July 22: With typhoon number 6 pulling away from Honshu, the rain has lifted and the air is cool and dry. I took the opportunity to head out to areas along the coast. The first, the city of Ishinomaki, I have mentioned already. This is the particularly hard-hit port city where I will be doing volunteer work next week. Hariu-san was kind enough to drive me out there, so that I could drop off some things with one of his former students, Sasaki-san, who now runs a hotel in the city. While there, we made a quick tour of the area around the station and city hall. On the way back, we also dropped by Matsushima, a tourist spot famous for its picturesque bay, scattered with small, rocky islands improbably topped with rugged pine trees. It is traditionally regarded as one of the three great scenic places in Japan (I’ve never bothered to find out where the other two are). The Tokugawa-period poet Bashō composed a famous haiku about the area during a visit in the course of his trip through what were for him the northern hinterlands. It too was hit by the tsunami.
Let me begin with Ishinomaki. After meeting with Sasaki-san at a mega-mall on the outskirts of the city (which wasn’t touched by the tsunami – for better or worse), we headed into the center. The area we ventured into was not the hardest hit by any means. Ishinomaki Station and city hall lie roughly two kilometers from the coastline, and are further protected by a hill that stands between them and the ocean. Even so, the tsunami covered this section of town as it traveled up the Kyu-Kitakami River to the immediate east and overran its banks, spilling into the city.
The red mark here is placed on city hall. You can make out the hill that stood between this part of the town and the oceanfront just to the south.
And here is a map of the same area of the city, showing the extent of inundation by the tsunami. The shaded areas on the map were covered in water and/or showed signs of debris visible in aerial and/or satellite disaster survey photographs taken between on March 13 and April 5. (Source: 『東日本大震災復興支援地図』Mapple/昭文社、２０１１年７月、第４７図)
I shot some video as we made our way eastward, past city hall. My apologies for the shakiness of the shot; the road was bumpy at points due to subsidence from the quake and damage from the tsunami, and to make things worse I was twisting back and forth in an attempt to take it all in. By the way, for you drivers wondering what’s wrong with the way image seems oriented – the Japanese drive on the left-hand side of the street, with the steering wheel on the right side of the car.
In this first clip, we’re heading toward city hall, marked by the vertical, blue sign high up on the pinkish building, which appears near the end of the clip. Water levels in this part of town probably reached a meter, and rose the further eastward toward the Kyu-Kitakami River one went.
Although it’s not in the clip, one thing I began to notice around this point was that all of the shrubs were brown, and only weeds seemed to be doing well. This may have been due to the salt water that soaked the soil.
The next clip continues along the same eastward road (route 398 on the map above), which becomes Tachimachi Ōdori, a major shopping street. From there, we turn south for a few blocks, and then west to the edge of the “white zone” on the map.
There are a few things worth noting here other than the increasing severity of the damage as we move toward the river into areas that probably took on around two meters of water. The first is the number of shuttered shops along the street. Some businesses have rebuilt and reopened, but most remain closed. Another thing to take note of it that electricity is apparently still out in this part of town. I really don’t know that for certain, but I can’t thing of any other reason why the traffic lights would be out and the police directing cars at each intersection.
The final clip in this series takes us back along the same street we took westward, but this time we go eastward all the way to where you can see the banks of the Kyu-Kitakami River. We then head north along it, before turning left (west) onto Tachimachi Ōdori again. The water here must have been over two meters, at least. Still, some structures survived fairly well. The thing that looks like a marooned space ship at the 1:33 mark is actually the Ishinomaki Manga Museum. It survived well enough that it has served as a shelter for survivors since the tsunami.
As you can see from the satellite photo above, areas of the city further south, between the rise in the land that escaped inundation and the water’s edge, faced much worse damage. I suppose Hariu-san might have driven us down there if I had asked, but somehow I didn’t feel like it. I guess it was something like a feeling of shame; as we drove around the city we saw crews had at work clearing rubble and trying to repair shops and homes. They didn’t need the extra traffic from folks just touring through, and the same would go for the people working in the harder hit areas. Even if I take no pleasure in the sights, even if I look upon the destruction with sympathy for the losses that were suffered there, somehow I couldn’t shake the sense that I would be an intruder on the scene, gawking at the suffering from the safety of our car as we slid by on the rubble-lined streets.
In the days following the disaster, I recall reading stories about disaster gawkers – people from outside who drove into the areas flattened by the tsunami just to stare at the destruction. They became an obstacle to search and rescue crews trying to find survivors and get them the medical attention they needed. At four months since the disaster, the chances of us getting in the way of relief efforts were greatly reduced. Still, it just didn’t feel like the right thing to do. In any case, I figured that I would be getting a close enough view of the destruction next week.
After leaving Ishinomaki, we visited Matsushima on the way back to Sendai. Here, the same features of the bay that make it so scenic – the numerous, small islands and the broad arc of the coast – also seem to have dispersed the tsunami as it rolled in. While there was damage to the town, especially the shops that line the man tourism street along the shore, it was nothing like what we saw in Ishinomaki, even in the areas of comparatively light destruction that we had confined ourselves to. I was also surprised to see that the picturesque islands with their improbable clumps of trees seemed to had made it through the disaster fairly well – at least judging from the vantage point I had on them – in spite of serving as the first line of defense against the waves.
Matsushima seems well on its way to recovery, at least in the parts of town we saw. There are some shops that are still shuttered, but most places seemed to be back in business.
Division, entitlement, and resentment
Prior to all that, we had a very eye-opening conversation with Sasaki-san over lunch at the mega-mall where we met. The mall was surprisingly crowded; a fact that would take on significance in the course of our conversation.
As a resident and business owner in Ishinomaki, Sasaki-san had a very detailed, first-hand perspective on what has been going on in the city since the disaster. He counts himself among the fortunate; his business and home were spared by the tsunami, and he lost no loved one – although he knows many who did. As we sat in a crowded family restaurant at the mall eating our lunch, he shared with us his observations of the situation in Ishinomaki – observations of a kind that don’t get reported by a media focused on emphasizing the ability of the people of Tohoku to put up with adversity and the spirit of volunteerism, cohesiveness, and cooperation that are rising to the challenge of rebuilding the area.
The first was that there has always been a certain tension among the residents of the city, between those who make their living through fishing and other marine-related industries, on the one hand, and those who work in agriculture, on the other. There’s more than just a conflict of economic interests behind this divide; in fact, more than economics, it’s cultural. Sasaki-san even put it in ethnic terms, invoking the term minzoku – a term that is as conceptually slippery as the English “nation” and “people” (in the ethnic sense), which are often used to translate it – to refer to “people of the sea” and “farming people.” These long standing divisions have been exacerbated by the fact that the city authorities have chosen the build temporary housing facilities on fields well inland, in an effort to keep them safe from subsequent tsunamis. While this makes good sense from a disaster planning perspective, it ignores the cultural animosities; the “people of the sea” apparently have no interest in moving onto the turf of the farmers – even temporarily – and thus refuse to leave the shelters for temporary housing. Instead, they have begun to rebuild in their former neighborhoods, often in opposition to the wishes of the authorities.
It also spelled trouble for what appears to be the government’s long range plan for revitalizing the local economy, Sasaki-san feels that this disaster might well be the end for much of the fishing industry in Ishinomaki. In recent decades importation of marine products from other Asian countries had severely cut into local profits. The revitalization plans that he has heard of seem to admit this state of affairs by calling for a greater emphasis on agriculture in the reconstruction of the local economy; this means that fishermen will have to be reconstructed as farmers, a plan that Sasaki-san feels is destined to fail.
Another point of tension is between those who lost their homes and those who didn’t, but were still evacuated during the tsunami, just in case. This is a tension that arises not from disaster itself but unwittingly and perhaps unavoidably from the administrative response to it. Apparently, some of the people who had homes to return to after the tsunami waters receded, or whose homes could in any case be repaired for occupancy in fairly short order, were still registered as residing at the evacuation shelter designated for them. The number of meals delivered on a daily basis to each of the shelters is based upon these initial tallies, a fact that, once it became known to the former residents, has resulted in a disappointing form of opportunism: people with homes to live in and jobs to work at returning to the shelters at dinnertime to collect their rations. Hariu-san said he has heard of this going on in Sendai as well – even residents of luxury condominiums in areas untouched by the tsunami have been observed heading back to their designated evacuation shelters in the evening to get their dinner. If asked, their response would probably be something along that lines that the meals were being delivered anyway, so they were entitled to take them.
A sense of entitlement also influences the behavior of some from outside of the Tohoku region, who come to Ishinomaki to do volunteer work. Sasaki-san says he has had people show up at his hotel without reservations asking for lodging. There is nothing wrong with this in itself, of course; many volunteers reserve rooms in the cities hotels while they are engaged in relief work there. (I myself will be spending a couple of nights at his hotel during the course of my time in Ishinomaki.) The problem is what sometimes happens when he tells them that all his rooms are full; rather than simply accepting the fact, some of the would-be lodgers then turn indignant, claiming that since they are coming all this way to volunteer, they have some sort of right to a room. One can see where this sort of attitude, or even the impression of it where the attitude itself may not exist, would get on the nerves of the city’s residents.
The most surprising and, for me, morally awkward observation that Sasaki-san raised, though, was in regard to survivors who have suffered the most. Whether one believes in the virtues of gaman or not, in some ways we all want to believe that there is a kind of dignity in suffering such a horrible loss, or rather that those who have suffered it achieve just such a sense of quiet dignity. In fact, Sasaki-san said that the behavior of some survivors has exhibited a sense of entitlement of its own. Some people who lost their homes and didn’t have enough insurance to replace them have demanded that the local government do something beyond just building temporary housing for them. To a certain extent, this is understandable, but he claims that there is an element of irresponsibility to some of these demands. The tsunami was no one’s fault, after all – it was a natural disaster. The attitude of some seeking redress for their losses, however, is that the city owes them new housing – or the money to build a new home – as if the tsunami itself was the city government’s fault.
Then there is the matter of bereavement payments. A central government relief program has provided payments of ten million yen (roughly $127,000) for each family member killed in the disaster to the survivors. According to Sasaki-san, some survivors have in essence made a fortune off of their loved ones, especially if one factors in payouts from life insurance policies on top of the bereavement payments. This, he claimed, was a factor in explaining the crowds at the mall that day: rather than looking for work, some of these bereaved survivors are content to live off the money they have received for the loss of their loved ones. There is even a term for this, apparently: saigai-butori – “to get fat off of disaster.” Since these survivors have money but nothing to do and no place to go (especially for those who chose to stay in the shelters), the claim is that they hang out at the mall and spend their newfound wealth lavishly.
Although I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the bereaved did in fact resort to this kind of behavior, this line of analysis seem to lack a certain amount of empathetic imagination. Even the bereaved for the disaster did behave as described, it’s worth putting yourself and their position and considering this: if I was in a similar situation – losing everything dear to me and suddenly receiving a large payout in exchange – how would I react? Would I do the “responsible” thing right away and buy a new house (assuming there are any left standing to buy, of course), and then look for a job (even though the only lines of work with plenty of openings in town are demolition and salvage)? Wouldn’t the temptation, at least for the time being, be to take it easy and lick my wounds in whatever material comfort I could provide myself?
No matter what the situations of those at the mall or the thinking of the bereaved survivors may be, though, there is one economic impact that has come to light recently, which involves the survivors. The July 23 edition of the Asahi shinbun carried a story on national trends in consumer spending over the last quarter, corresponding roughly to the three months following the disaster. Nationally, consumer spending is up – which is good news for the Japanese economy, of course. It appears that consumption in Tohoku accounts for most of the national gain. Whether they are spending newly-gotten wealth or just trying to replace what they lost, folks in Tohoku are buying stuff. In a capitalist economy, this may be a sign that people haven’t given up hope.
Counting the dead and missing
The most recent figures released by the National Police Authority put the number of dead from the disaster at 15,616 and missing at 4,949, for a total of 20,565. Every day the number of dead increases by just as much as the number of missing decreases, as they continue to find remains on land and off the coast. Hariu-san and I came across a reminder that the search continues on our way back from Matsushima. This sign directs people to the local morgue for victims of the disaster. The fact that it is still up four and a half months since seems to suggest that the work continues.
If you read my first entry in this blog, you might recall that I gave a different, higher number of 23,539, from figures released earlier by the Fire and Disaster Management Agency. I’m not sure what accounts for the difference. In any case, though, the NPA’s combined figure of 20,565 as well as the FDMA’s 23,539 are in all likelihood low. This is due to the fact that how the authorities define the cause of death in a disaster is different than how most people would see it. Apparently, even if a person dies from injuries received in the tsunami or earthquake after being rescued, unless that death occurs while that person is receiving emergency medical attention after the rescue, the death is not counted in the official figures. In addition many people in the shelters, especially the elderly, have died from medical problems because they could not get the medications they need to take on a daily basis. Although these people would probably not have died if the disaster had not occurred, their deaths are not classified as disaster related.
The importance of this discrepancy is more than just numeric: whether one is classified as dying as a result of the disaster or not has important consequences for whether the surviving family members can receive bereavement payments and certain life insurance payouts, for example. Ultimately, of course, there is probably no method of classification that will count all deaths caused by the disaster, both directly or indirectly. The gray zone of how indirect a cause of death can be and still count is the problem. Even so, the definition employed by the authorities seems too narrow, and may even deny a sense of closure to many who know that, if it hadn’t been for the disaster, things for them and their loved ones would be very, very different.