I checked in and was informed by the clerk at the front desk that Mr. Eiichi Katō, proprietor and CEO of the hotel, had an engagement that made it impossible for him to meet me that evening, but we would be able to talk the next morning at 9am. He also gave me something from Katō-san – an English translation of an article published by the “Fire Equipment and Safety Center of Japan” in the May 2012 issue of their journal, baring the title “Road to tourism recovery still unclear, Hotel wants to support recovery efforts.” This was a summary of an interview with Katō-san himself. So now I had a place to stay (with another hot spring bath in it, no less!), an interview, and materials to work from in formulating my questions for Katō-san. In my line of work, it doesn’t get much better than this.
While I was checking in, I also caught a glimpse of the Chinese characters for “Bōyō” – 望洋. To translate the name of the establishment into something analogous in English, I was staying at the “Hotel Grand Vista,” or the characters could also be interpreted as “Hotel Ocean View.” Thinking back to the steep road I took up to this place, I figured that during the day, and even at night in better times, either would have been a very apt name for the place. The harbor had to be right out there, in front of the entrance, below the hill I had just climbed. At night, however, everything below disappeared into the same abyss of darkness I had seen from the other hotel I had just left with POJ.
The place looked even larger from the inside, and had a very nostalgic “Shōwa” atmosphere to it. My room was as traditional as it was large (especially in comparison to the walk-in closet sized room I had spent the past ten days in at a suburban Tokyo business hotel) – a full eight tatami mats, complete with a low table and futon laid out in the middle of it, plus a small sitting room along the outside window. The room reminded me of places I had stayed in years ago during one of my early extended stays in Japan, when I used to take trips up to onsen towns in Akita and Yamagata. I had the momentary, uncanny impression that I had slipped back in time to those days. After a night on a bus and a day in the sun, I felt I deserved another leisurely soak in a hot spring bath, followed by a good read (Katō-san’s article), and a good night’s sleep.
The Jazz Fanatic
Mr. Eiichi Katō, in front of his establishment
Katō-san meets me in the lobby the next morning at nine. He is a very youthful 56, with a kind of gregarious nature that seems to radiate from him within the first few minutes of conversation.
“Konuma-kun tells me that you’re a bit of a jazz fan,” I say as we sit down across from each other at one of the coffee tables in the lobby.
“Not just ‘a bit’ of a fan,” he clarifies. “More like a die-hard fanatic.”
In his twenties, Katō-san spent two years learning English at the University of Oregon, after which he pursued his dream of visiting some of the greatest jazz clubs across the US, with extended stays in New Orleans and New York in particular. He once had a collection of roughly 1,700 jazz albums on vinyl and CD. Almost all of it was washed away by the tsunami.
“Except for one,” he tells me, as he rises swiftly and hurries off into a section of the lobby behind a partition. He returns shortly with an LP jacket in his hand. It is a recording of the Waseda University Jazz Band – one of the best university jazz groups in Japan. The record inside appears to have warped under intense heat. The album cover, too, has taken a beating. But the cover art is still clear, as is a handwritten dedication and autograph, “to Mr. Eiichi Katō,” scrawled in marker on the front. “That’s how I knew this belonged to me,” he says (as if there would be numerous copies of this particular jazz album circulating in Kesennuma). “ I got this years ago from the producer of the album, who signed it for me. I found this when I went back to the site of our house to see if anything was left. It was lying in a pile of debris about 300 meters from where the house had stood – it’s the only one I ever found.”
“Most of the LPs I brought back from America. Some I sent by surface mail; others I just packaged up and carried on my back.”
Being old enough to remember vinyl LPs – and how heavy a substantial stack of wax could be – I had to admire his dedication.
Katō-san may have lost his record collection in the tsunami, but it did not rob him of his English ability. Although we speak mostly in Japanese, he shifts seamlessly from Japanese into English at certain points – even for just a word or phrase, sometimes for a whole paragraph – without interrupting the flow of his narrative.
3/11/11 – The Black Wall, The Burning Sea
After reading the English translation he left for me the night before, I realized that I would be asking Katō-san to repeat many of the details described in it. I apologize for this up front: that’s just the way interviewing works, after all, and sometimes neglected details emerge in the course of subsequent retellings. He seems to have no problem with the idea of covering old ground once again.
What follows in this installment and the next is mostly from my interview with Katō-san, plus a few details taken from the aforementioned “Fire Equipment and Safety Center of Japan” article. I will also try to make it as clear as possible when I am adding my own interpretations of what might have happened, and why.
We start at the most obvious point – “that day” – shortly before the quake hit at 2:46pm. March is a slow month for tourist hotels in Kesennuma, since the area is still in the grip of winter. There were few guests anyway, because it was a Friday, and most of the guests from the previous night had already checked out. The only big reservation in the immediate future was for a group of 80 kids and coaches coming the following day for the weekend to take part in a soccer tournament. The hotel had laid in extra supplies of rice and other produce in preparation for this group – something that turned out to be fortuitous. But Katō-san had no way of knowing this at 2pm. The middle of the afternoon is a slow time of day in the hotel business, a period of relative peace between check-out and check-in. Katō-san was taking advantage of it to get some work done in the office; his wife was down at the tax office, taking care of business for the upcoming filing deadline.
“If you’re from Kesennuma, you’re pretty used to earthquakes. A level 3 or 4” – on the Japanese scale, worthy of being considered a fairly strong quake almost anywhere else in Japan – “is no big deal here. This area is like earthquake Mecca,” he says with a chuckle.
But the quake that hit at 2:46pm on March 11th, 2011, was different. Katō-san knew it right away. It was stronger than any he had ever felt, and lasted much longer – he guesses as much as five minutes. Afraid that the forty-year old building might collapse on top of him and his staff, he ordered everyone outside. As the shaking subsided, one employee, who had been on one of the upper floors when the temblor struck, yelled from a window that water was pouring down the walls from the roof, where the quake had apparently damaged water supply pipes to the building. Katō-san raced up to the machine room and tried to close the valves, but aftershocks almost as strong as the first quake rocked the building in rapid succession and convinced him that is was not safe to stay in the structure any longer. In any case, however, despite this water damage and many cracks in the walls, the Hotel Bōyō remained reasonably sound.
About ten minutes after the first quake subsided, the hotel’s wireless receiver for the national disaster information system began to broadcast a “major tsunami warning” for the town. Katō-san had heard tsunami warnings issued many times before, but this was the first “major tsunami warning” he could remember. Just the term for “major tsunami” in Japanese – ōtsunami – conjured up images of enormously high, killer waves. The warning strongly urged people to seek higher ground immediately.
Katō-san thought of his family. His wife was at the tax office, where she would no doubt hear the warning. One son was away at college in Chiba, the other at a high school in town that was probably high up enough on a hill to be out of harm’s way. But his mother was probably still at the family home, in the neighborhood below, not far for the water’s edge.
As he drove down the hill, people from the neighborhood were just starting to climb the slope in the direction of the hotel. Katō-san reached his home in the Shishiori neighborhood, but his mother was nowhere to be found. In fact, no one seemed to be around. Hoping that she had fled with some of their neighbors, he grabbed the family dog and headed back up the hill to his hotel. He recalls that there was surprisingly little damage to be seen at that point, despite the quake and aftershocks. Maybe a broken row of roof tiles here and there or a toppled cinder block wall along the side of the road, but nothing more than that.
By this point, driving up the hill was a slower process than descending it had been, due to a steady stream of people climbing it to take refuge. Katō-san navigated his way through the throng with one hand on the horn. He arrived at the parking spaces in front of the hotel to find a crowd of neighbors standing around, wondering what would happen next. His wife, Tomiko, returned from the tax office at around this point, somewhat unnerved by the quake and the tsunami warning but otherwise all right.
The harbor as seen from the front entrance of the hotel. The building to the right – a factory – was one of the few in the neighborhood below to survive the tsunami with some semblance of structural integrity.
Then, cries of “tsunami!” began to cascade through the crowd. Katō-san looked out at the harbor, and saw the water receding from it as if a giant plug had been pulled out of the bottom of the ocean. The support pylons of the wharf soon became visible – something which he had never seen, even at the lowest of low tides – and then even the concrete supports at the bases of these emerged from the water. Casting his gaze out farther into the Pacific, he could make out the white crest of a tall wave, approaching rapidly. This was something he had seen in previous tsunamis, but what he saw behind it was entirely new to him: a black wall, rising from the surface of the ocean, now towering above the white crest of the wave in front of it. The horizon disappeared.
Hotel Bōyō, as seen from a street in the devastated area below.
The hotel stood about 15 meters above sea level and 100 or so from the edge of the harbor. Even so, the enormity and speed of the approaching black wall made Katō-san fear for their safety here. “I told the people that we needed to get to higher ground. There were about 80 to 100 people in front of the hotel by that point, so I led them up the hill that stands right behind it. I figured we’d be safe there.”
As it turned out, the waves never made it up as far as the road in front of his hotel, but they came within two meters of it. From the hilltop, they watched as wave after wave rushed across the neighborhoods below. At the same time, a cacophony of bizarre sounds reached their ears. The chains and ropes used to secure large fishing vessels to the wharf snapped like threads, with sharp, explosive pops, as the tsunami propelled the boats further inland. Ship’s hulls collided with buildings, crushing them, or crashed and scraped against one another. The din was deafening. The sights were just as alarming. Katō-san saw a 300-ton fishing vessel spinning helplessly in the current immediately over the neighborhood where his house had stood, as if it was a toy boat circling above the bathtub drain.
He doesn’t recall how many waves rolled through, but after a while, they stopped. If the crashing, popping, and scraping sounds of the town coming apart in the tsunami had been frightening, the utter and completely lack of any sound at all in the aftermath was eerier still. No sound, no light, no motion; the town lay dead under several feet of water that had yet to recede. The sky grew dark with clouds and dusk. Then it started to snow.
Shivering from the cold and the shock of what they saw around them, the survivors, led by Katō-san, descended from the hill and headed back toward the hotel entrance. Katō-san recalls the curious sight of fishing boats floating in the water just beyond the road in front of his hotel, an area that had once been a precipitous drop-off to the neighborhood below. It was as if his hotel had suddenly become oceanfront property.
Then the storage tanks at the oil refinery that stood across Kesennuma harbor to the east began to explode, as oil spilled in the quake and tsunami was ignited by sparks from high-voltage electric wires laid bare by the receding water. In all, about twenty large storage tanks blew, hurling flaming oil far and wide across the surface of the water and any debris floating in it. The conflagration started to drift across the harbor, and the smoke became hard to tolerate. At first, the survivors decided to climb back up the hill to get away from the smoke, but gave up on this idea when it became apparent that the children and elderly among them were beginning to suffer from hypothermia. Not knowing where else to go, Katō-san urged the refugees inside his hotel and led they up to a large, tatami-floored banquet hall on the second floor; at least there they wouldn’t be terrorized by the sight of the flames moving ever closer to the hotel.
As it turned out, the fire never reached the Hotel Bōyō, although many of the neighborhoods below it – or what was left of them – burned. A prevailing wind out of the west saved the structure and the people inside. Katō-san didn’t realize it at the time, but the moment he opened the doors of his establishment and led the traumatized refugees up to the second floor banquet hall, the Hotel Bōyō effectively became “hinanjo Bōyō.”
Birth of a Hinanjo
The vast majority of places that became long-term shelters for people displaced by the disaster were public buildings: schools, municipal offices, and town gymnasiums were the most common sites. Most of these were also places that had been designated as evacuation shelters in the case of a disaster long before March 11th, 2011. The Hotel Bōyō was neither of these; it became a shelter purely out of the necessity of the moment and the large-heartedness of its proprietor. I ask Katō-san up front how long the hotel provided a place to live for people displaced by the tsunami – when did the last refugees finally move out?
“Well, in a sense it is still a shelter, because my family and I are still living here,” he gestures over toward the part of the lobby behind the partition, from where he had retrieved the only surviving LP from his collection earlier. “That’s the Katō family’s living quarters – until we find a place to build a new home.”
But aside from his immediate family, when did the last of the refugees leave, I ask.
“The day before yesterday.” The owner of the factory just below the hotel moved in during the immediate aftermath of the tsunami and stayed on, renting out the second floor for his home and for use as office space for his company after the rest of the people had left. “True, he was renting the space from me, so it was a bit different than the typical hinanjo situation, but it was the tsunami that made him end up here in the first place, and made this just about the only place he could rent within reasonable distance from where he was rebuilding his company.”
For the vast majority, though, their stay at hinanjo Bōyō was less than 70 days.
That first night, Katō-san, his wife, and the Hotel Bōyō staff distributed futons and blankets from the guest rooms to the 80 to 100 people in the second floor banquet hall. They also brought in kerosene heaters, which doubled as a source of warmth for groups of people to huddle around, and stoves on which the Katōs and their staff cooked some of the rice and other foods that the hotel had stocked up on in preparation for the kids’ soccer teams that would obviously not be checking in tomorrow. This too they distributed to everyone. Katō-san recalls how moved he felt to see people crying and thanking them for this. It was the only decent thing to do, and yet their gratitude was genuine.
The night outside was pitch dark, with the exception of fires that continued to burn here and there on the debris below but offered no signs of life. As far as they knew at this point, they were the only people in the immediate vicinity left alive by the tsunami.
Except for one person: a dockworker who had been carried by the tsunami all the way to the slope leading up to the hotel after trying valiantly to save his coworkers. He showed up at the hotel entrance soaking wet and shivering violently. The Katōs removed his wet clothes, wrapped him in blankets, and laid him down in front of a kerosene heater among the others.
Katō-san spent a sleepless night worrying about his mother and son, as strong aftershocks continued to rattle the building. The next morning he stepped out of the front door of the hotel to survey a hellish landscape below. Heaps of debris, some of it still smoldering, lay strewn across what had been the harbor side neighborhoods below. Here and there, hulking cargo ships and fishing vessels had come to rest within the debris field, on top of land that had once been covered with houses. Although the water had continued to recede over night, there were still areas completely covered by it to an unknown depth. Katō-san realized that between the residual water, the fires, and the seemingly insurmountable debris everywhere, they were essentially cut off from the rest of the town.
Still, they had it better than some. During the second day the workers for the factory directly below the hotel (the same factory whose owner would later rent out the second floor of the hotel), who had managed to ride out the tsunami on the roof of the plant, made their way across the space between the factory and the road up the hill, and began arriving at the hotel. Among them was the head of the company, who asked Katō-san if he could put his employees up for the night. He agreed, but it turned out that there were too many to house and feed. They decided that the young and able bodied would have to make a long, precarious trek along the base of the hill to the closest designated evacuation arena, about 3km away by such a circuitous route, and seek shelter there. The hotel took in a little over 100 workers, mostly those who were older, injured, ill, or otherwise in too poor physical condition to make the journey.
This meant that on the second night, 200 or more refugees huddled together for warmth on the second floor of the Hotel Bōyō. It also meant that, by the next morning, the hotel’s supply of food was nearly exhausted.
Even with the new arrivals, though, the sense of isolation wasn’t really alleviated. Cell phones were useless, as was the internet, or indeed anything that required power from the grid. “Nothing digital worked, so we had to rely on analog stuff,” Katō-san recalls.
One piece of analog stuff that did provide information about the outside world was a battery-powered radio in the office. The news Katō-san and the others heard, however, only reinforced their feelings of isolation. They learned that Kesennuma was not the only town to get hit; killer waves had destroyed communities all along the Pacific coast of Tohoku, and the estimated death toll kept rising. Then they head about the first hydrogen explosion at Fukushima Daiichi. “I really began to think, ‘this is it – this is the end of Japan.’ After hearing that first bit of news about Fukushima, we decided to stay inside at much as possible.”
Even the helicopters that began to buzz over Kesennuma on the second day did little to comfort them. They flew by with increasing frequency, but with no safe place to land near the hotel they passed without showing any sign that those inside had even noticed the people below.
By the morning of the third day, the fires had died down and the water had receded enough from the town to make it possible for people to begin picking their way through the debris-clogged street in search of their loved ones. Katō-san recalls moving reunions at the hotel, when people were reunited with family members that they had not seen since the 11th – which seemed like a lifetime in the past now. There were also the heart wrenching scenes of those who struggled up the hill to the hotel, only to leave without finding those they came in search of.
Katō-san decided to take the opportunity presented by the retreating water to look at what had become of their home. The Shishiori neighborhood was unrecognizable. Fires that still smoldered nearby covered the area in an acrid haze, mixed with the foul smells of putrefying ocean matter and death. He later learned that over 100 of his neighbors died in the disaster, some by water, others by fire. Physically and emotionally overwhelmed, he left the neighborhood quickly without finding anything to give him hope.
The third day did have some positive developments, however. For one, a friend who reached the hotel told him that he had seen Katō-san’s mother among the survivors at the shelter 3km away. Katō-san found her there later that day, alive, but suffering from symptoms of PTSD. She had spent the entire first night alone on the roof of a building in the neighborhood, surrounded by burning oil slicks and water that came up to her feet. The day after Katō-san found her, a rescue squad from the Tokyo Fire Department transported her to a hospital further inland, where she spent a month being treated for severe ulcers and other health problems. Katō-san was also reunited with his son, who found his way to his uncle’s house after spending the first night in a shelter.
Back at the hotel, from a peak of 200 or more taking refuge there on the second night, the numbers began to steadily decline from the third day on, as people came to find family members from whom they had become separated by the disaster, and others took advantage of the receding water to find friends or relatives to stay with elsewhere. For those who stayed, the major development on the third day was the arrival of a rescue squad from the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. Katō-san recalls that when they arrived they seemed to have no idea how many people were staying at the hotel – not surprising at all under the circumstances. The problem was that, although they did come with food and other supplies, since they were moving through the town looking for pockets of survivors, they didn’t bring enough food with them on the first day for everyone remaining at the hotel.
The arrival of the SDF may mark a subtle but important turning point in the Hotel Bōyō’s history as a hinanjo, for it brought about two new developments. First of all, it marked the point at which the hotel went from being a completely isolated, ad-hoc shelter, one that came together out of necessity and the altruistic sensitivity of Katō-san, Tomiko-san, and their employees, to one that was officially recognized by the authorities in charge of coping with the problems faced by (and posed by) survivors in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. This shift in character was made clear on the very next day – Day 4 – when an SDF team returned to the hotel again to deliver adequate food and supplies for the number of refugees they had counted on the previous day. Along with the supplies, they also gave Katō-san a newssheet of sorts, with vital disaster and relief information from around Kesennuma. One column was a list of shelters, with the number of persons staying at each, as of March 13th. Katō-san recalls that he was surprised to find “Hotel Bōyō – 150” among the entries listed. No one in the city government or from the SDF had asked him whether his hotel could be designated as an official shelter.
The second development is directly related to the first: once the hotel became recognized as a shelter, it began to receive supplies through from the authorities, be they the SDF, other Japanese government agencies, or even the US military as part of its “Operation Tomodachi” aid mission (who delivered emergency rations of pasta primavera, Which Katō-san preferred to the less appetizing SDF rations). What this meant was that, while supplies might have never been as plentiful as the people who remained at the hotel might had wished, they could be fairly certain that more supplies would eventually arrive, and that when they did, they as individuals maintained some sort of right to receive a share of them. This may seem obvious, but it is a very different situation from what the people who took refuge at the hotel on the first two nights faced, when no one expected the Katōs to share the food they had in store, and no one knew how long what they had on hand might last, or even if more would be coming anytime soon.
Just how that is significant is something I will explore in Part Two of Katō-san’s story.