Of Shelters and Survivors

As I think I mentioned in an earlier post, our tendency as human beings is to want to believe that those whom we see suffering are somehow ennobled by the experience.  Perhaps this is because doing so makes it all the easier for us to feel a sense of pity for them; pity well spent on unfortunate but virtuous souls.

But that is just our desire.  As such, it is also interesting to note how it stands in sharp contrast to another common belief about disasters.  Back to one of Rebecca Solnit’s observations: when the normal order of everyday life breaks down completely, we tend to believe that those stuck in such a situation will resort – or “revert” – to the most barbaric and Darwinian mode of struggle for individual survival, turning their backs on their fellow humans without a second thought, if that’s what it takes to make it through.

From the little bit that I have seen and heard over the course of my time in Miyagi, though, I have arrived at two hunches: 1) much as we would like to believe it, we do no one a service be expecting the victims of misfortune to behave better than the rest of us; and, 2) this is precisely because as things begin to return to normal – or rather to some altered state of normalcy – the problems really begin.

I call these “hunches” rather than “conclusions,” because I admit that the sources from which I have drawn them by no means comprise a thorough survey of peoples’ experiences and opinions.  An extensive oral history of life in the evacuation shelters eventually deserves to be recorded; but I believe it probably won’t be until well after the last residents have moved out.

Hinanjo: from evacuation centers to shelters for the displaced

A prefectural sports complex in Onagawa, which in the days and weeks after the tsunami sheltered many of the town’s surviving population.  At the present time, more than 150 are still living here.

During my stay in the Tohoku area, I had the opportunity to talk for various people who had resided temporarily in evacuation shelters in different towns and cities.  These included my friend Takumi and the others whom I met on that evening after the funeral, as well as another old friend from the basketball team, Komatsu; three individuals I met in Ishinomaki during the course of volunteering with JEN (one of them being the earlier-mentioned Ueshima-san); and a couple of people I met later in Sendai, during the Tanabata Festival.  I also talked to a student of Hariu-san’s who was from Ishinomaki, and knew many people who had lived or were still living in the shelters, although she and her family never had.  Yama-chan as always proved to be a source of detailed second-hand information through the conversations he had had with people living at the shelters in the course of his work.  The stories I heard from these people ea about what it was like during the early days and weeks after the tsunami came from shelters in Ishinomaki, Kesennuma, Natori, and the coastal parts of Sendai city.  I did not approach each and every one of these people with a standard battery of survey questions, but simply got them on the subject and let them recall whatever came to mind, although I would ask the occasional clarifying question.

What follows is thus not a detailed exploration.  A thorough history of the hinanjo, as evacuation centers are called in Japanese, will need to explore various facets of their administration and composition which these anecdotes alone won’t permit: for starters, what determined where people ended up?  On a walk through any Japanese town or city, you are likely to come upon signs identifying a specific area as a hinanjo.  Usually, these are school buildings and the grounds attached to them.  The reason for designating such places as evacuation centers is not only because they are public spaces easily recognized by people living in the vicinity, but also because the open grounds are the safest place to be in the event of an earthquake and the fires that often follow them.  Most hinanjo, in fact, seem to have been selected with the threat of earthquakes – not tsunamis – in mind: a situation that will require some rethinking in many areas in light of this disaster.

If you live in a Japanese town, and particularly if you own a home there, the municipality and your accumulated knowledge of your neighborhood make you aware of the nearest hinanjo to your home – the one you should go to in case of a disaster.  With the quake hitting at 2:46pm, however, most people were not at home at the time.  Schools and places of work have their own designated evacuation centers, of course, but what this meant is that many families ended up scattered among different hinanjo in the immediate aftermath.  This was precisely my friend Takumi’s experience.

How, or even whether, these separated families managed to regroup in the days that followed, represents the point at which the hinanjo began evolving from truly temporary places of refuge to residential shelters.  In all too many cases, of course, whatever joy came from reunions after days of uncertainty was tempered by anxious waiting for the appearance of other family members, and the eventual, bitter news that they would never be coming back.  Over time (although how much time it took is of course another question deserving exploration), families appear to have reconstituted themselves as best they could in the shelters nearest their homes – or whatever was left of them.  Even before this point, however, it appears that many of the shelters began compiling lists of the people taking refuge there, probably under the instruction of municipal officials.  The primary point of this exercise was of course to make it possible for families scattered across different shelters to find one another.  In the days after the tsunami, some of these lists were posted on internet web sites such as Google’s missing persons pages, as well as on municipal government homepages.  The earthquake and tsunami had drastically disrupted cell phone and land line phone service across northeastern Japan, but I have heard from many people within the hisaichi and outside of it that the internet faired a bit better, perhaps owning to the widespread use of fiber optic cable in Japan; as power began to be restored, people got back on-line.

Another purpose of the lists, though, was to serve as a head count.  Here too, the timing is important and deserves further examination.  The Japanese Self-Defense Force, with some aid from American forces stationed in Japan, began delivering food and supplies to the various hinanjo as soon as they could reach them.  The quantities delivered were at first based upon rough estimates of the number of people at each shelter, and probably constrained by logistical concerns such as the amount of supplies that could be carried on any one sortie and the number of hinanjo that required supplies during the course of it.  Eventually, however, the task of providing food and necessities to the shelters was turned over to the municipal governments, with aid from the prefectural and central governments.  The lists served to indicate the number of meals and other supplies to be delivered to each shelter.  This is where the timing becomes an issue, however: as I learned from Hariu-san, and mentioned in an earlier post, in some cases people whose names had been recorded on the lists moved out soon afterwards, either to return to their homes or to find other living arrangements.  Since their names remained of the list, though, the local government still delivered means for them – meals to which some still felt entitled; hence the anecdotes of ethically-questionable behavior, such as folks living in luxury condos making the daily trek to their local hinanjo to receive their rations.

Anecdotes from the early days

But let me get back to the very first days, since the lists and rations based upon them – and the problems this system subsequently created – didn’t start until weeks after the disaster.  People I talked to about life in the shelters immediately after 3/11 generally claimed that, although everyone felt a deep sense of uncertainty, signs of open panic and hysteria were few.  Part of this was due to the local nature of the centers; even if your entire family was not there with you, you were at least surrounded by many of your neighbors.  Of course, this introduced an element of personality into the situation that wasn’t always ameliorative: a student of Hariu-san’s whom I talked to told me about a friend of hers from Ishinomaki who took refuge in her neighborhood shelter.  The people empowered to be “in charge” of each shelter (whatever being “in charge” meant in the early days – or even later on – is another topic that still remains to be explored) were the leaders of the local jichitai – “self-governing bodies” – typically neighborhood associations and the like.  In this particular student’s case, the head of the jichitai, either out of stress or an inflated sense of self-importance under the circumstances, become quite dictatorial.  In such cases, however, the fact the shelters contained mostly neighbors who knew one another before the disaster disrupted their lives may have acted as a break on such high-handedness.  The student told me that after a few days, her friend’s parents and other adults at the shelter approached the individual in question and urged him – in no uncertain terms – to reconsider his approach.  He had no choice but to comply.

I’m not sure if this counts as a triumph of democracy in action, but it does strike me as something that probably wouldn’t have happened under normal circumstances.  The Japanese are usually pretty good at putting up – grudgingly, at least – with high-handed behavior from their bureaucrats and politicians; it’s part of that gaman thing, I guess.

From others I talked to, I heard intriguing episodes of generosity, as well as a willingness for people who didn’t even know one another to work together, based upon that the realization, perhaps, that they were indeed all in this together.  Takumi told me that on his second day in a shelter, a large trailer truck pulled up and two men began handing out gourmet wakame seaweed, kamaboko fish cakes, and other seafood delicacies, telling people to take as much as they wanted.  The company warehouse where all this food was usually stored had only been slightly damaged by the tsunami, but the loss of electric power had rendered its refrigerators and freezers useless: unless they got rid of it all in a hurry, they’d be stuck with a warehouse full of rotting marine products.

Sometimes, it was the refugees who took the initiative in acquiring what they needed, but in a way that seemed more like negotiation than looting.  I heard of such example from Kesennuma.  With no running water available, a group of thirsty evacuees debated amongst themselves whether they should break into a row of vending machines that stood across the street from their shelter.  The machines had not been damaged by the tsunami, but had lost power like everything else in the city.  Finally, they decided to contact the owner of the machines, whose name, number, and address appeared on the face of each, right by the locks that the group was prepared to break through to get to the precious contents within.  A representative went to the office of the owner to ask if it would be all right to break into the machines.  Instead, the owner accompanied him back the spot with the keys.  (This episode reminds one of the behavior of “the mob” during the Rice Riots of 1918, when skyrocketing inflation prompted groups of largely working-class Japanese in urban areas across the country to “negotiate” with rice merchants to sell their grain at a more agreeable price.)

To be sure, there was a strong element of self-interest at work in such generosity: the marine products company didn’t what to be stuck with a warehouse full of rotting fish and seaweed; likewise, the vending machine owner understood that giving away a few cases of beverage was better than having to repair his machines.  As such, they may not count as examples of true altruism.  But with the exception of the anecdote about the dictatorial jichitai leader, the people I talked to generally spoke of a strong sense of solidarity and generosity in the hinanjo during the first weeks after the disaster.  The refugees were low on everything – food, drinking water, toilet paper, and diapers in particular – but they seemed to have ample supplies of patience and goodwill for one another.  They shared what little they had.  I noticed that many of these folks spoke with a certain kind of nostalgia mixed with a tinge of excitement as they recalled these early days, as if there was something they experienced in that situation that was more subtly powerful in shaping their recollections than the uncertainty and desperation that had every right to feel.

Nor was this solidarity and mutual aid observed only among those in the shelters: people from the surrounding areas who were fortunate enough not to lose their homes delivered what they could to shelters nearby.  Many stories of this sort of generosity that appeared in local papers in the Tohoku area have since been republished by Bungei shunjū in a collection entitled The Great Eastern Japan Earthquake – News that Connects Our Hearts (池上彰、文芸春秋編、『東日本大震災・心をつなぐニュース』、東京：株式会社文芸春秋、2011年6月30日出版).  As the title implies, there is an emphasis on the heartwarming and sentimental in this collection.  Still, the anecdotes in these reports provide a glimpse of some of the best, most altruistic behavior exhibited among survivors in the aftermath.  There was the group of junior high school students in Watari, some taking refuge in the shelters and others whose homes nearby had survived, who took it upon themselves to clean the shelter in their area (Arahama Junior High), do the cooking for all the refugees there, and take care of trash and sanitation as best they could during the early days.  If all of these students had been members of the same school, it would have been impressive enough; in fact, however, many went to schools other than Arahama JHS, and many did not know one another prior to taking this duty upon themselves.  There were also the members of an amateur rugby team in Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture, who carried the handicapped and infirm up and down the stairs of a hospital that had become a shelter, since the loss of power had made it impossible to use the elevators.  In one case, such generosity actually led to the creation of a shelter.  A farmer in Shiroishi, a town in Miyagi Prefecture on the border with Fukushima, opened his home to 40 refugees from a town near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.  With the exception of his cousin and his family, all of them were complete strangers.

My point in relating these anecdotes is not to make the claim that there is something uniquely Japanese going on here; similar acts of generosity and concern for fellow human beings no matter who they may be follow in the wake of disasters wherever they occur.  What these anecdotes suggest to me is that, in the days immediately following the tsunami, there was no sense of the hinanjo as a kind of “special place.”  Evacuees and people from neighborhoods that had been spared the worst interacted freely.  The outpouring of goodwill was tremendous.

In the days after the disaster, it also rapidly spread to areas of Japan outside of Tohoku, as well as across the globe.  Individuals and groups across the country began sending relief supplies and volunteers to towns and even to individual hinanjo with days of the tsunami, before the roads to many areas were even passable.  Moral support – as well as donations to various charities – poured in from Japan and overseas in the form of condolences and messages of encouragement, addressed to local government offices and specific hinanjo alike.

Messages of encouragement sent to Ishinomaki from various groups around the country and world, on display in City Hall.  The flag above was sent from the participants in a relief concert held in Rome on April 21.

Although the disorganized nature of the some the material relief efforts at this point may have been a source of occasional logistical headaches for local authorities, the hisaisha appreciated it enormously.  (If anything, during the early days it was the media, which profited through making a spectacle of the disaster and their plight without bringing any relief supplies to the hinanjo along with their cameras and microphones, toward which some of the hisaisha felt animosity.)  They were even grateful for the mementos of support and encouragement that they received from around Japan and the world; at the very least, it helped to know that people were thinking of them and wishing the well.

The hinanjo as a self-contained community

As the weeks dragged on, however, and the state of crisis became the “new normal,” what we might call the permeability of the hinanjo during the early days seems to have declined.  Part of this was due, I believe, to a common phenomenon: as with any ongoing experience, life in the hinanjo became something that was not only shared by the people who had to live there, but at the same time something that set them apart from those who didn’t.  But this wasn’t the only factor in the loss of permeability, nor perhaps even the main one.  More important still may have been the realization on the part of those living there that unlimited access to the shelters by people who did not live there was, for a variety of reasons, not a good idea.

Hariu-san shared an anecdote with me from some of the shelters in Sendai in which acquaintances had lived for a time.  In the days immediately following the tsunami, anyone who could reach the shelters with food and supplies was welcomed.  Within a few weeks, however, a variety of religious groups began to send people to the shelters to proselytize while distributing food and other necessity.  Some of these groups were Christian, others Buddhist, still others were of less discernable lineage, but in any case the message that most brought to the shelters hit similar themes: this disaster befell you because you did not believe; it was a sign from god – or whatever – that you/the Japanese/humankind are not leading the proper life and/or that the end is near.  Salvation, rebirth in paradise, etc., were possible only by embracing the faith and joining the group; all others were doomed to suffering and perhaps even eternal damnation in the next life.

A Christian evangelical group on the streets of Sendai, with signs and a recorded message about God’s judgment and the significance of the earthquake and tsunami as a sign of divine displeasure, played on a tape loop over a bullhorn.  Groups like this have become a regular sight in the city since the quake.  The signs read: (top) “Christ will judge each person’s secrets” [Romans, 2:16]; (bottom) “Repent!” [Matthew, 3:2].

Despite the ubiquity of shrines and temples, the Japanese tend to be fairly suspicious of organized religion, and especially congregation-based religions that demand of the believer a voluntary separation from the social world that most Japanese operate in.  In this sense, Japan is a tremendously agnostic country: people don’t wear their faith on their sleeves, and one’s spiritual beliefs – no matter whether they adhere to the teachings of a particular religious tradition or not – are considered one’s own business.

And on top of that, these groups were showing up at the shelters with the message that the suffering of these people, who had lost their homes and loved ones, was essentially their own fault.  It should come as little surprise that most evacuees had very little patience for this.  Residents of the shelters complained to their jichitai representatives, and rapidly the shelters established “front desks” to regulate who obtained access to the shelter and its residents.

Annoyance at the insensitivity of evangelicals was not the only issue at stake here, I believe.  On a deeper level, it also reveals how the people living in the shelter were beginning to regard it as a kind of “home” – a place where they belonged, and which belonged to them, even if that sense of belonging didn’t involve a strong sense of emotional attachment per se.  In the same way that most of us find visits to our door by religious proselytizers to be something of a nuisance, because it represents an intrusion on our time and privacy, so to did the residents of the hinanjo – for “residents” is indeed what they had become – find the intrusion to be an invasion of their privacy, and an especially irksome one in light of the message that came with it.  A similar sensitivity lay behind the criticism that Prime Minister Kan Naoto received from the residents of a hinanjo he visited in Rikuzen Takata on April 2^nd, when the PM apparently entered the building without first removing his shoes.  From Kan’s perspective, the building was just another public space; for those residing there with no place else to go, it was “home” – even if a rather uncomfortable, inconvenient one at that – a place that should not be entered with ones shoes on.

I got a bit of a sense of this myself one morning in Watanoha, while on my way back from the local convenience store to buy supplies for the day ahead.  The route took me past the front of Kazama Elementary School, which stands in an area that probably took on a less than a meter of water during the tsunami.  The school gymnasium probably housed around 70 people during July, or so I was told by some of the JEN staffers.  In the mornings in particular, the residents could be seen outside in the school athletic ground or hanging laundry out to dry on racks set up for that purpose in the parking area between the gym and the road on which I was traveling.  There were almost always a few people hanging out in a makeshift smokers’ area in a corner behind the gym, right next to the fence that separates the school parking lot from the road, as there were on this particular morning.  As I approached the spot on the JEN bicycle, I happened to make eye contact with one of them, and said “good morning.”  I seemed to have caught him off-guard, but in a rather startled manner he returned my greeting.  As I passed the group, though, I heard one of the others say to him, “What – you know that guy?”  (Nan da – aitsu shitteru ka.)

This brief encounter probably requires a bit of explanation to underscore what I see as significant in it.  First of all, the Japanese education system, and increasingly the media, place a great deal of emphasis on the importance of the practice of exchanging such everyday social greetings, even among (or rather especially among) strangers.  Elementary school lessons and even public service announcements extol the virtues of saying “hello,” “good morning,” and “good evening,” and thanking people when they do something for you, no matter how small the favor may be or how perfunctorily it is performed.  The overall message seems to be that a society in which people greet each other with proper courtesy is a healthy, cohesive society.

As a quirky aside that nonetheless illustrates this emphasis, take a look at the following video clip.  This is a public service announcement aimed at young children, which encourages them to get into the practice of saying “hello,” “good-bye,” “good night,” etc., by connecting these phrases to the names of animals, cutely rendered in the anthropomorphized form.  Such everyday greetings, the accompanying song tells us, are in fact “magical words” that will increase the number of friends one has.  In the aftermath of March 11^th, when every network turned its programming over 24/7 to covering the disaster and the unfolding situation in Fukushima, regular commercials apparently disappeared from most TV broadcasts (why this was is not entirely clear to me – either the commercials disappeared with the programs that they were intended to sponsor, or else the networks decided that it would be somehow inappropriate to plug the fruits of commercial convenience in the midst of a disaster).  In their place, public service announcements filled the breaks, and the PSA below attained particular notoriety, both for its frequency and its cutesy content.  (Thanks to Tokyo-based friend Michael Burtscher for the background story and the link.)

I doubt that this PSA was produced specifically in response to the disaster.  At the very least, though, the fact that folks in positions of authority see the need to plug the practice of exchanging greetings through such media may suggest that they are concerned about a declining sense of social cohesion.  As for the actual state of the practice itself, it is much as you might expect; in big cities, it’s fairly rare to hear greetings exchanged between strangers, unless you’re in one of the “old neighborhood” enclaves tucked away off of the major thoroughfares.  In more rural areas, it’s not at all uncommon to hear people exchange greetings, although that also could be because there are fewer strangers in such areas to encounter in the first place.  In Ishinomaki, though, I noticed that even the little children we often ran into in the neighborhood of Watanohaus, including those around the school, seemed pretty good about returning our greetings, as did may of the adults in the area (I should admit that I’m not typically so good about this sort of thing myself, but after the episode with the smokers, I began to make a point of greeting the people I passed first, just to see how they would react).

At the risk of reading too much into the encounter, though, what really interests me in it is not so much the act of greeting a stranger itself, or the decision not to do so, but what lay behind the “What – you know that guy?” comment.  Was it because I was an obvious foreigner?  Maybe – although that didn’t seem to the prevent kids and adults in the immediate vicinity of Watanohaus from saying hello.  Also, it’s interesting to note that the utterance wasn’t “what – you know that gaijin?” – which it probably would have been if the person was questioning why his companion had bothered to greet a foreigner.  In this case, it seems I was just a “guy.”  Since I clearly wasn’t a resident of the shelter, though, the question might have had a different significance: why would you bother saying hello to him?

This was just one comment by one individual, after all, so I’m not willing to read too much into it, but it may be indicative of a kind of “us and them” mentality among residents of the hinanjo that has taken root as their term of occupancy drags on, seeming to become a semi-permanent state.  Local authorities across the hisaichi seem sensitive to this plight and the problems it creates, and are thus trying to get the dislocated out of the shelters as quickly as possible, by moving them into prefabricated housing units know as kasetsu jūtaku – “temporary housing.”  After leaving Ishinomaki, I learned that in both Sendai city and in Rikuzen Takata they had achieved just that by the beginning of August, and that the last of the shelters in both cities had since reverted to being what they were prior to March 11^th: school gymnasiums, neighborhood meeting halls, and government offices.  The fact that so many hinanjo remain open in Ishinomaki perhaps attests to the depth of some the tensions between people from different neighborhoods and livelihoods in the city that I mentioned in earlier posts.

Whatever the reason, they are still there – or at least were as of the beginning of August.  The Ishinomaki City homepage still lists Kazama Elementary as an active hinanjo, along with numerous locations in other parts of the city (http://www.city.ishinomaki.lg.jp/bousai/bousai_jyoho/bousai_info_hp.jsp), although it does not provide information on the number of people still residing there.  The stress of this lifestyle is difficult to imagine, especially as the weather gets hotter.  Kazama Elementary doesn’t even have bathing facilities; the residents have to travel over a kilometer to another hinanjo, where the Self-Defense Force built a temporary public bathing facility for the displaced back in April.

And that underscores some of the disparities that arise as life returns to normal for people outside of the shelters – disparities that may only accentuate whatever feelings of separation and social isolation those in the hinanjo already feel.  While discussing these issues one night with Yama-chan and some of the other volunteers, Kuwabara-san made the cogent observation that all of the houses surrounding Kazama Elementary no doubt had baths and showers of their own; if the bonds uniting people in a city that had suffered the tsunami to the extent that Ishinomaki did were indeed as strong as the media constantly claimed they were, then why didn’t people living in the homes around the hinanjo at least allow the folks living there to come over for a bath or shower every so often?  This, after all, is not an unheard of thing in Japan.  Had this ever occurred at any time since March 11^th?  Had no one even thought of offering to do so?

Tensions within

Even if circumstances have forced an identity upon the residents of the hinanjo that serves to set them apart – or rather make them feel set apart – from people who are not in the shelters, this doesn’t mean that all is harmonious within the hinanjo.  Images from inside the shelters broadcast by the Japanese media over the past five months reveal a subtle but significant development: the rise of partitions.  In the first days after the disaster, photos of the hinanjo showed exhausted refugees crowded together on the floors of school gyms.  People far outnumbered the possessions they had managed to bring with them.  Families and friends huddled together for warmth under blankets or around whatever heat sources happened to be available.

Over time, however, the floors of the shelter were divided into spaces for individuals and families.  The earliest attempts of this kind involved using the cardboard boxes in which relief supplies arrived at the shelter to erect makeshift walls.

Eventually, materials specifically for the purpose arrived: large sheets of corrugated cardboard; polls and curtains, even specially designed prefab cubicles and camping tents.

This is an obvious development in many respects: people require a certain amount of privacy, after all, and the shelter is a very difficult environment in which to secure it.  There is a symbolic dimension to this transformation too, however; the rise of partitions suggests an attempt to return to some semblance of normalcy – a way of life in which the communality of the earliest days after March 11^th is disaggregated back into separate units of families and individuals.  This is not to say that a sense of community no longer exists, but with the immediacy of the disaster fading and the arrival of relief supplies obviating the need to hang together in order to survive, people seek to return to the way things were before the disaster that transformed everything – even when it is infeasible to do so, and even at the cost of personal comfort in other areas.  Both Hariu-san and Yama-chan told me separately that the trend in the shelters seems to be to erect higher and higher partitions over time.  That this trend continued even as the weather grew hot and humid – in gymnasiums that have neither air conditioning nor enough electric fans to go around – suggests how much people are willing to sacrifice in order to secure a sense of privacy and normalcy.

At the same time that residents of the hinanjo do what they can to achieve these things, however, the very fact of their shared situation creates tensions that cut against the desire to do as one pleases, without concern for the group.  In the course of his work spraying odor neutralizers, Yama-chan gets to visit many hinanjo.  The residents are quite thankful for the work that he does for them, and he has attended many meetings of residents at their shelters in order to introduce himself and explain how his products work.

“To be honest, I try to avoid going as much as I can, because once the meeting starts you sometimes get to see the uglier side of living at close quarters for so long.  For some people in the shelters, I think things were actually better right after the tsunami, when they all had practically nothing but each other.  I know it sounds horrible to say that, but before they began receiving relief rations, people tended to share whatever they had.  Now, though, problems arise over really stupid stuff.  Everyone gets three meals a day in the shelter, right?  So, someone decides to go out and buy some ice cream or maybe some corn-on-the-cob to have with the food they get for dinner one day.  Someone else sees that and has a problem with it – like it’s somehow not fair unless everyone gets to eat the same thing.  At the meetings you have to sit through a lot of that sort of complaining.”

As society outside of the hinanjo returns to its normal state – a state based upon the premise that in exchange for money one should be able to fulfill ones personal needs and desires as conveniently as possible – the gap between what has become normal outside and inside produces such conflicts.  Some residents wish to overcome their predicament – or at least take the edge off of it – with whatever creature comforts they can obtain from a society that views individualized consumption a good thing, if not indeed a virtue.   Others feel that this kind of behavior undermines the principle that the shelters operate on as relief centers; namely, that everyone gets just as much as everyone else, and no more.  Which view one adopts in any given situation largely depends on whether one is exercising their right to pursue fulfillment of their desires, or whether one is observing others do so.

There is an element of a Japanese-style approach to achieving equality through bureaucracy in the latter sentiment; ensuring equality of opportunity is considered a tenet of a democratic society in Japan to a much greater degree than it is in the US.  That in itself is certainly not a bad thing.  It has always sat uneasily with the consumerist culture of Japan that took hold in the high-growth years and beyond, though.  The altered state of life in the hinanjo has brought this tension to the fore, however, with particularly stressful results.

This, incidentally, was probably why the JEN staff in Tokyo urged me not to bring the t-shirts, and why Yama-chan felt that donating them to the Oshika flea market would be a much better course of action that bringing them to a shelter for distribution among the residents.  Although the JEN staff told me that they could not effectively assess the needs of the people in the shelters, it may have been more a problem of finding a shelter in which everyone would get a shirt of the proper size to fit them, and nobody would be left out.  With only 70 t-shirts in a variety of sizes – plus a certain number that were clearly women’s tees and thus could not be given to men – it would be very difficult indeed to find a shelter small enough to ensure that everyone got a shirt.  Even if we had managed to, in the end I would have been left with quite a few shirts and nowhere else to distribute them that wouldn’t leave someone out and run the risk of creating discord.  By contrast, donating the shirts to the Oshika flea market put them in the realm of purchasable commodities, but in a way that would keep the price well within reach of anyone who needed them and generate funds to help support folks displaced by the tsunami at the same time.  It was a proverbial win-win, in that sense.

What is to be done?

In any case, this episode and the discussions I had with JEN staff people, other volunteers, and many other people in Ishinomaki and other parts of Miyagi Prefecture drove home the difficulties involved in aiding victims of the tsunami.  The first response of human compassion to a situation like this is to give something, and in a capitalist world system money seems to be an obvious choice as both the easiest and most helpful thing to give.  In this disaster it was certainly so at the start, and still is greatly needed in regard to some specific aspects of the current situation that I will return to in a future post.  For the most part, though, what is needed now are things that no amount of donated capital can buy for the survivors: clear policies to rebuild not just the infrastructure and other physical aspects of the area destroyed by the tsunami, but also the economy and culture; as well as a sustained will on the part of the central government to make this happen.

And this is exactly the problem now, because neither is entirely evident yet.  Local and prefectural governments have, up to this point, concentrated most of their efforts on clearing the rubble, reestablishing utilities, and rebuilding basic infrastructure – particularly roads.  This is necessary, but as Yama-chan pointed out, what the hell are the people living in the area – whether they are stuck in a hinanjo or not – supposed to do in the meantime?  For its part the central government finally enacted its Basic Act for Great Eastern Japan Earthquake Recovery (東日本大震災復興基本法) on June 24, 2011, over 100 days after the disaster.  In contrast, a similar law enacted after the Great Hanshin Earthquake that destroyed Kobe and other parts of the Kansai area in 1995 took only about 40 days to enact.  The delay has been caused not so much by the enormity of the problems in this instance – including as it does the technically, logistically, and politically tricky question of what to do about the Fukushima Daiichi reactors and what the impact of that crisis will be on national energy policy – but more so by political infighting plain and simple.  The opposition Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito have used the crisis to undermine the legitimacy of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan.  Doing itself no favors, the DPJ was itself mired in factional disputes over whether PM Kan should be replaced, and if so by whom, for much of the spring.  Democracy in action…

From the standpoint of the stricken prefectures in Tohoku and the hisaisha who live there, though, it really doesn’t matter what party is in charge, as long as the central government takes a firm hand in bringing reconstruction and recovery about.

The Basic Recovery Act at least opens a door to the possibility that this could happen, by instituting an administrative framework, including the creation of a new Reconstruction Agency, to oversee the work to be done.  In the interest of not making this entry any longer than it already has become, I won’t get into discussing the Act now.  Here’s an overview of the Act, in English, from the DPJ website, for those who are interested:

http://www.dpj.or.jp/english/news/index.html?num=20276

The language is quite vague, to the point of being a bit unclear at times.  This might be due to the quality of the translation, but I think that it probably has more to do with the nature of laws of this kind, which serve primarily to define the spirit of what is to be done; the actual content will have to be fleshed out later by numerous new pieces of legislation, studies, and plans to come.  One bit of this that concerns me in regard to the task of rebuilding not just infrastructure but communities is the following line: “The basic philosophy of the reconstruction process would be to create new local communities, as well as to work to establish communities fit for mid-twenty-first century Japan, to respect the wishes of the residents of the affected areas…” This assumes, of course, that the residents will want their communities to be reconstructed as such.  This may be a very hard sell in some areas, especially in regard to fundamental issues like where people will be allowed to build and live.  Moving coastal communities up into the hills will most likely put them out of harm’s way in the event of future tsunamis, but it will also so radically alter the way residents relate to their immediate environment, including the kinds of economic and perhaps even cultural activities they pursue, that “reestablishment” or even “restructuring” might be better terms to use than “recovery” and “reconstruction.”

As for the hinanjo, even in Ishinomaki, with its large number of shelters and residents in these, the days are numbered.  The government seems set on ending the special payments to those living in the shelters as of the end of September, at which point the shelters will be closed as well, and any remaining residents will either have to move into the prefab temporary housing units that have been built for the purpose, or else find housing on their own.  The prefab housing units will be provided rent free, and would certainly provide more privacy and a greater semblance of normal living conditions than the shelters, but many are not conveniently located, nor would those who move in have any connection to the neighborhood around them – a big concern especially for the elderly.

On top of this, these people will need jobs, and soon.  In the interim, the government can continue to provide them with meals and other relief aid, but this does nothing to deal with the fundamental problem.  In fact, given the propensity in capitalist systems for people to look down upon the poor, the unemployed, and those on public assistance as indolent and content to live off of the taxes paid by others, it is absolutely crucial that jobs be created for these folks as soon as possible.  Otherwise, the people living in the temporary housing facilities will become stigmatized – something that can happen all too easily in Japan…as anywhere, perhaps.