Watanoha and Onagawa: examples of destruction

Let me start with JEN’s home turf:

Watanoha

Shortly before midnight on my second night at Watanohaus, the idea of taking a walk around the area struck me.  I have a thing about talking walks at night, so I decided to act upon the urge right away.  As I walked south toward the coast, I soon entered an unnerving nocturnal landscape.  Less than 250 meters south of the house, one enters a part of the neighborhood where electricity has yet to be restored to traffic signals (actually a continuing problem in many parts of Ishinomaki – the salt water seems to have destroyed the circuitry of the signal switches) and street lamps.  These are areas like that in which Ueshima-san lives.  Many building still show signs of heavy damage to their first floors – shattered windows and even external walls torn away – but here and there I saw lights on in second floor windows and cars parked in front; suggesting that, like Ueshima-san, these homeowners had come back to stake their claim.

Not much further south than this, however, the water reached heights that rendered the structures still remaining unfit for even partial habitation.  There is no artificial light here at night.  As I walked through streets lined with gutted homes, even the high-powered flashlight I brought along was of little comfort.  Its beam illuminated the exposed insides in a harsh light, making the bare supports, fixtures, and scattered objects left inside stand out in eerie relief.  I was heading directly toward Watanoha Middle School, I felt, where Takumi had rode out the tsunami. Now, just recalling his description of what he saw in the immediate aftermath sent chills up my spine.  I consider myself fairly skeptical when it comes to stories of the paranormal, but if ghosts exist they would have every reason to haunt such a landscape.

Abandoning the quest to make it to Watanoha Middle School at night, I beat a hasty retreat to Watanohaus.

August 2^nd was a Tuesday – a day of rest at JEN – so I took the time off to tour Watanoha at a more reasonable hour, and with the aid of the JEN bicycle.  As it turned out, I was a bit off in my nighttime route.  Completing the same intended path on the bike did not bring me to the front of the school, but instead to this:

This is the Great Watanoha Rubble Pile, or at least it might as well be called such.  It is one of several in Ishinomaki.  All of these piles were constructed by the self-Defense Forces in their efforts to clear as much of the rubble as rapidly as possible.  It is hard to get a sense of just how enormous this is from a photo.  It was at least four stories high, and had been built in such a way that dump trucks loaded with freshly gathered rubble could drive up to the top on a path that zigzagged across the face of the pile to drop their cargo at the summit.   Takumi told me that you can sometimes see smoke rising from these piles, indicating that some sort of spontaneous combustion is going on deep within.

About a hundred meters east, I came upon Watanoha Middle School.

The building seemed to be in surprisingly good shape for a place that was so close to the ocean.  Perhaps the tall trees standing between the building and the shore acted as a kind of wave break, absorbing some of the initial impact of the first wall of water to make landfall.

According to Takumi’s story, it should be possible to get to the ocean by walking past the school building to the other side, but there were work crews and guys with helmets and bright orange batons setting up a work perimeter in front of the school, so I decided to move on and get to the water’s edge by a different route.

A little ways along, I took a right turn, past the remnants of some sort of warehouse for marine products.  The warehouse had been gutted by the wave, and anything left inside had since been cleared by clean-up crews, but the stench of rotting fish was still quite powerful.

A little bit beyond this, I entered a neighborhood of one-family homes that stood on the opposite side of an 8 to 10 meter high sea wall that had ultimately failed to protect Watanoha.  A few wrecking crews were at work here and there, taking down what was left of the houses.  I climbed atop the protective wall and surveyed the neighborhood:

Considering that the high water mark in this area was over the roofs of these houses, I was actually impressed by how well the structures that were still standing seemed to have weathered it.  Some still even seemed to have second floor windows intact.  This presented another mystery, especially since – as we’ll see in a bit – parts of Watanoha further from the coast than this, where the water level was lower, seemed to have suffered more in the way of broken windows and the like.  Perhaps the difference lies in the fact that areas right by the sea, like this neighborhood, didn’t face the kind of blasting by rubble borne on the rushing current that those further inland did.  Thinking of this, I recalled a story I had seen on NHK a couple months back (“News Watch 9,” aired via satellite on June 9, 2011).  Autopsies on tsunami victims reveled that most had suffered blunt force trauma to the chest and abdomen, most likely caused by the tons of heavy debris propelled as speeds close to the 20km/h (or 6 meters per second) at which the water rushed in.  Buildings further inland would have been assailed by the same torrent of debris – as well as contributing to it as they succumbed.

Touring what was left of the neighborhood, I noticed that some of the homes that were left bore the following notice, posted prominently on a front door or wall:

The text reads:

“To the Owner of this House:

We are currently conducting a search for missing persons.  This building has become a hindrance to that search.

As we would like to discuss this matter, the owner should contact us at the number below.

Ishinomaki City Hall, Residential Environment Bureau, Environmental Department”

The notice is not dated, but I assume that the fact that such structures were still standing, in spite of being a “hindrance,” indicates that either the owners had yet to contact the city, or else the matter of what to do about their homes was still being debated.  Even in this neighborhood, just meters from the ocean, residents might be resisting governmental efforts to take their homes, even those as thoroughly damaged as these were.

I got back on the JEN bicycle and headed west back along the coast, past the school and the Great Watanoha Pile, then turned north, crossing over a main road through the area into a residential neighborhood about 100 meters from the shore.  The following video is shot starting from this point, heading north from there on the bike into areas where the signs of damage at last start to abate – sorry as always for the shakiness of the image:

The video stops at a point where the water level probably reached about 1.5 meters, judging from some of the water marks I observed on buildings in the area later, when JEN brought us there to clean more rain ducts.  At a meter and a half, it still did plenty of damage to the first floor, but a recent government survey of towns hit by the tsunami concluded that in areas that took on less than two meters of water, the chances of buildings surviving with enough structural integrity to be repaired increased markedly.  In areas that took on two meters and above, on the other hand, most residential structures didn’t fair well enough to be worth saving.

Rumors of lawlessness

The southern part of Watanoha is still a creepy place to be at night, but even then, it is by no means a dangerous place.  This was apparently not the case during the first weeks following the tsunami.  With the local authorities and prefectural police overwhelmed, whatever police force that remained in the city was stretched too thin to patrol areas like Watanoha effectively.  The Self-Defense Forces were involved in search-and-rescue and debris clearing, but apparently were not empowered to take on the functions of civilian law enforcement.  In any case, since SDF troops could not work at what they were tasked to do in the dark, the area at night was left without any organized presence whatsoever to give even the sense of surveillance.

This is where things got dicey.  I heard from long-term volunteers like Yama-chan (about whom I’ll have much more to say in a future post), as well as from some of the residents of Watanoha that I talked to that gangs descended on the area and, usually under the cover of darkness, ransacked damaged homes in search of valuables, or else carted away automobiles that had only been partially damaged in the tsunami.  Most said that these were Chinese gangs.  Some stories attributed truly reprehensible behavior to them. I heard stories of Japanese residents being stabbed when they tried to protect what was left of their homes from pillage.  There were even rumors that Chinese gangs had cut the fingers off of dead bodies they found in the rubble in order to steal diamond rings and wedding bands.

As with all rumors in a time of crisis, it was hard to know what to believe in the absence of corroborating evidence.  Questions abounded: If the criminals in these gangs were indeed all Chinese, where did they come from, how did they get here, and where did they go during the day?  What happened to the cars and other things they stole?  Were they sold off through networks in Japan, or did mysterious ships appear off the coast of Watanoha to carry this booty back to China?  Could it be possible that these gangs were partially or even mostly Japanese, rather than Chinese?  Where were Japanese organized crime gangs in all of this?  In Kobe after the Great Hanshin earthquake, yakuza syndicates such as the Yamaguchi-gumi actually assumed some of the functions of maintaining public order for a time.  Were there no local yakuza gangs in Ishinomaki interested in doing so and attaining local hero status in the process?  Had the tsunami wiped them out?  Or were they more interested in the profits that could be made through plunder?

No one seemed to have answers to questions like these, but almost everyone seemed willing to assume the worst about the Chinese.  Of the folks I talked to about it in Ishinomaki, only Takumi seemed suspicious of these stories.  He had heard the rumors, of course, but felt that even if some of the thieves were Chinese, they would need a lot of local support in order to know where to go and how to smuggle things out of the city.  Chances were high that plenty of Japanese were involved, too.

Yama-chan related a strange personal anecdote from the time.  Soon after he began staying at Watanohaus, in May, some local residents approach him about forming a civilian police squad – which they called a jikeidan in Japanese – to clamp down on rampant theft, again presumably by Chinese gangs.  (Why they turned to him is hard to figure – he never struck me as the fighting kind – nor did he explain what their rationale for approaching him might have been.)  Yama-chan had a better idea: rather than confronting the Chinese gangs themselves and run the risk of getting knifed or maybe even shot, the residents should cut a deal with one of the gangs.   Get in contact with the members of one that seemed fairly active in the area, and promise them a selection of nice cars and other stuff, in return for keeping other gangs out of what would be recognized as their “turf.”

Nothing ever came of this proposal, apparently, nor did the residents of Watanoha ever form their own jikeidan, with or without Yama-chan’s help.  This is all for the best, of course: the combination of rumors and jikeidan led to horrific instances of bloodletting in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923.  Then, it was Koreans rather than Chinese who were rumored to be causing trouble, although many Chinese (and even some Japanese), along with thousands of Koreans, were attacked and murdered by jikeidan that had been empowered by the police to do what they saw fit to in order to maintain law and order.

Whatever might have happened in the days and weeks following the tsunami in Watanoha, the area was now firmly under control of the authorities.  As in the rest of Ishinomaki, the police are ubiquitous.  Some of the reason for this is due to the fact that traffic lights are still not working, requiring cops to direct traffic at intersections throughout the city all day long.  But as we made our way around the city, we saw plenty of patrol cars making the rounds as well.

The police force in Ishinomaki, and perhaps in other towns hit as heavily by the tsunami, is like none other in Japan, in that it is interregional.  Although the police in Japan are much more centralized than in the United States, organizationally each prefecture has its own force – with the exception of Tokyo, which is policed by cops attached directly to the National Police Agency, to which all the prefectural forces are connected.  Under normal circumstances if you were in a town like Ishinomaki, the only patrol cars you would see would have “Miyagi Prefectural Police” printed on the sides and rear.  These days, however, the increased policing duties, along with the fact that much of the town’s police equipment and probably even many of its officers were lost in the tsunami, has led to the curious sight of patrol cars from as far away as Fukuoka (in Kyushu) patrolling the streets of Ishinomaki.

Another change I noted.  Despite the rumors of Chinese thievery, there seemed to be very little suspicion directed at non-Asian foreigners in Ishinomaki, at last as far as I could tell.  Everyone just seemed to figure that folks like me were volunteers, no matter what we did or how suspicious we figured it must look to passers-by.  I noticed this first as I stood in front of a house, taking pictures of objects left inside, when a patrol car from Fukui passed behind me.  To my surprise, they didn’t even slow down or look at me.  Even in Tokyo, I have been asked any number of times to get off my bicycle and read out the registration number, so they could call it in and check if the bike actually belonged to me.   But in Ishinomaki, the cops didn’t even blink, no matter where they were from; my reasons for being there were apparently obvious enough.

Onagawa

Even Watanoha couldn’t prepare me for the devastation I saw in Onagawa.  If the tsunami battered Watanoha, in Onagawa the waves tried to wipe the town clean off the map.

Onagawa lies on the opposite side of the Oshika Peninsula from Ishinomaki, the side that faces east, out into the boundless Pacific Ocean.  This part of the coast was one of the earliest points at which the wave made landfall, owing to its proximity to the epicenter of the quake.  Prior to March 11, Onagawa had been a lively fishing port, but you would barely know it to see it today.

Like Aikawa, Onagawa lies in a narrow valley – actually a confluence of three valleys – that come together at the coast.  Surrounded by high foothills, this geography amplified the height of the wave as it came ashore.  Here’s a picture of a relief map that I found at the temporary city hall (the regular one was completely destroyed by the tsunami), showing the extent of the inundation.

The ocean at its normal extent is the green area; the extent of tsunami inundation is blue.

Yama-chan drove me out to Onagawa on a rainy day because he had some business to discuss with the city government and I asked to go along for the ride.  As we drove into the town from the west (the valley that appears at the top of the photo, above) we saw signs of damage long before the ocean came into sight.  Then we descended into the town proper.  Nothing I had seen up to this point prepared me for this.  The constant misty drizzle gave the scenery a particularly ponderous feel, but given what I was seeing, the brooding gray sky seemed to fit the landscape perfectly.   In Watanoha, the remains of houses still stood.  In Onagawa, only the largest structures remained, and some were not even upright.

We turned off the road we came into town on and headed up a steep road to the city hospital.  This had a commanding view of the port below, but even here, at this height, the water flooded the first floor.  Yama-chan figured that we were about 30 meters higher than the shore.  That may be a bit of an overestimate, but I was willing to buy it, just looking at the scenery below us.  I felt physically ill trying to imagine all of the space below me, space that was once filled with a vibrant town, filled like a tub with seething, black water.  The water would have been over my head even where I was standing, so far above it all.  Here’s what I was looking at:

We got back in the car and drove on the temporary city hall.  This required descending again and driving through the void I had just shot.  Our tiny, 500cc engine pickup passed in front of the building lying on its side in front of the harbor on the same road that dump trucks six times our size did in the video.  “The interesting thing about Onagawa,” Yama-chan began suddenly,” is that there are almost no volunteers here.  You know why?”  I confessed I didn’t – if there was any place in Japan that looked like it needed help, it was here.

Yama-chan nodded as he lit another cigarette. “Nothing for them to do.  The buildings that are left will all have to go, but that’s work for the demolition crews.  After that, this whole area will probably be off limits for residential and most commercial use.  That’s the whole town – just gone.  I hear that there’s a plan to level off parts of the mountains around here and build residential and commercial areas there, but will that be the same Onagawa?”

Not as far as I could imagine.  Although I had never been here before, and the town that was once here was now less than a skeleton of its former self, I had to believe that the situation of being sandwiched between the sea and the steep hills was a condition that had served to define life in Onagawa.

We climbed another steep hill and arrived at the prefab building that now housed city hall.  We entered and Yama-chan asked for the whereabouts of the person he had an appointment with.  He told me he might be a while, gave me the keys to the truck, and then – paradoxically – told me not to drive it anywhere.  As he left I turned to ask the same greeter where the men’s room was.  It was then that I noticed he was wearing a vest – the same kind of mesh vest that some of the volunteer groups wear – on the front and back of which was a label that said “Gunma Prefecture.”  Gunma wasn’t hit by the tsunami, and is nowhere near Onagawa.

“You’re from Gunma?”  I asked.

“Yes,” he said, and then, a bit surprised, “You know it?”

I told him I’d been there a few times, and I had friends there.  My real question, though, was why he was here, in the prefab city hall of a devastated town, greeting people, handing out forms, and telling them where to get what they needed.

“Onagawa lost a lot of city hall employees in he tsunami – about a quarter or more of the regular staff.  We were sent here as substitutes because we know the job – you might say we’re on loan.”  He chuckled, and I asked him why he used he term “we.”  He pointed to another man across the room, wearing a vest of a different color but with a label I couldn’t make out at this distance on his back.  “See him?  He’s here from Kyoto Prefecture – also ‘on loan’.”  There were a few others as well, all from different prefectures.

All of these people had volunteered. They received their usual salaries, plus a bit extra, for helping out.  I asked him why him decided to do this.  “I know this job – city halls operate about the same way anywhere in Japan.  This was a chance for me to do something to help.”

I felt kind of silly asking him to direct me to the men’s room after that.

Taking care of my own business, I left the city hall and headed up a steep incline toward what was labeled as an athletic ground.  What I found was an Olympic size track and large gymnasium, with a sign identifying it as a shelter.  I walked to the front of it, but in the pissing rain no one was outside to talk to, nor did I feel it would be appropriate to barge in uninvited – this was now their home, after all.

Back at city hall, Yama-chan finally concluded his business.  We got back in the truck and descended, taking a different route into what had been the center of Onagawa.  Here we are, traversing the remains of the town from one valley, through the center, and then out the way we had come in.  This is where the SDF and the private demolition crews had decided to dump all of the debris from the clean up of the town proper.  None of these mountains is as tall as the Great Watanoha Pile, but the number and variety were impressive.

The rest of what happened that day is a different story for a different subject heading.  Yama-chan had shown me plenty.  What I wanted to know was how many people in Onagawa had managed to escape, and how.  What I wanted was a hot bath and a beer, something that I’m sure many in the aftermath had wanted even more.

Yama-chan lit another cig, and assured me we’d get our bath in later.  “But if you want to see something really frightening,” he added, “you should see Rikuzen Takata, in Iwate Precture – nothing left.  Even less than here.”

That was hard to imagine.