The Summer Festival Rapid Deployment Force
One such group was Kanda-san’s “Power of Japan” (POJ), mentioned in the previous post. When I contacted her to set up our meeting to talk about her thoughts on the situation in Fukushima, she invited me to take part in a POJ trip up to Kesennuma, scheduled for July 28th.
Kesennuma lies on the coast in the northernmost corner of Miyagi Prefecture. Despite my years in Sendai, I had only visited the town once: for a friend’s wedding, in what now seemed like the remote past. In the first days after 3/11, some of the first images I saw of the tsunami’s awesome destructive power came from Kesennuma. I recalled the home video on YouTube that showed the water rapidly rising in the narrow streets, carrying away cars, then trucks, then larger and larger fishing vessels, and finally causing buildings that lined those streets to sway and succumb to the irrepressible force of the current. Another video showed an enormous ship with a red hull spinning slowly and helplessly in the current as the tsunami pulled back into the ocean; it would eventually come to rest on top of a residential neighborhood that had been scoured bare of its homes. Other images revealed the terrifying paradox of an industrial port that caught on fire even as it remained inundated, due to the combination of live electric wires and copious amounts of fuel oil.
The 28th was a Saturday. Kanda-san sent me the schedule in advance. Our destination was a collection of temporary housing units (kasetsu jūtaku, now referred to more commonly by those who have any sort of association with them at all as simply “kasetsu”) in the Shichihanzawa area of Kesennuma. The people living here – around 60 families in total – had been settled here after losing their homes in the tsunami and spending months in evacuation shelters throughout town. Our job was to set up, manage, and take down a summer festival for the community on the site of a parking lot adjacent to the rows of housing units. We were to meet at Tokyo Station, roughly 400 kilometers to the south of Kesennuma, at 12:30am on that day and take a chartered bus that would get us to Shichihanzawa by 9am. Unloading the supplies and other materials that would accompany the bus on the trip up would commence immediately, followed by the set-up, and then the festival from 4 until 7pm. After that, we were to pack the whole thing up and head back to Tokyo, arriving around 5:30 the next morning.
“Sounds grueling,” I told Kanda-san, after she outlined the scheduled to me during our talk at Yamanobe-san’s restaurant.
“Yeah, but that’s just the way it has to be,” she answered. “Most of our members and others who sign up for these volunteer opportunities live in the Kanto area, and the logistics and added expense involved in finding aplace to stay in Kesennuma for the volunteers would make it impossible to do something like this. So, we just sleep on the bus.”
I agreed to go – it sounded like just the sort of crazy road trip I was up for anyway – on condition that I wouldn’t have to make the trip back to Tokyo with the rest of the group. Nothing personal, of course; I was ready to start the Tohoku leg of my trip, and doing so with a little volunteer work and being able to catch a ride up to Miyagi for just the nominal 7,500 yen it would cost to participate seemed like a very great deal.
In all, about 25 people boarded the bus at Tokyo Station. I got the sense that most of them were either POJ members or people who had otherwise participated in its volunteer activities before. In terms of age, they fell between the early 20s and late 40s, although most were toward the younger side of that range. The predominance of youth involvement that I observed in Ishinomaki with JEN during the previous summer’s volunteer activity was evident here too. Unlike last year, though, I was the only obvious foreigner – although this could have simply been due to the more local, grassroots character of POJ as an organization in comparison with JEN.
Aside from Kanda-san, it turned out that there was one other person I had met before on this bus: Takehiko Konuma, a student from Dartmouth who was one of the organizers of the “Rethink, Rebuild, Remember” observance of 3/11 at Brown University and other schools on the East Coast that Kanda-san had taken part in. Yamanobe-san was unable to join us for this trip, unfortunately.
The ride up passed with little conversation. Everyone seemed to be trying to get as much sleep as they could in preparation for the day ahead – not an easy thing to do on a tour bus. Somewhere along the Tohoku Expressway in Fukushima, I must have drifted off. The next thing I knew, the sun was attempting to burn through the fog and we were a few miles outside of Kesennuma.
We got off the bus in an area that was fields with houses built among them that looked to be of fairly recent construction – probably one of the town’s former agricultural areas that was giving way to residential development – and took a short walk to a set of prefab, one-story buildings arranged in neat rows. These were the Shichihanzawa kasetsu. We were on high ground now; by government regulation kasetsu can only be set up in areas that are well out of the reach of another killer tsunami. The plot of land this temporary community stood on had probably been farmland prior to the disaster. Now it was home to a transplanted community of people who had lost their homes in a different neighborhood that once stood somewhere along the shore. I recalled the tensions between farmers and fishermen that I had heard about on my first trip to Ishinomaki the summer before, and wondered if this juxtaposition of two very different communities exacerbated similar animosities here.
After a few words of instruction from Kanda-san, we got to work unloading the truck. We separated the boxes on borad into supplies for the festival and flea market that would be part of it, and other goods – toilet paper, diapers, non-perishable food items, etc. – that were for the residents to use. These people had lost more than their homes, after all; many had lost their jobs in the tsunami as well. The fact that POJ was able to gather contributions enough to bring so much was as heartening as the fact that such aid was still needed seemed incongruous, from the perspective of the Tokyo I had just spent ten days in.
Rows of kasetsu jūtaku in Shichihanzawa. As with other temporary housing facilities across Tohoku, residents are allowed to live here rent-free for the time being. Just how long “for the time being” will end up being is a difficult question to answer. The original term of one year until people would be required to leave has been extended for two more years, in light of the dearth of construction to replace lost homes in these areas, and may well be extended even further before that deadline is reached.
The truck unloaded, we headed over to the parking lot to set up the festival. The 25 of us had been assigned to specific work details for the set-up and the actual hosting of the festival. For set-up, I was on the crew assigned the task of building the yagura, along with four others. A yagura is the platform at the center of the festival, festooned with red and white bunting and hanging lanterns. In the case of the festival we were going to throw, it would also serve as the stage for the karaoke competition. This would be a major undertaking. Fortunately, we’d be working with a professional – Keiji Takenaka – whom Kanda-san and others referred to as “Shachō” (essentially “boss,” in the sense of one who heads a company), because he ran a company that set up events like these, and was donating his time, expertise, and equipment on this day. Takenaka-san arrived with the all the materials to build the yagura loaded on a flatbed truck. These consisted of metal scaffolding for the center of the structure, and a collection of wooden frames and boxes that could be assembled quickly to make a sturdy platform…if you knew what you were doing, that is.
Takenaka-san’s truck awaits unloading
Once he set to work, it was clear that Takenaka-san knew exactly what he was doing. With the skill of the expert carpenter he was, he directed the rest of us in putting the proper parts of the structure in their correct positions, while at the same time leaping onto the emerging platform repeatedly to drive nails in at regular intervals with unerring hammer blows to hold separate portions together, make minor adjustments to keep it level – constantly checking the stability of the yagura as he went. We made quick progress, which was good, because there was a lot to do and this was not the kind of weather for fumbling around it. One of the things Kanda-san had told us in her debriefing before we got to work was that the temperature in Kesennuma was expected to reach a record high that day – and the day lived up to the forecast. By noon it was already 32-degrees Celsius – 89.6 Fahrenheit – without a cloud in the sky, and we were working on a paved surface without a patch of shade to hide in.
The metamorphosis of the yagura. By lunchtime, it is structurally complete and carpeted.
At noon, we retreated to one of the prefab buildings that served as a community gathering hall for the kasetsu development, for a lunch prepared for us by some of the residents. The heat radiating off of our already sunburnt bodies soon overwhelmed the air conditioning units inside, but the food kept us there just the same. It consisted of ample servings of curry and rice, a variety of pickled vegetables – always good, but especially good when you’re trying to replace lost salt content – and several kinds of local seafood, including one thing I had never tried before: ocean sunfish sashimi. We ate our fill, rehydrated, and then sprawled out on the floor, or in a patches of shade outside with a breeze, to catch a quick nap.
Mambo (ocean sunfish) sashimi, front and center
Even if you didn’t know why these prefab structures were here, little hints were everywhere. A label on the refrigerator in the community hall.
Lunch was also the perfect time for the obligatory group picture, even without the whole group.
Back at work in the afternoon, we put the finishing touches on the yagura.
While our crew had been building the yagura, other crews of volunteers put up tents and prepared cooking spaces for the food and drinks to be served at the festival: yakitori, yakisoba, soft drinks, beer, etc. – all of it free of charge. There was also a flea market with clothing and household items for sale at low prices, and a variety of traditional summer festival games for kids, such as whack-a-mole and a kingyō-sukui (“goldfish scooping,” a contest in which one uses a paper-screen ladle to scoop as many goldfish out of the water as one can before the paper screen breaks) tank.
At four, people began to show up. Kids who appeared to be in the upper grades of elementary school were the first arrivals. Shortly after them came parents with even younger children in tow, as well as increasing numbers of elderly people. Most appeared to be coming from the kasetsu but it was hard to tell in some cases. Not that it really mattered where you came from; the festival was open to everyone in the area, no matter where they lived.
(Re)creating a Sense of Community
I’ll omit a description of the festival, simply because, with the exception that this one was entirely free of charge, it was pretty much just like any of several thousand small, neighborhood festivals – with karaoke contests, food, games, and beer – that take place across Japan from late July through August every year. Which was by design of course; this was an occasion for the kids, first and foremost, but also for their parents and grandparents – to feel a sense of normality, the normal seasonal rhythm. For the folks forced by circumstances far beyond their control to live in the kasetsu for the foreseeable future, it was offered in part to help them forget that fact – at least for a little while. It was a chance for them to experience a normal summer event, despite losing the means to do so as they had before 3/11.
By saying so, I do not mean to say that these people could not have put on their own festival without volunteer help. Whether they could or couldn’t have is a matter beyond my ability to judge, based upon the little I know of their economic circumstances. Every if doing so on their own would not have been impossible, however, under the circumstances facing them – having lost their homes, jobs, and worse still for the purpose of holding a festival, their own neighborhood space in which to hold it – I suspect they would not have seen it as being worth the tremendous additional effort involved.
When I considered this, I realized what POJ was really doing here. I can imagine that there may be some people who might claim that this kind of charity only breeds a “sense of entitlement” or a “handout mentality” among the people living in the kasetsu. Whether it does on doesn’t, though, is a concern that is actually beside the point. It is really about building community, on at least three inter-related levels.
The first and most obvious of these is of course the community of the people living in the Shichihanzawa kasetsu themselves. Here it is important to recall that this is in many ways an artificial community. Even if most of the residents used to be neighbors in a part of the town wiped out by the tsunami, the loss of the very material context in which the community originally took shape puts subtle but pervasive strains on those bonds. Add to this the stress of economic factors, which are constantly working to pull people in the kasetsu apart from one another: in many cases, those who live here probably do so less out of choice or a sense of dedication to the old neighborhood than out of economic necessity; meanwhile, what job opportunities there are for the fortunate few are more likely to drag them away from the kasetsu than allow them to remain living there. These are circumstances with which the residents of the Shichihanzawa kasetsu, like residents of kasetsu across Tohoku, are all too familiar – and this knowledge in itself is a source of stress on community ties.
On another level, an event like this tries to build community where it never existed before. Here I am referring to the relationship between the people who were living in the Shichihanzawa area before 3/11 and their new neighbors in the kasetsu. This, as I’ve said, is an area where tensions that were already part of life in the town prior to the disaster could flare up in reaction to the cultural and special dislocations it has forced upon everyone. This was why the festival was open to everyone, regardless of where they lived. To limit it to only those living in the kasetsu would likely invite animosity from those in the surrounding neighborhood.
I should hasten to add here that I don’t know for a fact that relations between the two are actually so fraught with underlying tension. While I did talk to a few of the kastestu residents close to my age during the festival, our conversations were mostly on the level of “nice evening for a festival, huh,” “thanks for putting this together for us,” and “where are you from?” etc. A festival with a karaoke contest going at full blare is not really an ideal venue for in-depth interviews, nor a particularly good time to be asking questions like “so, tell me about your new neighbors – do you really get along with each other?”
Also, I have no idea how many of the folks from Shichihanzawa who were not living in the kasetsu actually came to the festival. I can only imagine that it would be pretty clear to anyone in the area why this festival was being hosted free of charge by a Kanto-based NGO: no kasetsu, no festival. No matter what their feelings for their new neighbors, this realization alone might be enough to keep most Japanese in the “old” neighborhood away – the Japanese are anything but wedding crashers, after all. Near the end of the festival, the MC also made a point of apologizing to the people in the neighborhood for making such a racket with the festival. Since the yagura and the speaker of the karaoke machine were facing towards the older homes in the neighborhood – not toward the kasetsu – I can only imagine that the apology was meant for the people living there.
Still, there were signs that the folks in the pre-3/11 neighborhood were willing to lend a hand. As we put the lanterns up on the yagura we realized that we’d strung one of the lines up backwards. What this meant was that to light the bulbs in the lanterns on that line, we would either have to take it down and redo it the right way (something we had neither time nor energy for doing by that point), or get the owners of the property next to the parking lot to allow us to plug the line in to one of their outlets. After a little bit of explanation, they agreed with alacrity, and even offered an extension cord to make it happen when it was clear that our lead wouldn’t reach.
Finally, the last level on which this festival – and events like it – serves to build community may in fact be the most important in the long run. As the festival drew to its conclusion, the MC asked Kanda-san to come up on stage to thank her for all her work in putting this and other events together. I had already learned over the course of the day that POJ had been to this same community in Shichigahama before – quite a few times over the past many months, in fact. But the reason for this was not entirely clear to me: why this area, out of so many kasetsu communities in Tohoku to choose from? As the mc – Kuwata-san – spoke, however, it began to make sense. Kuwata-san is not from Tohoku, nor from Kanto originally, but from Kobe. When the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake devastated Kobe in 1992, a group of volunteers from Kesennuma were some of the first on the scene to help. She recalled this with tears in her eyes, her voice threatening to break under the strain of her recollections and feelings of gratitude.
Later, as we packed up the festival, I saw similar scenes on a much more personal level take place between POJ volunteers and people from the Shichihanzawa kasetsu – there was a real sense of fellowship here, built on mutual gratitude and, for some at least, a mutual understanding of what they had been through, somewhere, at some point in their lives. This was a community that stretched beyond area and time. This is what kept so many volunteers coming back, and, I can only hope, keeps the people in kasetsu developments like Shichihanzawa hopeful.
旅立ちTabidachi
What took a whole day to build we managed to pack up in a little over 90 minutes, thanks to the help of many from the neighborhood. After a long soak in the onsen bath of a ritzy hotel overlooking the harbor – a view that now means little at night since the land below is indistinguishable for the sea without the lights that accompany human habitation – it was time to head out on my own. It was far too late to make it to Sendai – my ultimate destination – but Konuma-kun made a reservation for me at a hotel in town where he had stayed a few days before. “You’ll like the proprietor, Kato-san – he’s a huge jazz fan. I told him you’re coming, and he’s looking forward to meeting you tomorrow morning at 9. I think you’ll find his story fascinating.”
So I already had my first Tohoku interview arranged, and I hadn’t even lifted a finger.
As the bus wound its way through streets in a part of town near the port – streets that once were lined with buildings, but now only held foundations flooded with brackish water – the driver pulled over and stopped at an intersection where the road split in two direction: one climbing a hill, the other continuing along the edge of the port. This was my stop, since the hotel where I would spend the night was at the top of the hill – a fact the importance of which I wouldn’t realize until the next morning.
Kanda-san grabbed the microphone meant for tour guides to use on sightseeing trips and informed everyone that I loved Kesennuma so much that I had decided to stay. Taking the mic from her, I threatened to sing a song, and then said goodbye to my friends. Although the day had been incredibly hectic, with little time to really get to know one another, that’s what we had become. The bonds among volunteers that I had felt in Ishinomaki last summer were palpable here too. This may be yet another level on which activities like this build community. I believe that the so-called “repeaters” (the English term is used: “ripītā”) are probably searching for just that: a sense of immediate, unconditional acceptance – or as close to it as they know they can expect in a cynical world – and the realization that it is after all okay for them to extend the same to others. How long this will last, I do not know – but it was deeply reassuring to find it again after so many months.