I have personal reasons for choosing to volunteer in Ishinomaki, I was inspired to do so – and to consider writing a blog about Tohoku four months on – by Tracey Taylor and Dee Green’s March 29^th entry in their blog “37 Frames.”  In this and subsequent entries, these two Tokyo-based Australian photographers recreate their trips to take part in relief efforts in Ishinomaki.   It’s powerful reading.  Here’s a link to the March 29^th entry:

http://www.tokyophotographers.com/2011/03/37-frames-great-tohoku-earthquake-tsunami-2011-japan-the-black-mouth-1.html

One last note on the choice of title for this blog is in order:  Anyone who saw the images of the aftermath of the tsunami that began to emerge in mid-March will recall the rubble, piles and piles of chaotic rubble, much of it barely identifiable in origin, that seemed to stretch for mile after mile.

As I stared at image after image of this rubble, much of it coated in a toxic sludge of sand, mud, oil, industrial chemicals, and dead ocean life, the first thought that came to mind was: where does it all go?  What is to be done with all of the mangled remains of so many towns and cities?  From a logistical perspective alone “daunting” does not even begin to describe the task ahead.  A recent survey by Japan’s Ministry of the Environment estimated the total amount of rubble and waste in the three hardest-hit prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima to be somewhere in the area of 22,600,000 metric tons.  In Ishinomaki, which was harder hit than most coastal communities, as of June 20^th only ten percent of the estimated 6,160,000 tons of debris had been cleared and carted off to temporary disposal/containment areas for processing.  (Source: Honkawa Yutaka’s analysis of the figures in the June 21^st Cabinet Office report, as posted on his website, 「社会実情データ図録」http://www2.ttcn.ne.jp/honkawa/4363e.html )

While the logistical problems Ishinomaki faces are particularly severe due to the sheer volume of debris, the majority of the municipalities surveyed had yet to clear even half of their rubble.  In towns that have been evacuated due to the nuclear crisis, in fact, the work hasn’t even begun yet.

But debris – or gareki as it is called in Japanese – has another, more symbolic meaning to it.  It is not just splintered and water-logged lumber, cracked roof tiles, shattered glass, twisted metal, and innumerable other substances; it also represents what these objects were, and by extension the world of the people they belonged to, prior to their being pulverized by the unstoppable, churning onslaught of the sea.  It is lives lost and lives damaged, perhaps beyond repair.   Where does it all go?  The survivors, too, face the problem of finding a place to put the past and process it, or else to bury it forever – either way, they must do so as they struggle to move on.

A friend in Ishinomaki who lost too many loved ones on March 11^th tells me that he often overhears his mother – who survived but suffered the same losses as he did – sighing to herself, “Aa – nan datta darō ne?”  On the surface, it’s an easy enough statement to translate (“what the hell was that all about?” comes pretty close), but there is so much going on below the surface of this comment, so much that she implies but leaves unstated – maybe because it is too painful and enormous to grapple with just yet – that I can’t think of a translation to do it justice.  But that sense of disbelief, the realization that so much has been taken away and for no reason whatsoever, is in its own way a kind of emotional – perhaps even spiritual – gareki.  Like its material counterpart that continues to occupy so much of the landscape, it too must be cleared and dealt with.

But that will be much harder to do than turning a landscape strewn with material debris into towns and cities once again.