And yet, the landscape in the hisaichi still looks like a bizarre moonscape in parts, with busted buildings and the naked foundations of now absent structures everywhere one looks. On the psychological level, too; survivors still seem to want to talk about the early days, whether to “outsiders” or among themselves, as if the things they experience are still replaying in their heads. Many do so in a way that suggests a sense of awe at what they witnessed, but otherwise they seem to have come to terms with it. Deep down, however, I doubt this is the case; they replay the events because they are still searching for something in them, some element of meaning, perhaps, that once found will allow them to relegate March 11th and its aftermath to the realm of memories that don’t have to constantly be recalled and relived – if that is possible for events of such enormity. For others, however, the need to recall and relive what they saw is more like the curse we outsiders might expect it to be; they would rather forget, but can’t.
The disaster thus lives on, although you would hardly know it outside of the hisaichi areas or the prefectures of Tohoku that contain them. I felt this contrast most after I left Tohoku for the Tokyo area. There, the disaster is tucked away in the background, or present only in the corner of one’s eye. It is visible only through occasional public service announcements urging people “not to forget” the plight of folks in the northeast, and human interest stories on the news that give the viewer brief glimpses of the area and the folks living there. There is also plenty of news coverage of the ongoing disaster in Fukushima, as the pall of “hot spots” seems to cast an ever-widening net of uncertainty over Japan.
From only watching the national news, though, one might come away with the impression that, aside from the nuclear catastrophe and the fact that some people are still living in shelters, Tohoku must be on its way to recovery by now. Both in Fukushima and the areas north of it, though, that is simply not the case. Recovery efforts are only just beginning to gain traction, and there are no assurances that many of the smaller communities will ever make a come back.
What follows – in two separate posts, to keep the length manageable – are some random observations about what lies in store, I think, for the people of the region as they try to move forward with their lives, as well as what I believe to be some of the lasting after effects, or reverberations, of the disaster. I focus here on human impacts, rather than exploring issues of economics or infrastructure, etc. The media and various analysts will no doubt cover the impact on Japan’s economy and infrastructure in thorough detail. If that is the “main story” – the heart of what this disaster means to people for whom Tohoku is just another disaster stricken area in a world system that continues to move on in spite of nature’s disruptions – then what I will discuss below are matters of more psychological and cultural significance for survivors and other Japanese alike.
Ghosts
In the town of Rifuchō, just a bit east-northeast of Sendai along the coast that leads on to Ishinomaki, there is a large prefectural sports complex called “Grande 21” that was untouched by the tsunami. One of the buildings within this complex is the Sekisui Heim Super Arena, pictured to the left. This multipurpose indoor stadium can seat seven thousand spectators. The floor is 4,473 square yards: enough space to fit four basketball courts. In better days, it was also used as a venue for concerts by big stars. Soon after 3/11, however, it became the largest of several temporary morgues in the prefecture. Refrigeration units were installed to keep large numbers of bodies on ice during the night; during the day, however, most of these were apparently brought out onto the main floor, so that people who came to look for deceased loved ones could view them. I have no idea how many bodies came here, but the selection of this arena, with its large floor, would seem to suggest that it must have been a lot. Many of the bodies recovered from the ocean end up here when it is impossible to determine what town they were washed away from.
The sign that Hariu-san and I passed as we returned from my first trip to Ishinomaki was in fact for Grande 21. Later that evening I asked about the place, and Hariu-san and his wife told me some of the rumors surrounding it. The word was that the arena would eventually be torn down, because the stench of death has seeped into everything. Visitors claim that the arena has a cold and foreboding atmosphere. There have also been sightings of ghosts, the most active of which is that of a little girl who wanders the floor and aisles of the arena, searching for her mother. Because of this, the turnover rate for security guards at the complex is supposedly quite high.
Whether there are ghosts or not – at Grande 21 or anywhere else, for that matter – I don’t know. The idea of making the trip out to Grande 21 did cross my mind after I returned to Sendai from Ishinomaki, but by then the heat and humidity had become so oppressive that the 3km, mostly up-hill walk from the nearest station to the complex just didn’t seem like a good idea, and the thought of haling a cab and asking the driver to take me up to the facility – when everyone in the area knew very well what it was being used for – seemed more than a bit awkward; going to a mass morgue just to see the unidentified dead and perhaps catch a glimpse of their ghosts has to be one of the most lurid and crass examples of disaster tourism. It seems fairly certain, however, to expect that urban legends of haunted places will become common across the Tohoku area in the years to come – if they haven’t already. That might be a topic worthy of further scholarly exploration in itself (not the question of whether these stories are “true” or not, so much as how and when they get started, and what the nature of these tales and the timing of their appearance says about the way people come to terms with catastrophic loss).
What I find interesting, however, is how these sites are actually in the process of reverting to their former purposes, despite serving as exhibition halls for the most tragic aspect of the tsunami’s destructive power. The rumors that the Sekisui Heim Super Arena will have to be demolished turned out to be just that: rumors. As of July 1st, the temporary morgue was moved to another building in the Grande 21 sports complex. On September 10th, the arena is scheduled to be the venue for a concert by Japanese pop legend Kuwata Keisuke, billed as “Live in Miyagi –Marching towards tomorrow!” (source: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/宮城県総合運動公園総合体育館) This will mark its return to service in the purpose it was designed for, ghosts or no ghosts. The same seems to be the case with many other public facilities that served as morgues across the region. A page on the Miyagi Prefectural Police website (the same one where I learned that the morgue at Grande 21 had been relocated), provides information on the changing locations of such facilities across the prefecture. (http://www.police.pref.miyagi.jp/hp/jishin/itai/itai.html). As the numbers of new bodies being found and remains left unidentified declines, it appears that the police are closing the temporary morgues and turning whatever bodies that remain in them over to municipal authorities for preservation in local morgues.
Some bodies – or parts of bodies – may never be identified. Others will probably never be found. As I write this, nearly six months since the disaster, 4,122 people remain missing.
The fact that these facilities are reverting to their original uses, after bearing such a close association with death and loss, seems symbolic of both the recovery process and the way those left among the living in the hisaichi may view their villages, towns, and cities from now on – perhaps even after the last vestiges of destruction are gone. The scale of the devastation was so enormous and the loss of life so great that in the aftermath there was no way to segregate death away from the living, in the way that we usually try to do. Death invaded the public spaces in which ordinary life usually takes place. As the survivors have to get their lives back on track, however, there is no time or room to relegate these former morgues to the liminal spaces that they usually occupy in everyday life; they have to go back to being what they were before, as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place in them. Yet the survivors will remember the aberration that occurred in these spaces in the months after 3/11. The recognition of this fact will live on in the various ghost stories that will come to be associated with these places. The urban legends that tend to emerge in such situations seldom identify who the spirits were in life. Rather, the ghosts are generic; they serve as representatives for the dead in general, reminders that this was a place where death once erupted into the world of the living.
A member of the Japan Self Defense Forces praying for the soul of a victim found in the rubble
But death remains with the living in other ways, too. A case in point are the men and women in the Self Defense Forces who were mobilized in the wake of the tsunami to search for the living and the dead amidst the rubble. At peak, a force of roughly 200,000 troops from regiments throughout the country spread out across the 600km of devastated coastline to engage in these important tasks, as well as in clearing debris and rebuilding vital roads and communication networks. After the first week or so, search and rescue shifted to search and recovery. Apparently it was around this time that the SDF instituted a revealing system of hardship pay for those engaged in the work of finding bodies in the rubble: troops received 3,000 yen for each cadaver they found intact and in good condition, and 4,000 for body parts, bodies missing heads and/or limbs, or else those that had suffered severe damage or were uncovered in advanced stages of decomposition. The rationale for this rather macabre pricing system was that finding bodies in the latter state was deemed more disturbing to those who found them than finding those who had died but had not been horribly disfigured. No matter what the compensation scheme, though, this work takes its toll: in the weeks and months after the SDF began the process of recovering bodies, stories emerged of the increasing numbers of troops suffering symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder: insomnia; loss of appetite; avoiding making eye-contact with others; and staring up at the sky purposelessly for long periods of time.
The troops weren’t the only ones. Back in Sendai after volunteer work in Ishinomaki, I had the opportunity to meet a man introduced to me only as Ken-chan. He was the cousin of Hariu-san’s wife. He dropped by the house for dinner one evening after working all day in Watari, taking down the remnants of buildings there. Ken-chan worked in the public works and demolition business, and business across the region was good. He and his crew had been steadily employed in Watari since the water receded and the SDF had made the roads throughout the area passable – just about four months by that point. He told me that on average it took his crew two days to take a structure down to the foundation and clear the lot. Four months of work meant a lot of buildings, but there was still a lot of work left to do.
For the first few weeks after the tsunami, however, Ken-chan had been employed at another task. Aside from the SDF, search and rescue squads from fire departments throughout Japan headed up to Tohoku. They brought with them dogs trained to find the living and the dead buried under rubble, as well as shovels and other rescue equipment vital to the task. Due to the damaged state of the roads into the area, though, they could not bring heavy equipment. Ken-chan was thus contracted by a rescue squad from Nagoya to do the heavy lifting with his company’s hydraulic shovel.
As things turned out, though, they recovered lots of dead bodies but found no survivors.
“I worked with the Nagoya squad for about two weeks,” Ken-chan told me. “They had strict rules concerning how long their guys could work without some down time. I think they had a rotation of two days on duty followed by one day off. But for the guys they contracted with, like me, there were no such rules, so I worked every day – no down time. During that time, I don’t know how many dead bodies I saw. Sometimes, I had to help the squad guys load them on the trucks by hand. The kids were the hardest to see. That really stays with you…”
Just from observing his expressions as he recalled this, I could see that it had. Ken-chan had the look of a haunted man. He swallowed hard as he finished his story and then sighed deeply. Hariu-san asked him how he was sleeping these days, and he admitted that he was still having problems. Visions of the dead people he had carried came to him in nightmares. Sometimes he awoke in a state of sleep paralysis, a condition that in Japanese folklore is associated with temporary spirit possession.
Ken-chan stayed for a little bit after this conversation, but soon excused himself. The crews kept early hours, he explained, so he had to get to bed early. I wondered how much sleep he would get tonight, and how long it would be before he could enjoy the kind of “sleep of the dead,” which is the only kind of sleep fully worthy of the name.
As I thought about Ken-chan’s situation – a civilian who was most likely suffering from PTSD – I couldn’t help thinking two things. The first was that there must be countless Ken-chans out there, scattered across the Tohoku region and beyond. The second was the realization that Ken-chan’s experience and Takumi’s experience, although similar in respects to finding bodies over a week after the tsunami, were quite different – fundamentally so, perhaps. Takumi, you may recall, crawled over mountains of rubble in his neighborhood in Ishinomaki, and on the 12th day found the body of his 15-year-old daughter. As he told me in the uncannily matter-of-fact style that so many people who lost loved ones seem to speak in, she had apparently been taking a nap at the time. Since it was still winter, she had wrapped herself in a down comforter. Oddly enough, this had preserved her body from quite a bit of decomposition. A day after that, not too far from the spot where he found his daughter, he found his wife. Unlike their daughter, she was probably awake and wondering what to do when the tsunami hit Mitsumata. Her body had not survived 12 days of waiting as well. Takumi told me all of this just as if we were discussing the weather or the most commonplace of daily occurrences.
So why the difference? Why was Ken-chan so unnerved by all he had seen, but Takumi could discover the bodies of his wife and daughter – as well as others he glimpsed in the rubble of Watanoha after the tsunami – but still seem so positive (yes, that’s the best adjective I can come up with to describe it) and relaxed (another odd choice, but it does fit, believe me) about it? I don’t know. Individual personalities come into play here, or course. But, at the risk of reading too much into it, I believe that there are two fundamentally different perspectives and contexts involved here.
Takumi saw plenty of death in the days after the tsunami, but it was not his task to confront it. He did not have to pick it up and carry it. He did have to bear the burden of discovering the corpses of his wife and daughter. Even if he did not actually carry them to where the authorities would perform whatever procedures needed to be done, I’m sure he must have touched them, held them, and felt overwhelmed by shock and grief in that moment. For Takumi, however, there were many people around him who had experienced much the same kind of loss. Through talking about it amongst themselves – repeatedly – they may have helped each other work through the worst of the trauma.
Ken-chan, by contrast, was on his own; there is no support group for people in his situation. No one he knows can say to him “yeah, I know what you mean – I manned a power shovel in those early days, too.” Even if such people are out there, there is no ready-made and sustained context in which they can have those conversations. On top of that, the bodies Ken-chan carried were those of total strangers. He knew nothing about them, and never will. There are no memories from life to ameliorate the coldness of their lifeless forms – especially the kids, who just shouldn’t be dead at such a young age.
When I thought about things this way, I really couldn’t decide who had the worse situation, Takumi or Ken-chan. Most people would choose Takumi, and for reasons I can certainly agree with. As I’ve said before, put me under similar circumstances and I sincerely doubt I would hold up as well as my friend has. Still, he knows what he has lost, and knows what he has left. The grief will never completely go away, but perhaps – and this is purely my conjecture as one who has never had to face such a challenge – what he has left (his son) provides him with a sense of focus around which to move forward and build a new life. Takumi may well be very lucky in this regard, albeit in a tragic way. But someone like Ken-chan – a hisaisha who blurs the line between primary and secondary – has no such focus. He’d seen numerous dead individuals to whom he had no connection in life. Under “normal” circumstances – say, if they had been victims of isolated accidents – he would probably have no reason to feel anything more for them than the sense of pity we feel at the loss of human life in general, but there is nothing about what he, or they, went through that is normal. The enormity of the tsunami and the defenselessness of the victims, accentuated by their sheer anonymity, hits hardest, perhaps, as one is left wondering who they were and who might be frantically searching for them at this very moment. Without answers to these questions, how does one put the experience of holding their bodies behind one?
Put in Ken-chan’s position, I doubt I would have faired any better than he did. There is something about the way we are wired – at least under the best, most natural of circumstances – that makes witnessing the suffering of others intolerable. By extension, it also makes imagining what they must have suffered, and what those who will miss them will suffer at their passing, just as painful. These impulses are all-too easily thwarted by our propensity to mistrust others based upon prejudice and misguided self-interest. In the teeth of a disaster, when the normality that underlies such bigotry and selfishness is suspended, some of us – maybe more of us than we realize – rise to the occasion by falling back on our better instincts. Ken-chan had done just that – but was now paying the price for it.
Children
One group I haven’t talked about much at all in this blog so far is children. The image of Tohoku that the foreign media projected in the wake of the disaster was that of a traditional, even rustic, area populated overwhelmingly by old folks. Recall, for example, David Sanger’s portrait of the northeast, which I commented upon at the outset of this blog. While it may be true that young people tend to move away from coastal towns like Ishinomaki upon finishing high school – especially those who enter four-year colleges that are typically located in urban areas – the image of Tohoku as a place for the elderly is really something of a trope: the traditional (and thus old) countryside, juxtaposed to the modern (thus young) metropolis. As I mentioned in regard to the Kawabiraki Festival, though, there are in fact young people in places like Ishinomaki. Many of them never leave. Others return after they finish college. They marry and have kids, and these children experienced the tsunami much like everyone else.
Yet those children dealt with the tsunami and its aftermath in their own way, although in some respects it was in keeping with the kind of resilient strength I had seen in survivors who lost so much, like Takumi and his son Hiromu. In other respects, it reveals glimpses of the tremendous stress that children who witnessed the tsunami live under. My evidence here is, as usual, anecdotal. Much of it comes from discussions I had with some of Hariu-san’s students who had recently returned from two weeks as student-helpers in nursery schools located in various towns in the hisaichi. Hariu-san also shared with me some of the essays and illustrations that his students produced as part of a class assignment of the impact of the disaster on young children.
The signs of stress in these very young children appear most frequently in the form of separation anxiety. Many of the students mentioned that the most difficult time of the day at the nursery schools they visited was at the start. Little children clung frantically to the legs of parents who were trying to drop them off, and pleaded not to be left behind. Some continued to cry for nearly and hour after their parents finally left. The students learn from the regular staff at their schools that many of these children had not suffered from such anxiety prior to March 11th. Restlessness throughout the day was another problem. Children who had been good about napping during the day prior to the tsunami now had difficulty doing so. Additionally, kids who had been good about going to the bathroom in time to relieve themselves seemed to have regressed to wetting themselves in the months since the disaster. Most obviously and understandably, many of the children would be sent into a panic at the slightest tremor – and weak (and not so weak) quakes continued to hit Tohoku frequently throughout the spring and early summer.
Student drawings of “jishin-gokko” (top, by Hayasaka Aimi) and “tsunami-gokko” (bottom, by Yamada Ayano)
While their parents worked through their experiences by talking about them with other survivors, little children had their own strategies for processing the traumatic past. Many students remarked on two new forms of group play that were very popular in the nursery schools they visited. One was “jishin-gokko,” or “pretend earthquake.” This usually started with one child shaking a table – often after he or she had built something out of blocks on top of it – and accompanying this with a shout of “Jishin da!” (“Earthquake!”). Other children would then run away from the table in mock (or real) panic, or else hide under it, as if protecting themselves from falling debris. “Tsunami-gokko” worked much the same way: one student would suddenly cry out “Tsunami da!” and dash frantically in a straight line, as if trying to outrun the wave. As soon as he or she did, others would join in, running in more or less the same direction. Some of the kids would intentionally fall down and lie there struggling, pretending to be overtaken by the water. The students often said that they found these forms of play vaguely disturbing the first time they saw them, but soon realized that the children were actually trying to work through things by doing so. This became clear in the reactions of some of the children who were newly enrolled at the nursery school. At first, many of these very little ones found this kind of play upsetting; pretending to take refuge from the quake or flee from the tsunami brought back too many frightening memories, perhaps. Within a week or two, however, even these children were joining in, sometimes even as the instigators.
At the same time, though, many of the students also expressed a sense of awe at how matter-of-factly children who were only four of five years old could talk about their experiences. The topic would come up without any prompting on the student’s part; indeed, they had been instructed not to raise the issue of the disaster at all with the kids or their parents. In spite of this, a young child might suddenly come out with a statement like “Daddy cried all day long when we learned that grandma had died,” or “there were dead people in the field near our house after the tsunami.” The students suspected that this might have been a form of dissociation, and perhaps it was just that. At the same time, it seems surprisingly similar to the kind of steadiness with which adult survivors would often speak of what they had seen and all that they had lost.
And children of all ages, but especially those in the higher elementary school grades and junior high, also seem to have displayed a tremendous amount of psychological strength and resourcefulness in the immediate aftermath. I’ve already mentioned the spontaneous outpouring of public spirit among an ad hoc group of junior high school students in Watari, who became the de facto caretakers of the shelter there. In a similar vein, children suddenly robbed of the comforts of home seemed to find ways to cope, and adapted quickly to their new reality. This was nowhere more evident than in the way older siblings took on the duties of a parent lost to the tsunami for their younger sisters and brothers. The Japanese media ran many stories of this kind in the months after the disaster; especially when mothers were taken, older sisters and brothers took over many of the myriad jobs that women in Japan tend to do in the role of both mother and wife, and especially that of trying to comfort their younger siblings. Such cases revealed a truly remarkable sense of responsibility, as well as an underlying desperation; it was as if the older children feared the fabric of the family would completely dissolve if the youngest children were allowed to give themselves up to a despair that would no doubt become infectious.
One of the most moving cases of this kind of fortitude and maturity, displayed by a young child years before one would expect it, came from Toba Futoshi, the mayor of Rikuzen Takata, which was all-but obliterated by the tsunami. In his account of the city since the tsunami, Let’s Talk about What’s Really Going On in the Hisaichi (戸羽太著、『被災地の本当の話をしよう：陸前高田市長が綴じるあの日とこれから』ワニブックスPLUS新書、２０１１年８月２５日出版), he recounts the turmoil of the first few weeks after the disaster. Toba took refuge on the roof of city hall, where he and 126 others barely managed to stay above the water. From this vantage point, six floors above street level, he could see that the school where his two sons were was out of the water’s reach. He also saw that the area in which their home had stood – the home where his wife had been when he last spoke to her, just moments before the quake – was completely submerged. The days that followed kept the mayor and other members of the city government who had survived busy around the clock, as they frantically tried to assess the situation and get in contact with prefectural and central government authorities, as well as the SDF. It wasn’t until two days later that he was finally reunited with his sons, in grades 4 and 6 of elementary school, when their grandfather brought them from the school to the building in which the emergency city government had been established. There was still no word about their mother.
Mayor Toba, in fact, hadn’t even filed the paperwork with the local police to declare her missing. His reasons for not doing so lie partially in the fact that he was hellishly busy trying to obtain the basic necessities for the survivors of his city. Beyond this, however, was the sense of pride – and responsibility – he felt in being an elected official: if he were to take time out from his duties as mayor to concern himself with the health and welfare of his own loved ones, when so many people in the city needed help, wouldn’t this be a horribly self-interested breach of duty? It wasn’t until days later, when he found himself looking at the list of missing persons circulated by the local police, that he noticed someone had, in fact, submitted the paperwork to declare his wife a missing person: his older son, still in 6th grade. Seeing his son’s name listed as the person searching for his mother rather than Toba’s own made the mayor doubt whether he was fit to be a father after all.
Whatever one may think of Toba’s reasons for not declaring his wife missing, the thought of a boy of no more than 11 years old taking it upon himself to go to the police in order to submit the required forms, and to do all this in such a way as to not disturb his father, is as remarkable as it is moving. Under the force of necessity, the boy had assumed adult responsibilities. Perhaps with it, too, came a mature ability to gauge the possibilities before him and resign himself to what seemed the most likely fate. When Toba’s wife’s body was finally discovered, over two weeks after the tsunami, decomposition had taken its toll. A police officer who was an in-law informed the mayor of the discovery, rather than his son, out of concern for the shock it might cause. For similar reasons, Toba had the body cremated before telling his children that their mother had been found dead. When he finally approached his eldest son with the news, the boy accepted it without crying: he told his father that he had already come to the conclusion that there was no hope left of finding his mother alive.
Again, the toughness of the bereaved survivors. At the same time, though, I can’t help but feeling that these children face problems down the road, problems arising from the necessity to assume an adult – perhaps even superhuman – sense of personal responsibility, acceptance of the fundamentally unbearable, and capacity for forbearance in the face of this disaster far ahead of their years. At present, the Ministry of Welfare and Labor lists 234 children under the age of 18 in the three prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima who lost both parents on March 11th. In addition to these, there are 1,295 children like Mayor Toba’s and Takumi’s, who lost one parent to the tsunami. Their parents may have found a way to talk through the pain of loss; for the children, though, it is hard to imagine that such opportunities will occur as spontaneously. The time to act on this may be rapidly slipping away.
One last observation about the youngest of the hisaisha who have remained in their shattered hometowns is worth making: the longer one spends in these communities, surrounded by reminders of the destructive power of water, the less one notices it; gutted buildings that look as though an enormous fist had punched through them, flayed automobiles in the middle of rice fields, and enormous piles of debris – after only a few weeks in the area all of theses sights become part of a new normal, everyday perception of life in the hisaichi. If this is true for adults, it must be even more so for young children, whose memories of the way things were before 3/11 is less firmly established. As these children grow older, how will growing up amidst such a landscape come to affect them (assuming that they stay, which is another question)? How will the natural phenomenon of growing accustomed to a landscape bearing the scars of the tsunami – as it will continue to do so for years to come, at the present rate of reconstruction – influence the way these youths see themselves, their future, and their country?
Thinking of what the youngest hisaisha – the survivors/victims – must be going through fills those of us who have passed through childhood with a sense of pity. Yet that could be to a great extent because as adults we are constantly underestimating them. Any of us who can recall details from our own childhood will most likely recall getting brushed off because we were “just kids.” I’m not trying to claim that there is nothing to worry about in regard to the future of these children – not at all – but they might roll with things better than we as adults could ever expect. Children have been the victims of disasters throughout human history, after all, but peoples everywhere seem to continue surviving – in spite of often forgetting what it meant to survive.
If there is one thing I have learned from visiting the hisaichi this summer, it is this: as animals, people are surprisingly fragile physically – we’re by nature environment-changers, after all, so when nature decides to destroy our little attempts to stave its extremes off, we don’t fare so well. But, those who survive can be (and I stress that, because I know it doesn’t apply to every case) extremely resilient. We talk about certain kinds of loss and despair as “soul-crushing.” I have heard plenty of stories this summer that deserved the same description – except for the fact that the people who told them to me were not crushed, spiritually or psychologically. Will they have problems further down the line? I don’t know. But I feel I have learned something from these folks, even in the stories of the youngest of these. They have faced death – not just as a threat to themselves, but more significantly as a reality surrounding them – and have not given themselves up to despair. Not yet, anyway.
Which is not to say that everything is fine, of course. In the hisaichi, as in rest of Japan, the impact of 3/11 has different meanings – some positive, some not so. More on that next time.