Disaster, Egoism, and Normalcy
As if the people taking refuge in the Hotel Bōyō didn’t have enough to deal with on the first few days just trying to come to grips with their losses and deal with the uncertainty of not knowing what had happened to so many loved ones, the living conditions in the hotel began to decline rapidly. The massive influx of people from the roof of the factory on Day 2 – which more than doubled the number of people in the hotel – meant that by the morning of Day 3 almost all of the food on hand in the kitchen was gone. Katō-san recalls that one of the last things left was instant ramen. Since the disaster had left the entire town without running water and the hotel’s supply of kerosene to boil whatever clean water they had was running very low, people resorted to eating the dry noodles straight, or with a little of the salty seasoning powder for the soup base sprinkled on them for flavor.
Lack of fuel and drinking water weren’t the only problems, though; 200 people living in a building without running water quickly led to a massive sanitation problem. This was a common situation in hinanjo throughout the areas hit by the tsunami, but in this regard the Hotel Bōyō had a bit of an advantage: since it was an onsen, the large baths still held an ample supply of water that could be used for flushing the toilets, in lieu of water from the usual water supply.
As with any situation in which something that we take for granted is suddenly lost, however, people first had to figure out that a “work-around” existed, and then they had to actually put it into practice. The idea of using the bath water to flush the toilets came to Katō-san quickly; the problem was institutionalizing it as a practice, due to the considerable inconvenience involved in going to the bath and fetching a bucket of water after every trip to the lavatory.
At first, the hotel staff took charge of flushing the toilets and cleaning them at regular intervals, but with over 200 people taking refuge there on the second night, they couldn’t keep pace with the load. Try as they might, they couldn’t seem to get people to take care of this themselves after each use. This was understandable in the case of the elderly and infirm, but even the young and those with no physical problems also seemed content to have the staff clean up after them.
Starting sometime around the third day, Katō-san began to notice another change in behavior among the refugees from the first two nights. He, Tomiko-san, and the staff began to receive requests for more blankets and more food. In a sense, this was understandable; by the third day there weren’t enough of either to spread around evenly. But what caught Katō-san’s attention was not so much the requests themselves, but something in their tone. During the first night in particularly, there were few requests at all. To say that the people in the Hotel Bōyō then were “just happy to be alive” may in itself be something of a clichéd interpretation. They were alive, and that’s about all they knew for certain. Whether that was a cause for happiness or not depended on numerous other factors that they had no control over, and a lot of information that they had no way of knowing under the circumstances. The ground was still shaking violently from aftershocks every few minutes, after all, and they had no guarantee that another big quake – with perhaps an even bigger tsunami that could reach the hotel – would not come. Under these circumstances, people shared what they had (which wasn’t much, given the way they had fled their homes), and were sincerely grateful for whatever they received from others.
In contrast to this, the new attitude had more of an air of normalcy about it. It didn’t take long for Katō-san to put his finger on it: under normal conditions this was a hotel, after all, and some of the people thus took themselves to be “guests.” This realization also explained the problem with getting people to pour water in the toilets after doing their business – after all, no decent hotel would ask its guests to do such a thing!
From Katō-san’s perspective, however, the problem here was more than just the fact that these weren’t paying customers. To treat these people as proper guests, he and his staff would have to do something that they were in no position to do at the moment: make everything right. There just wasn’t enough of anything to go around – certainly not enough to satisfy not only basic needs but also individual preferences to boot. Even the initial delivery of supplied from the Self-Defense Force was insufficient and unappetizing; the food portion of it consisting largely of a hard, crusty bread-like substance known as “kanpan” (dried bread) in Japanese. He, his family, and his staff were in no better position than anyone else at the hotel.
Katō-san refers to this shift as the reappearance of “egoism” among the refugees at the hotel. He uses the English term, which has a decidedly philosophical or psychological ring to it in Japanese. The philosophical implications aside (although the psychology is still pertinent), in retrospect I realize that I should have asked him to be more specific about the timing of this shift. I assume that the first thing that would have become problematic was the situation in the toilets. The “guest mentality” may not have been a factor in this situation from the start: people need to go, and they will do it where they have been taught to do so, to the extent that they will be remarkable impervious to the deterioration of sanitary conditions when nature calls under extreme situations. (I recall my friend Takumi’s story about his experiences with the toilets in the hinanjo at Ishinomaki city hall – people would “hold it” as long as they could, but when they had to go, they did so in the toilet, no matter how filthy it was.) I can’t help but wonder when Katō-san and his staff began to ask people to fetch water from the bath and use it to flush the toilets – I can only imagine that sanitation began to be a problem during the course of Day 2 (March 12th), especially after the influx of new arrivals from the factory down the hill would have rapidly exacerbated the situation.
In any case, my guess is that the Hotel Bōyō was probably a bit ahead of the curve of many hinanjo in regard to this shift to egoism, or selfishness, or expectations of normality, due to the fact that it was after all a hotel, and the people taking refuge there might thus be forgiven for expecting hotel-like hospitality from a proprietor and staff that were, under the circumstances, in no position to provide it. Even so, I can’t help returning to the question of timing: this shift occurred around the time that the SDF put the Hotel Bōyō on the official hinanjo map, and began delivering supplies to it. This created a situation in which people not only realized that food and supplies were being delivered, but felt they had a right to their fair share of those (usually defined in subjective rather than objective terms). This produced tensions in the hinanjo that did not exist in the early aftermath. Katō-san tells me in this regard that he later learned that after the first few days, when the SDF arrived at a shelter without enough food to provide everyone in it with at least one meal, they chose not to distribute anything at that time, but instead made a note of the numbers and put the place on their priority list. This reminded me of the problem with getting rid of the t-shirts I had brought with me the year before: since I didn’t have enough shirts to guarantee that I could provide every one at a given shelter with a tee in their size, JEN staff probably felt it was safer to avoid the conflicts that might otherwise result.
I must confess a bit of conceptual discomfort in writing the above observations, because they seem to lead toward the ideological conclusion that “handouts corrupt people,” make them lazy, give them feelings of entitlement, etc. To ignore for the time being the typically classist nature of this kind of rhetoric (in so far as it ignores the fact that many states spend tremendous portions of their GDP to subsidize industries like energy and finance – and thus the class of folks who control them – but who are seldom portrayed as lazy or besotted with feelings of entitlement), my first reaction is to ask what the state exists for, if not to provide for the welfare of its citizens – all its citizens – in an emergency? Then there’s also the follow-up question: even if one can claim that “handouts” only bring out the worst in people by making them expect to be taken care of, how does not taking care of those who need help make the situation any better?
The hinanjo situation observed on the evening of Day 1 (and maybe into the next day) at the Hotel Bōyō – as well as at countless hinanjo throughout Tohoku at the same time – was by no means a “utopia.” At the same time, though, the sense of mutual aid and social harmony found there existed not only because of the state of shock people were in, but also because they were all in the same situation together, no matter what differences in wealth, social standing, education, etc. might have separated them before. Disaster is often called the Great Leveler – but it is our nature as humans to try to recoup a semblance of normalcy as quickly as possible. Normalcy reaffirms who we are (especially vis-à-vis others). The sense of reassurance we find in that identity seems as predicated on the differences it establishes between people as it does on the similarities it suggests exist “naturally” between us and others. It is a fundamentally unequal state of equilibrium. And yet, I have heard in the voices of many people who experienced the massive uncertainly of the early hours and days after the disaster – including of course Katō-san – a sense of wonder, even bordering on nostalgia, for the way people came together in the immediate aftermath. People who had little in common in their “normal” lives – people who had never met and probably would never meet again. People who shared what they had without even exchanging names first. Perhaps I’m giving voice to my inner utopian, but when I think of it this way, I can’t help but feel that there is something sad about a human condition in which this state – rather than the unequal, egoistic equilibrium – is not what we call “normalcy.”
Rules and Leaders
Under the circumstances, Katō-san decided that they needed a set of rules and some kind of organizing principles for the people staying at the hotel. He called a meeting, with the help of the factory owner, and laid down a few basic guidelines and procedures. I’ve taken the liberty of enumerating and summarizing them as follows:
1) Everyone should take care of the elderly people and small children around them, including in regard to guideline #2.
2) Keep the toilets clean by pouring water in to flush them when needed. Do so for those who can’t do it for themselves.
3) A few people from the groups that arrived on Day 1 and Day 2, respectively, will be appointed to serve as “leaders” among their groups. Each “leader” will be responsible for a certain number of people in their group.
4) Leaders will be responsible for receiving supplies brought by the SDF and distributing them among those in their charge. They will also bring any concerns from those under their charge to the meetings with other leaders.
The first question that arises – which I don’t bother interrupting Katō-san’s narrative to get an answer to, alas – is who became a “leader” and why. He does tell me that dividing the refugee population into two groups by when they had arrived and where from just seemed to make sense – so much so, in fact, that no one bothered to question the rationale for it. Likewise in regard to the selection of leaders, my hunch is that this too followed preexisting relationships and hierarchies in the workplace and neighborhood from which the people in each of the two groups came.
The equitable distribution of supplies was the biggest concern of these leaders, of course. The SDF arrived almost every day to drop off supplies, and did so in increasing abundance. The leaders gathered frequently – perhaps several times a day, to receive enough food and supplies for those under their charge – and nothing more.
I ask how the supplies were stored, and what kept people from just taking whatever they wanted.
Katō-san motions again to the area behind the patrician. “There’s a place back there where we had a small store in the lobby. It had a shutter that we’d lower and lock when the store wasn’t open. We put the stuff in there and locked it up at night and during the day, except for when the leaders gathered to receive their allotment of food and supplies for the people under their charge.”
This gets me onto a topic that I have always wanted to learn more about, precisely because American and Japanese media coverage of the disaster portrayed Tohoku as a bastion of Japanese honesty, civility, forbearance, and public spiritedness: crime among survivors during the aftermath. I put the question to Katō-san – was there much theft?
“Oh, sure,” he explains. “As soon as the roads became a bit passable, people drove into stricken neighborhoods at night to steal stuff from houses that had been damaged in the tsunami. The same thing happened in Kobe after the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. Here, too, a lot of it was probably connected to the yakuza.”
I ask him if there was any theft in the hotel, especially since the use of the shuttered area to lock supplies up would suggest that there were at last concerns of it. Katō-san tells me that there may have been some at first – although not really enough to become a problem. In any case, the decision to put the supplies off limits came very soon after the adoption of the leader system, and was motivated by a desire to discourage pilfering before it really started. I have heard stories of other shelters that adopted similar policies soon after relief supplies began to arrive from the SDF and other aid organizations. Pilfering of the stores seemed to have been a major concern in hinanjo across the devastated region. Ironically, it may have been more so in towns like Kesennuma, which received a great deal of media attention in the aftermath – leading to a considerable volume of supplies sent directly to specific hinanjo by grassroots volunteer organizations throughout Japan as well as from the Japanese Red Cross, the SDF, and the US military. In smaller, more remote communities that never received such coverage, refugees made due with what little they could get when they could get it. For them, in essence the material conditions regarding food and supplies that everyone faced in the first two days improved much more slowly than in the shelters of larger towns like Kesennuma. This meant that particular dimensions of the stress and uncertainty they faced also continued longer, with corresponding impacts on their behavior.
But did Katō-san and leaders at the hotel really suspect that people would start looting the supplies? Wouldn’t the famed Japanese sense of decorum and shame dissuade people from sinking so low?
“Probably not,” he says after giving it some thought. “In abnormal situations, people are capable of things that are normally unthinkable – good and bad.
“In any case, though, what we were really concerned about wasn’t people taking stuff for their own use in the hotel. In those conditions, other people would notice something wasn’t right, and people would start to talk. No, what we were concerned about was people taking stuff to give to others who were still living in partially damaged homes.”
Once supplies began to arrive through the SDF and, soon after that, the Japanese Red Cross and other aid organizations, things became a bit easier for those living in shelters. As I said, there was a considerable amount of lag time for this to happen between areas with higher populations and truly remote villages dotting the coast of places like northern Iwate Prefecture, but even so, if you were living in an officially-recognized shelter, you knew that was a good chance that you would receive something from whatever supplies came in.
Many people who initially took refuge in their local shelter, however, returned to their homes for a variety of reasons. For those in areas that were only damaged by the tsunami – not destroyed – this made sense: they still had homes to return to that were at least partially inhabitable. Furthermore, many of their possessions remained inside. With stories of late night looting running rampant, many in this situation chose to return home with candles, flashlights, or generators, and provide the signs of occupancy that might save their homes from burglary. By doing so, especially before the SDF or local government officials arrived to count the number of people at the shelter to use as a base line estimate for the amount of supplies to deliver, they effectively removed themselves from access to any food or other supplies from external sources; the SDF, Red Cross, and local authorities didn’t provide home delivery. Katō-san believes that, under such circumstances, it would be understandable that neighbors and relatives who remained in the shelters might try to obtain food and supplies for the shelter’s store for such “homesteaders.” As understandable as this was, though, it still threatened to wreak havoc on the hotel’s ability to guarantee enough supplies for everyone currently seeking shelter there. As much as he and the other leaders could sympathize, insuring the efficient distribution of supplies – a duty they had tasked themselves with soon after the authorities recognized the hotel as an official shelter – required an institutional approach.
Returning to “Normal”
As I mentioned in Part 1, the Hotel Bōyō’s history as a hinanjo continued for about 70 days, with the numbers of people seeking shelter there declining gradually from the peak of 200 or more on the night of March 12th. Katō-san says that many of the last people listed as residing at the shelter toward the end were actually more like part-time residents by the final days. They were mostly elderly residents of the neighborhood near the hotel that had been damaged by the tsunami, but still contained some houses that were at least partially habitable. These people either spent the nights at the hotel, due to the sense of desolation and lingering concerns about crime in the neighborhood after dark, or else came to the hotel during the day to receive their meals and socialize with other refuge seekers, and returned to their homes at night to protect their property.
“By the end, the hotel functioned more like a community center than a shelter,” Katō-san recalls.
I ask him when he thinks that things returned to normal at the hotel and for himself.
“Hmm… ‘Normal’ is a hard term to pin down in a case like this. Since my family and I are still living here, I guess from that perspective, things still haven’t returned to normal, have they? But when I think back on it, I can see steady progress toward a state of normalcy. Cell phone service was restored after about a week. We got electricity after 41 days, and water after 53. These changes did give us the sense that things were getting back to normal.”
At the same time, however, Katō-san recalls that the landscape of destruction, disorder, and debris left by the tsunami gradually became a new state of “normal” for him, his family, and probably anyone who had to live under such circumstances for so long.
The ship Dai-18 Kyōtoku Maru – all 60 meters and 330 tons of it, resting in the Shishiori neighborhood, about 800 meters from the edge of the harbor where it had been anchored on March 11th.
“Since we had lost just about all of our personal possessions but the clothes we had on in the tsunami, soon after the roads were cleared my wife and I began to take trips to Sendai to buy things. Sendai was like a different world – I mean parts of it had been hit just as bad as Kesennuma, of course – but downtown Sendai, was nothing like what I had become used to. I can recall stopping on the street and just staring at it all. I’m sure people thought I was crazy – just stopping and staring like that. Sometimes, I found myself getting so tired of the bustling streets that I’d go back to the hotel we were staying at in the afternoon and go straight to bed. When I got back to the scenes of wreckage and the ships parked on what used to be the coastal neighborhoods of Kesennuma, only then did I know I was home.”
If by “normal” one means the way things had been before, though, a return to it will most likely never come. The neighborhoods along the coast, including the Katō’s own of Shishiori, will probably never be rebuilt – at least not for residential use. In Kesennuma as elsewhere across the hisaichi, there are difficult legal and bureaucratic issues to work out in regard to how this land will eventually be used, but barring a striking about-face on the part of all of the levels of government involved in the work of reconstruction, areas as close to the ocean as this will never see homes built upon them again. As both a fishing port and a tourist spot, the town has also suffered. Katō-san tells me that he has even contemplated closing the Hotel Bōyō for good and building a new inn elsewhere.
“The place was hit pretty hard by the quake and needs a lot of work. Since Kesennuma’s days as a tourist spot might be over, I’ve wondered whether it’s really worth all the money it would take to fix this place up. You know, one of the ideas that the government has floated is to build an enormous wall out there,” he points out toward the mouth of the harbor, “to protect the town from the next big tsunami. I’m not sure that a wall is really going to be able to do that, though; look at all the wave breaks and walls that this tsunami overwhelmed so easily – can we really say that a taller wall will manage any better? The next tsunami might be even bigger than this one, after all. Although that seems hard to imagine, it’s the job of the people who prepare for disasters to do just that. Besides, a wall that tall would obscure the view of the ocean and kill off tourism to Kesennuma. It would be like living inside Alcatraz.”
For the time being, however, Katō-san has decided to keep the hotel open and stay put. “We have a different clientele now – mostly volunteers and construction workers – but it’s important to provide those people a place to stay while they do work that will bring the town back. But beyond that – I don’t know. I still don’t even know when we’ll be able to move out of here, or where we’ll move to!”
The Good, the Bad, and the Helpless
I decide to ask Katō-san a question that strikes me as very odd, maybe even a bit heartless, even as I ask it: is there anything you have gained from your experience of the tsunami and its aftermath? I am reassured when he answers without hesitation in the affirmative.
“One thing it gave me was a rare glimpse at just how good, and how bad, people can be. This isn’t easy knowledge to live with, but I think it’s important to know.”
For the good, he mentions that incredible spirit of mutual aid and concern among the survivors on the first night. Every act of generosity was selfless, and the gratitude that people expressed in return was equally sincere. Listening to Katō-san recall this, with a sense of wonder at it still, reminds me again of Rebecca Solnit’s observations about human behavior in the throws of disasters: despite what we have been led to believe about how horribly self-interested we are, both as individuals and as a species, we prove remarkably willing to take care of each other in the worst of circumstances, when the very material and social conditions that maintain our everyday sense of self-interest are suddenly pulled out from under us.
And the bad? I ask Katō-san if he means by this the looting of damaged homes, or perhaps the petty self-interest that became evident as supplies began to reach the hinanjo. He agrees that these too are examples, but not the worst that he saw.
“One day about a week or so after the tsunami, a car pulled up in front of the hotel, dropped off an old woman, turned around and left. It turned out that this woman was suffering from pretty severe dementia. Her son had brought her up here after he heard that the hotel was serving as a shelter, with the intention of getting her off his hands – just like in the old folktale of ‘Ubasuteyama’!”
When they located the unfilial son and brought his mother back to him, explaining that a hinanjo just wasn’t prepared to deal with a person in such a condition, Katō-san says that it was clear that the son wasn’t either.
“We told him that we just couldn’t take proper care of someone with such severe dementia, and he didn’t try to argue it with us. But I could tell that he was at his wit’s end. That’s what forced him to do something so horrible. I felt bad that we couldn’t help in some way, but we really couldn’t. He probably wasn’t a bad person by nature – just completely overwhelmed by everything that was going on.”
I wonder how many cases like this occurred across Tohoku in the aftermath of the disaster. Many of the towns hit by the tsunami had been experiencing an aging of their populations that was higher than the national rate for years prior to the disaster, as young people left for jobs further south, or at least further inland. Although the Japanese health and public welfare system does a pretty good job with the infirm – particularly in comparison to many other industrialized nations – elderly individuals and the families who take care of them have increasingly fallen through the cracks as the graying population puts mounting fiscal strain on the system. As horrifying as it is to contemplate, for people already under the stress of caring for a an infirm or senile parent or relative, the loss of whatever support services they might have had – along with the sudden collapse of the social order that provided a moral compass – may have urged many to contemplate similar courses of action. This is an aspect of the disaster that, to my knowledge, has received very little attention.
Precious Lessons, Unexpected Gifts
This wasn’t the only thing Katō-san learned from the disaster and aftermath, however. He says that one of the things it brought home to him was the importance of friendship. If this sounds like a cliché, his illustrations of it were anything but.
“I remember when we finally got electricity back – after 41 days – and I went to check my email for the first time since March 11th. I couldn’t believe it – I had hundreds of messages waiting for me, from people all across Japan and in other countries, too. Many of them were from people I knew well, but others – far more than I would have expected – came from people who had stayed at the hotel in the past, recalled their stay fondly, and became very concerned about our fate when they saw the scenes from Kesennuma. They must have gone to a lot of trouble just to find my email address and send a few lines to express their concern and wish us luck – especially the foreigners. This really moved me.
“Life is beautiful,” he says in English, with a bit of a laugh. “It really is.”
That sense of being connected to others through bonds of goodwill has, if anything, only strengthened for Katō-san since then.
He leads me around the partition in the lobby to the other side – the side that now serves as part of the Katō residence – to show me something. On the other side of the partition from the coffee table where we had just been sitting, is what looks like a small gallery of mementoes – pictures, paintings, t-shirts and flags of various countries that appear to bear signatures – all gifts from and memories of groups of volunteers that have stayed at the Hotel Bōyō since March 11th, 2011.
“Without the disaster, I would never have met such good people,” he says. “It has brought me closer to the rest of the world.”
“And it also taught me the importance of home and family,” he says as turns to search for something on a table behind him. It is full of photographs, some of which appear to be professionally done family portraits. Others are of groups of volunteers, or shots of the carnage left by the tsunami.
Finally, he picks up a photo from among them. It is of Tomiko and himself, standing in the midst of piles of debris. Katō-san is giving the peace sign to the camera, but with a determined look on his face. Tomiko-san’s expression is harder to make out, but she seems to be moved by something. She is holding an object that looks like a photo album.
“My son took this picture of us the first time we went back to our house together to look for anything of ours we could find – especially photos.”
This was a common desire among those who had lost their homes in the tsunami. It was why the volunteers digging through mud and debris took such great pains to set aside any fragment of a photograph they found that contained the image of a person’s face, recording where it had been found so that the original owner might discover it at the local facility were such items were put on display.
“In the end, though, we only managed to find one photo album – my son found it, in fact. All of our other photos were lost. But this is what was really strange about it: that album was of pictures from our wedding. My wife started crying when she saw what it was. I really didn’t know what to make of it – but it felt like God was trying to tell me something.”
~~~~
My conversation with Katō-san lasts less than an hour and a half, but I come away from it feeling like he has revealed to me many things of an intensely personal nature that mean a lot to him – all with a tremendous openness and generosity of spirit. This is something I’ve noticed with others who experienced 3/11, and are now willing to share their experiences with those who are really interested in listening and learning. The tsunami gave everyone who witnessed it and survived it a story to tell. While each of these stories is unique, they share some features in common. Every account I have read or heard reveals a sense of awe at the power of nature and an equally strong sense of gratitude for the kinds of things that most of us take for granted: food, shelter, warmth, family, and friends – as well as life itself.
“At first, I didn’t really want to talk about these things with people who weren’t here when the town was destroyed,” he admits. “But as word got out that there had been this unusual hinanjo in Kesennuma, more and more people started to ask me for interviews. I even got to meet Ken Watanabe that way!” He shows me another picture – of his family surrounding the famous actor. “He came here to do an NHK documentary on Kesennuma, and interviewed me at the hotel after the producers heard several stories from survivors who had stayed here on the first two or three nights.”
It was through sharing his experiences like this that Katō-san discovered the importance of telling his story – and began to enjoy doing so.
“Disasters like this happen all the time. Usually, if they don’t affect us personally, we forget about them and move on with our lives like nothing happened. I can’t do that in regard to this disaster, though – no one who was here on March 11th can. Talking about it is one small thing I can do in the hope that other people will understand what happened here.