12:46am in Connecticut is 2:46pm in Japan. As of the morning of March 11th, 2012 in Japan, the figures from the disaster stood as follows: 15,854 confirmed dead, 3,155 still missing but officially presumed dead, and 343,935 dislocated and living in temporary housing facilities or other arrangements. In addition to these figures, it is necessary to bear in mind that these numbers represent whole communities along the coast of northeastern Japan; communities that are nowhere near making a recovery after a year. Some may never do so, especially in the areas closest to the failed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
The disaster goes on. So much so, in fact, that it almost doesn’t seem to make sense to speak of an “anniversary” – although much has changed since. So, as I sit down to watch the NHK satellite feed tonight, as we press on toward 2:46pm in Japan, here are a few thoughts, by way of commemoration. Most of what I would like to say, though, concerns not how far things have come in a year, but how much further they have yet to go. This is not to be overly pessimistic. Reconstruction is happening, because the survivors won’t let it be otherwise. Still, in the very act of “reconstructing” one finds the ongoing toll of the disaster at every turn.
NHK at Midnight
Right now, I’m watching a town-by-town assessment of the state of things in 51 communities along the coast of Tohoku. For each community, the screen displays how many residents were killed and how many remain unaccounted for, while the narrator tells me how many of the original residents have returned (if they have been allowed to at all, in the case of places close to Fukushima Daiichi), how many are still living in temporary housing facilities, and how many have moved away, as well as the current state of reconstruction measures. In almost every case, with the exception of the coastal areas of the large city of Sendai, populations have plummeted. The Japanese term kaimetsu (annihilation, obliteration) is used repeatedly to describe the social and physical damage that is still readily apparent.
The first thing that occurs to me as I watch this is how much the tone of this broadcast – and indeed of anything I have seen on NHK over the past many months – differs from that of the plethora of stories on Japan that have appeared in the American media over the past few days. The ABC Nightly News broadcast on March 10th, for example, was a litany of the same kinds of complimentary yet Orientalist descriptions and accolades: “this proud nation,” and the “characteristic” respect for order and courtesy of its people, even in the face of adversity. Of course, there are also reports of the ongoing health concerns that people living in Fukushima Prefecture have in regard to the pall of nuclear contamination that spread across their communities – which is of course certainly the case. While this concern is real, and national in scope, it is only the most immediately perceptible to those living so far away. It is, perhaps, the only approach to the story that makes sense to people how haven’t had any connection at all to the disaster since it faded from the American news cycle sometime in the spring of last year; in our nuclear age, we all share the vague dread of radiation. Most of us have never experienced the ravages of a tsunami. I can’t help but wonder if people who experienced Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, or those who survived the devastating tornadoes in Joplin, or the more recent storms across the South, might have a different way of viewing the tsunami in retrospect.
The moment
March 11, 2012 – Memorial Service for those lost in the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, at the National Theatre in Tokyo. Photo from the Mainichi News (http://mainichi.jp/select/jiken/graph/20120311/22.html)
It is almost 2:46pm in Japan. NHK is broadcasting the memorial ceremony at the National Theatre in Tokyo live. The emperor and empress have just arrived. The ceremony starts with the singing of Japan’s problematic national anthem, “Kimigayo.” Then, at exactly 2:46, a full minute of mokutō – silence, silent prayer, and meditation.
2:46pm is an obvious choice, but also one of national rather than of local significance. Every part of Japan felt the quake, after all; but the shaking itself, for all its violence, claimed very few lives. It was the tsunami triggered by the explosive upheaval of the earth’s crust that brought death and destruction to Tohoku, and those waves struck at different times across the region. 2:46 is a point in time that, while by no means arbitrary, serves as a convenient focal point for national memory, but it overwrites diverse local memories of the catastrophe as it was experienced across the Pacific coast of Tohoku.
As I write these lines, it is 1:20am – 34 minutes after the quake hit. A year ago at this time, the first tsunami waves were just making landfall in parts of Iwate Prefecture.
After the moment of silence, Prime Minister Noda makes a brief speech. He promises the nation and its emperor that the government will do the following in the years to come: restore the affected areas of Fukushima Prefecture to a livable environment; learn from the disaster, and be prepared for the next of its kind; remember the way the people pulled together in the days after the disaster, and cultivate such values in future generations; recall the aid and sympathy Japan received from all over the world, and repay this debt of gratitude whenever and wherever circumstances call for it.
After Noda’s speech, Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko stand to make their address. The emperor is dressed in a black coat and tails; the empress in a black kimono and obi. Both stand with their backs to the audience, facing a wooden pillar erected on the center of the stage in memory of the victims of the disaster. Both bow formally to it, then the emperor removes the text of his speech from the breast pocket of his coat. The address that follows is not long – Japanese emperors are not known for making long addresses (or for making them at all, in fact), and Akihito has just recently recovered from heart surgery – but the following passage caught my ear. What follows is my off-the-cuff translation:
“I expect that along the road to recovery in the devastated areas there will be many obstacles to surmount. I hope that the people of Japan will extend their hearts to the afflicted [hisaisha] and spare no pains to see to it that the devastated areas are restored. Furthermore, it is important that they never forget the memory of this great earthquake and tsunami and teach it to their descendants, thereby fostering a consciousness of how to prepare for such disasters, and in doing so strive to realize a safer country.”
NHK moves on to the ceremonies simultaneously taking place in communities across coastal Tohoku. Some of these spots are very familiar. They interview a family at the exact spot overlooking Ishinomaki that Takumi brought me to at the end of our tour of his hometown, back in July of last year – the grounds of a Shinto shrine atop a prominent hill that faces the bay. As they speak of their losses on “that day,” it is obviously that they are fighting back the tears.
The coverage moves on to Onagawa. Again, the camera shoots from the exact same parking lot which Yama-chan brought me to on our rainy visit to the town back in early August – the parking lot of the municipal hospital that overlooks that ruins of the town directly below. I am struck by how little the scenery has changed since that day, now over seven months ago: even the reinforced concrete building with the green roof that had been knocked over like a toy and lay pathetically on its side is still there, in the exact same state, as if it has become a de facto memorial to the savage power of the tsunami.
Other towns are covered. In many, interviews with local residents reveal people still struggling with loss, and with the fact that there are others – friends, loved ones – who are still unaccounted for, but will never return; a particularly hellish kind of psychological limbo for the survivors.
Coverage returns to the National Theatre, where survivors are addressing the memorial with their backs to the audience, just as the emperor and empress did. They read from carefully prepared speeches, although all speak of their own losses of a year ago. I am deeply moved, not so much by what they say, but by how much they struggle to say it. Most are visibly shaking with grief. Tears may be less frequent across the hisaichi now than they were in the months immediately after the tsunami, but that doesn’t mean the wounds have healed. The pain is always there, like a vast well of despair, just below the surface. The fact that it is still there may be a sign of our humanity, just as our ability to move on in spite of such losses must be a sign of our will to live.
Catch 22
The fact that Onagawa appeared on screen, apparently with so little change since August, brought to mind the on-going disaster. If March 11th of last year was a disaster of sudden, catastrophic change, the past months since the work of collecting the debris drew to a close has been a disaster of inertia.
Arial shots of Onagawa, taken from the same vantage point, on March 13, 2011 (above) and February 22, 2012 (below). These photos and other “then and now” comparison photos can be found on the Asahi Shinbun website at http://ev.digital.asahi.com/special/20120311oneyearlater/
Onagawa and places like it are a perfect example. I mentioned before that in Onagawa the plan is to relocate the entire community to higher ground, by cutting into the faces of the steep hills that surround the original port. This will certainly put people out of harm’s way in the event of a tsunami, but it will also separate what was once a compact community into separate hillside outposts. Worse still, such plans – in Onagawa and elsewhere across Tohoku – have thus far been drawn up without much input from the residents of the community.
This has led to a roadblock to recovery. While most of the debris has been cleared, land owners who can afford to rebuild homes and business can’t, or won’t, because of understandable fears that their original land may be ruled off limits to residential or business use. The local economy can’t rebuild without aid and infrastructure, but national and prefectural governments are still mulling over the question of whether to rebuild all the ports destroyed by land subsidence and the tsunami, or to concentrate fishing and other marine activities in selected regional ports deemed more viable and protectable in the event of future tsunamis. Without the fishing industry, merchants and other business owners who served the community don’t know whether to rebuild on give up on the idea of reestablishing their businesses in town. Even if they are determined to stay, however, the crucial question is where to set up shop. In the traditional layout that was so brutally wiped away by the tsunami, each town had a shopping district that was more or less centrally located. Residents could walk or bike to it in most cases. If the town is relegated to leveled hillsides around the original, centralized port area, how does one set up a shopping area accessible to as many customers as possible?
For municipal bureaucrats and city planners, there are plenty of headaches beyond dealing with the needs, desires, and concerns of the original residents. First and foremost is the time issue: every day that the state of recovery seems to languish is also a day without the hope of jobs, and a day on which residents may decide to give up on the town and look for a new life elsewhere. The result is the perfect vicious cycle of population exodus, economic stagnation, and more flight; a slow but steady wave of community kaimetsu to follow in the path of the tsunami.
Many communities, especially those within the 12km evacuation zone around Fukushima Daiichi, are most likely done for. Back during the “bubble years” of the 1980s, there were stories (probably apocryphal) of hikers in the mountains of northern Japan coming upon villages that had been abandoned years before, in the course of Japan’s juggernaut ascendancy to economic affluence. These ghost villages became the perfect setting for urban myths of hauntings, as if the past were seeking vengeance on an upstart present. It is easy to picture the same scenario unfolding years from now, as a new generation of hikers – this time traveling intrepidly along the Pacific Coast of Fukushima, in spite of the lingering radiation – come upon nuclear ghost towns, abandoned almost over night. What will their ghosts seek vengeance for?