This turned out to be Ian, a recent graduate of Bates, who had been in Japan for about a year on the JET Program, teaching English at a school in Tokushima Prefecture. Tokushima wasn’t damaged by the quake or tsunami at all, but Ian felt the urge to come and help after seeing the images on TV. Also, he admitted a certain fascination with the idea of being able to witness the aftermath firsthand. I confessed the same fascination; one shared by almost everyone who comes to volunteer – at least on their first time. I wondered if this meant that there was no real difference between a gawker and a volunteer, especially in the eyes of the folks who had suffered the tsunami and were still living trying to get by with their day-to-day existences here. I figured I would probably find that out in the course of the ten days ahead.
We were shortly joined by a third volunteer; a Chinese math teacher from Hong Kong named Lucas. Then one of the JEN staff told us that the van was waiting for us downstairs, so we grabbed our stuff and left.
I had seen some of the road to Watanoha previously, on my visit to Ishinomaki with Hariu-san. Once we crossed the Kyu-Kitakami River, though, we were in new territory for me – and the devastation here appeared even worse than what I had seen around the station. If anything, it was on par with what Takumi had shown me in Mitsumata. We passed a line of “big box” type stores – drug stores, pachinko parlors, and the like – that lined the east bank of the river. All that remained of them were their frames and enough siding, higher up on the building, to provide evidence of the kind of business it had been in better times. We also drove past a couple of elementary schools that now served as shelters. The line of portable toilets in front served as the marker.
The van pulled up to a pair of houses positioned close together by the foot of a large hill, about 3.5km from the ocean. The tsunami apparently stopped just short of here. The older of these two structures was “Watanoha House,” or as it had become abbreviated by the JEN staff and volunteers through constant reference “Watanohaus.” It was an old, country-style home, consisting of 7 rooms, a kitchen, and a toilet. Most of the rooms had tatami on the floors that had not been changed in what appeared to be a decade or so. The rooms were quite spacious, however, and the fact that the shoji doors separating them were usually slid open created one big, communal gathering space for the people staying here.
While it had a certain rustic charm, this was hardly living in luxury. Fly paper streamers hung from the shoji door frames between rooms, attesting the amount of insects that had spawned to consume the dead and rotting matter in the sludge left by the tsunami. Over the next ten days spent here I would walk into them on more than one occasion, a uniquely disgusting experience, especially when they were plastered with the carcasses of unfortunate insects. Despite these measures, flies pestered residents throughout their waking hours, although the JEN staff claimed that the fly population seemed to have declined since its peak in May and June. Mosquito-killing incense burners could be found in every room and were lit religiously in the evening, so that everything in the place – including our clothing and selves – bore a trace of the charred smell throughout the day. The major conveniences Watanohaus lacked were bathing facilities, a refrigerator, and enough amperage to allow the occupants to run even a vacuum cleaner and an electric fan simultaneously without throwing the main breaker.
A quick look around revealed that the house was cluttered with supplies for the kind of work we would be doing. There were enough “safely boots” (boots with a steel toe and insole, to protect the wearer’s feet from rocks, broken glass, and nails) in the entrance hall to equip a small army. The entrance hall also had boxes of work gloves, rubber gloves, salt candy to help ward off heat exhaustion, sunscreen, bug repellant, antiseptic sprays, and band-aids. I had brought all of these items with me, since the instructions I had received from the JEN Tokyo office recommended it. I realized what was going on here: like I eventually would too, many before me had left their supplies behind at Watanohaus after finishing their volunteer work. Most of us have no need for things like “safety boots” in our normal everyday lives, after all – much less so safety boots caked in tsunami sludge.
At the house, were met another new volunteer: Atsuki, a native of Yamagata in his late twenties who now lived permanently in LA, where he was pursuing a career in music while working a day job on staff at a local college. Atsuki had driven directly from his family’s home in Yamagata with a luxury van loaded with food and other supplies for everyone to use: we would not want for anything, apparently – except maybe for a bath.
I arrived on a Tuesday, which was a day off for the volunteers. Most had gone to Sendai for the day, but they began to return at around 7pm. There was Don, a third-generation Japanese-American from LA, probably in his late fifties or early sixties, but with a youthful energy and attitude that made it hard to guess his age. Don worked in insurance, but had taken time off to come over and help out. Thanks to a childhood spent in Hawaii, he spoke English with an easy-going accent, as well as broken Japanese quite effectively.
There was also Cat, from England via Harvard, from which she had recently graduated. Cat had been at Watanohaus the longest of any of the volunteers I met on that first evening – about three weeks by that point. She had been in Japan before – and was in fact Japanese on her mother’s side – but did not speak the language. Without the benefit of understanding Japanese, she must have felt pretty isolated at times, especially when the house was crowded with Japanese volunteers. Whatever kept her at it in spite of this, she was an incredibly hard and persistent worker. Wherever we went, Cat was always the first to set work, the last to quit, and one of the most mud-caked by the end of the day.
The final folks to arrive that evening were the Ishida family, “Okaasan” (mother) as we all took to calling her, and her two adult children, Koji and Junko. I got the impression that this was not their first time at Watanohaus. They seemed to know their way around the place very well. They proved to be an invaluable asset to the group: Koji ran a restaurant in Tokyo and Junko was training to be a massage therapist. Good food and an occasional massage to work out the kinks were a godsend after a long day of labor.
This completed the group, except for one: Yamamoto Ryuji, or “Yama-chan” as everyone seemed to call him. He was in Sendai on business until tomorrow, I was told. That business was an important one in places that had been hit by the tsunami: applying chemicals to reduce the stench left by the putrefying substances in the sludge. Don assured me that I would find Yama-chan to be a lot of fun. Cat assured me that he was crazy.
Work detail
JEN works with neighborhoods in Ishinomaki city proper and the outlying communities. Most of the people I saw talking on cell phones in the office were probably either talking with people at the Tokyo main office or answering calls from the city’s disaster response headquarters with requests for help. As one of many organizations doing work in the city, JEN handles much of the heavier lifting (but not the heaviest, which is the province of the Self Defense Forces, or increasingly contracted out to private salvage firms). They also have the transportation to take volunteers to communities further outside the city – and due to the municipal reconsolidation of a few years back, there are a lot of outlying areas. One of these is Higashihama, a small fishing community on the Oshika Peninsula, about 20km east (in a straight line) of Watanohaus, over roads that have been damaged by both the quake and the tsunami.
Day One (July 27), Higashihama:
The next morning we headed out to Higashihama on a bus chartered by a group of employees of Mitsui & Co., Ltd. Mitsui had partnered with JEN to regularly send groups to work in Ishinomaki, although they didn’t stay at Watanohaus with the individual volunteers, but commuted via charter bus from a hotel in Sendai.
The main industry in Higashihama was cultivating the oysters that Miyagi is famous for. This is labor-intensive work, especially at first. Oysters apparently release their eggs into the water in August. The trick it to lower something into the water onto which as many eggs as possible will adhere and develop into oysters. Scallop shells imported from Hokkaido and Aomori Prefectures are used for this purpose, because the rough texture of the outside is the ideal surface to catch the eggs. By drilling a hole into the center of each shell, they can be strung like beads on long strands of wire, and then lowered into the ocean. Each strand consists of 37 flat half-shells (the bottom shell of the oyster), and 37 curved, or top shells, with spacers between them. Our job involved cleaning the shells of mud and sludge, and them stringing them onto the wires – the holes had already been drilled in them. A mountain of shells had somehow been rescued from the tsunami, but were so caked in the omnipresent sludge that even separating them was tough work.
Under normal circumstances, this work would be done be the residents of Higashihama, working in family units, with each family making its own shell strings, placing them in the ocean, and eventually harvesting the oysters for sale. The tsunami had taken so many lives from the community that these separate family businesses now had to band together to get the work done – and even then there were not enough hands available to do the work. That was where the volunteers came in.
The process was easy enough to learn, and JEN volunteers had been doing it on-and-off for the past few weeks by the time I arrived. Sometimes they worked alongside the women of the village at stringing the shells; other times, like this first day for me, we worked alone. Today, we divided into two groups: half of us washing the shells and separating the flat ones from the rounded ones, the other half stringing these onto the wires. The work was not complex, but in the bright sunlight by the sea, it was tiring nonetheless. I realized half the way through the morning that I had forgotten to apply sunscreen. I would be burnt to a crisp for certain by the end of the day.
While we broke for lunch – consisting of convenience-store fare that we had purchased the night before – one of the men of the village came over to talk with us. He and some others had been working on a boat engine a short distance away. He greeted us in the same way that Takumi had greeted the volunteer from Kobe the day before: “thanks for your help.” He told us about the tsunami, which had risen as high as seven meters in Higashihama. He himself had only escaped the wave by climbing the hill behind the harbor, where a small Shinto shrine stands. He was stranded there for two days, because the harbor and most of the village had been reduced to a salt marsh.
“The ground here dropped about two meters due to the quake,” he told us, “you’ll see it when the tide comes in this afternoon – the concrete area gets covered in sea water.”
Indeed, later on we saw just that. Here’s the harbor landing area at a bit past noon, during our break:
And here it is just before we quit work for the day:
The man looked at his watch and decided it was time for him to get back to work. He bid us farewell. “Thanks again. Really, if it wasn’t for the volunteers, I doubt we’d be able to make it at all. The prefectural and town governments are all overwhelmed as it is, and who knows when or even if the central government will get around to doing something about this mess. If we make it through this year in Higashihama, it’s because of the volunteers.”
I certainly hope they make it. But even with the volunteers’ help, the future is anything but bright for folks in communities like this. An entire village will try to make a living – somehow – on what will probably be less than half of the total harvest of oysters it had managed in years past.
At 3:30 we called it quits and dragged our sun-burnt, salt-caked selves onto the bus. Later that evening, Atsuki drove us in his van to “Futago-no-yū,” a hot spring bath located at a highway service area about 30 minutes drive from Watanohaus. After a long day in the hot sun, the bath felt great. We picked up food for tomorrow and plenty of beer for the night on our way home, and returned to a feast prepared for us by Koji.
At midnight, it was lights out. Despite the flies and the fact that I had only a thin, woven mat to sleep on (I could have used one of the many sleeping bags left at the house, but it was so hot that I didn’t even consider doing so), I slept better than I can remember doing in a long time.
Day Two (July 28), Aikawa:
The assignment for today was to head out to a small village in Aikawa – a bit further away on the Oshika Peninsula than Higashihama – and begin cleaning sludge and mud out of a stream that feeds into the ocean. This work was important for the local industry, which was cultivating wakame seaweed, a staple of Japanese cuisine. The mud and sludge had been deposited in the stream when the tsunami sent a torrent of water blasting up it in the opposite direction of the normal current. This stuff contained heavy oil and other pollutants that would continue to leach into the bay as long as it remained in the stream, thus ruining the seaweed. Our job was to bag up as much of the stuff as we could and haul it up and out of the riverbed to a big pile of sludge-filled bags deposited by earlier crews of volunteers.
This was heavy work, using shovels and pick axes. As we dug into the mud, we found more than just sand, mud, and rocks – although there was plenty of that, too. Bits of insulation material were everywhere, suggesting the remnants of a house. Soon we began to find even bigger chunks of it: pieces of lumber, sections of beams, even an electric cord that had once been attached to the ceiling light fixture of someone’s living room. Every so often, other signs of domestic life surfaced: I dug two waterlogged dictionaries and a high school math textbook out of the sediment, before uncovering the same kind of New Year’s card file that Takumi had found the other day. We set this aside with the other personal effects, all of which would eventually end up at a local lost-and-found facility.
We dug on, bagging dirt as we did, but with the amount of house parts, books, and other signs of domestic life we were finding, it felt more like an archeological dig than a clean-up project. I think it was either Don or Atsuki who put the growing sense of uneasiness I was feeling into words as we shoveled: “God, I sure hope there isn’t a body under here.”
It was a hot and humid day, just like the day before, so our JEN supervisor, Endo-san, made us take frequent breaks to rehydrate. I took advantage of these times to walk around and observe what the tsunami had done to this village. The wave must have been enormous. The local elementary school, a three-story building standing about 200 meters inland and maybe 10 meters high than the shore, showed signs of damage up to the top floor.
The village lay in a narrow valley, at the bottom of which ran the stream we were working to clear. Endo-san told me that this geography acted to amplify the height of the wave as it came ashore. The tsunami followed the course of the stream upward, reaching about 3km inland in spite of the rise in height of the land from the shore as one moved upstream.
This torrent not only carried mud and sludge, but also debris from the buildings further down stream. Much like the case with the roads in Ishinomaki, here too the torrent deposited much of the debris to the sides – with the exception of the stuff that ended up buried in the mud left with the water pulled back.
For the most part, it was difficult to tell what most of the rubble had been prior to being pulverized. Every so often, though, something recognizable would catch the eye.
We took lunch at a point far enough upstream that there were no signs of rubble or sludge. This must have been a beautiful place prior to March 11 – here it still was. After a bit of camaraderie – including a watermelon-splitting contest (think piñata, only with a watermelon on the ground) – we went back to work. The afternoon heat was even less forgiving, though, so by 3pm Endo-san called it a day. We hauled the last of our sludge sacks to the ever-growing pile, got on the bus, and headed home.
In all, it felt like we had barely made a dent in the little patch of mud had been working on. Endo-san told me that local residents and future dispatches of JEN volunteers would eventually take care of it. True, perhaps, but this was just one small piece of wreckage. The road back contained plenty of scenes of ruin that apparently had yet to be touched.
Day Three (July 29), Watanoha:
The next morning we got a later start than usual. Today, we’d be working right in the neighborhood, cleaning out the rain ducts along a section of road in Watanoha, further south (and closer to the ocean) than the area in which Watanohaus stood.
I should probably explain what a “rain duct” is. If you’ve ever been to a Japanese city, there’s a very good chance you have walked right on top of one, whether you noted the fact or not. Called sokō in Japanese, these trenches function as storm drains. Instead of laying sewer pipes underneath the road and placing large openings at intervals on the side of the road that allow rain water to empty into them, the Japanese approach is to construct fairly shallow concrete gutters on either side of the road. There are covered with rectangular concrete slabs that have a small indentation at one end, so that when a line of them is put in place on top of a rain duct there are small holes every 50cm or so through which rainwater drains into the duct below. The roads are constructed to be slightly higher in the middle than at the sides, so that the water will run off into these gutters. This makes it possible to keep the street clear of standing water, while at the same time maximizing the usable road surface – important considerations in a country where it rains a lot and space is at a premium.
But they only work if they are clear of obstruction. Fortunately, the design also allows for fairly easy maintenance: all you need to do is remove the slabs, and you have immediate access to the gutter below. The slabs are heavy, but there’s a fairly simple tool for lifting them.
When we did, we found that the gutters below on this section of road were packed solid with sludge, called hedoro or odei in Japanese. This stuff is a mixture of what the tsunami brought ashore from the bottom of the sea, plus whatever it then picked up along the way to its final point of deposit. The stuff we had to shovel out had the consistency of hard clay, after lying in these ducts for over four months. Even though the ducts in his part of town were only a bit over a foot deep, that was still a lot of heavy lifting.
The consistency alone would have been bad enough, but the hedoro we encountered on this stretch of road contained a lot of debris that made it hard to get a shovel blade into it. Broken glass was common enough, but there were also miscellaneous pieces of metal, like those pictured below, which prevented easy shoveling.
These were probably from some sort of factory closer to the coast, and must have washed into the duct at points where the slabs were missing or got carried off by the tsunami. Sometimes, the size of the stuff we pulled out of these ducts was astounding.
That’s a steel beam, roughly five feet in length. How the hell this got into the gutter is hard to figure. In addition to these items, we also pulled packs of cigarettes, a hot plate, an electric drill, and lots of other everyday items out of the sludge. Don told me of a volunteer he had heard about who once found a roll of ten-thousand yen bills in a gutter like this, totaling three million yen (roughly $38,000). JEN turned it over to municipal authorities, but with no name or address attached, it is highly unlikely that the rightful owner will be found. The rumor is that money like this will end up going to fund reconstruction projects in Ishinomaki.
After about three hours of work, we had cleared our assigned section of ducts, brushed them out, and replaced the slabs on top of them. Throughout the job, we had the help of Ueshima-san, whose house stood along the section of road we were working. He had called the city to see if they could clear the rain ducts on his road, since it was flooding every time it rained; they turned the project over to JEN.
Ueshima-san told me that the water reached almost two meters here. His house had been heavily damaged, but he was determined to stay here. As we spoke, I could here the sounds of a buzz saw and hammers pounding inside his house, attesting to his determination. Still, this is an area that may end up being ruled off-limits for residential use in the future – the ruling on that will be up to the prefectural and central governments, and is not expected anytime soon. I wondered what would happen if the authorities decide that people have to leave this part of Watanoha. Across the street stood a row of public housing projects. The first and second floors were obviously damaged and empty, but people were living on the third and above. Here and there crews seemed to be at work repairing the lower floors. I hoped this meant that the verdict would be in favor of allowing people to stay, but Ueshima-san said this alone was no reason to be overly optimistic: different bureaucracies have different agendas. On the one hand, the city is desperately trying to get people to leave the evacuation shelters, but finding it hard to convince them to move into temporary housing far away from their neighborhoods. Restoring these apartments will at least give their original residents a place to leave the shelters for. What happened months or years down the road after they moved back in, however, was another matter for another bureaucracy to decide.
Ueshima-san wasn’t the only “local” we came into contact with while working in the area, although he was the only one who worked along side of us. Others, mostly women from the housing project, came over to give us things to eat and drink. One gave us a big plastic bag bursting with convenience store bread and sandwiches – more than the whole crew could possibly eat. Later on, as we cleared ducts on a different street a few blocks away, another woman came by on a bicycle to give us each a fresh tenugui towel to wipe our sweat away with. Yamanaka-san, our JEN supervisor for the day, told me that this was common. In most cases, the stuff we received was stuff that these women themselves had received from the city as disaster relief rations. It was more than they could use. As if to prove his point, at that moment a large truck pulled up and unloaded a stack of boxes in front of one of the apartment building to a group of waiting residents.
Be that as it may, we were surprised and touched by these gestures. “You’re working really hard! Thanks a lot!” Even if they had suspected us of coming in part to gawk at their misfortune, they didn’t seem to hold it against us.
By quitting time we had cleared the rain ducts on two separate sections of road, producing over 150 bags of sludge in the process, which we piled by the sides of the road for eventual collection by the city. Still, just like with the work we had done in the stream the day before, it felt like we had barely made a dent in the work remaining to be done: we had cleared a mere 75 meters or so of rain duct; in Watanoha alone there are probably over a hundred kilometers of such gutters. In all of Ishinomaki, or the affected areas in Miyagi? Who could even say?
A few days later, when I was walking around the city, I saw a poster that I wish I had had a camera to take a picture of. It was a small announcement for a “Volunteer Counseling Center.” According the text, volunteers had a tendency to start to feel overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the destruction and of the work that always remained to be done, no matter how long or hard one worked in the city. This was especially true of volunteers who knew the city well prior to the tsunami. The poster gave a number for volunteers who were feeling depressed to call. I could see how things could come to that. I had to admire the staff of JEN; guys like Endo and Yamanaka were “locals,” after all.
Fellowship
Although you could easily get overwhelmed by the amount of work that remained to be done if you chose to dwell upon it, for me so far, volunteering had its rewards. One of these was the gratitude that people in the communities we worked always showed us. I did not expect it, nor would I have been dismayed if people just ignored us, as some did. For the most part, though, when local residents pass a group of volunteers hard at work, they greet them with at least a “gokuro-sama desu”: “thanks for your help.” And this in spite of the fact that volunteers are by no means a rare sight in Ishinomaki. On any given day that we were out in the streets of the city, we would see members of other organizations heading to other locations to do pretty much the same kinds of things we were doing with JEN. (Other groups, like Peace Boat Japan, had their volunteers wear brightly colored mesh vests with the group’s name on the back. JEN was no frills, but with the humidity what it was, I was happy not to have to wear any more clothing than I had on already.) Similarly, it seems like you can’t travel on the roads of the city without finding yourself behind a pickup, van, or dump truck with out-of-prefecture plates. These are just anecdotal evidence of the amount of people who are here to contribute their labor power on a daily basis. The citizens of the city seem to take it in stride.
An even greater reward, though, was the sense of fellowship and solidarity that I felt with my fellow volunteers during these first few days. It would not be wrong to say that it grew over time, but it might be a bit misleading; to say that it “grew,” after all, implies that the feeling wasn’t really there from the start. Even before my first day on the job at Higashihama, though, I already felt perfectly at home with the group I had joined. The beers and conversation the first night helped foster this, of course, but I doubt I would have felt the same sense of belonging after sharing a few beers and conversation with any other random group of strangers. What brought us together was a sense of common purpose, as well as a feeling of sharing in the experience of it together.
In some respects this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Take a bunch of people with nothing necessarily in common and put them together, and it will take them some time to figured out who that have common points of interest with, or if they even want to bother trying to figure that out. But volunteers aren’t like that; the reason for their gathering in the first place is the common point of interest. That first evening we talked a little bit about what we did in our “normal” lives, but not much. Mostly, we talked about the tsunami, and listened to those who had been on the job awhile already tell us about what they had seen and done. In some cases, this was a conversation carried on in a mix of languages, since the folks involved didn’t share a complete fluency in either of their native tongues. It didn’t seem to matter much. Nor did it matter when someone joined the group; there was no sense of a hierarchy, based on experience, seniority, or any other criteria. Everyone got along, and was willing to share whatever they had, and to buy more than they needed to bring back to Watanohaus, so that communal cache of food, drink, and supplies would always be full enough for everyone.
This might have something to do with the kind of mutual aid and altruism that Rebecca Solnit observes in the aftermath of disaster. In a certain sense, the condition of being a volunteer, especially in the aftermath of a disaster, is very much like the emergency situations that Solnit examines: it represents a similar kind of suspension of our normal conditions of life that people in the midst of a disaster or emergency face. The difference, of course, is that the volunteer can leave and thus return to their normal situation whenever they want, but when I talked to JEN staff like Endo and Yamanaka about it, they couldn’t recall any volunteers who left early because they couldn’t hack it. If anything, they saw the opposite: people came back again and again, to the point that there were unexpected scenes of reunion at the house.
Whether this kind of mutual aid took place in the shelters I couldn’t say, but I had not expected to find it among people who were not actually victims of any disaster.
After finishing the day’s work of cleaning out rain ducts, I left the group at Watanohaus for a business hotel in the center of the city. Tomorrow I would attend the funeral for Takumi’s family, so I figured a good night’s sleep and a shower in the morning, before putting on my suit and catching a cab, would be much easier to manage at a hotel than at Watanohaus. It was a momentary return to normalcy, but I found that I wasn’t really looking forward to going back just yet.