{"id":112,"date":"2021-08-23T18:52:49","date_gmt":"2021-08-23T18:52:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/the-accidental-refuge-an-interview-with-mr-eiichi-kato-part-1\/"},"modified":"2021-08-23T20:21:57","modified_gmt":"2021-08-23T20:21:57","slug":"the-accidental-refuge-an-interview-with-mr-eiichi-kato-part-1","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/migrated-posts\/the-accidental-refuge-an-interview-with-mr-eiichi-kato-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"The Accidental Refuge: an Interview with Mr. Eiichi Kat\u014d (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The place where I was to stay the night was called the Hotel B\u014dy\u014d.\u00a0 \u201cB\u014dy\u014d\u201d is not exactly a common term in Japanese, and when I reached the top of the incline where it stood, the sign over the entrance \u2013 \u201cHotel B\u014dy\u014d,\u201d spelled out in the roman alphabet rather than in katana<\/em> and Chinese characters \u2013 gave me no clue as to its meaning. \u00a0\u00a0Looking up at the structure, though, I could see that it was a much larger place than I had imagined.\u00a0 Even without counting, it was clearly at least five floors high.<\/div>\n
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I checked in and was informed by the clerk at the front desk that Mr. Eiichi Kat\u014d, proprietor and CEO of the hotel, had an engagement that made it impossible for him to meet me that evening, but we would be able to talk the next morning at 9am.\u00a0 He also gave me something from Kat\u014d-san \u2013 an English translation of an article published by the \u201cFire Equipment and Safety Center of Japan\u201d in the May 2012 issue of their journal, baring the title \u201cRoad to tourism recovery still unclear, Hotel wants to support recovery efforts.\u201d\u00a0 This was a summary of an interview with Kat\u014d-san himself.\u00a0 So now I had a place to stay (with another hot spring bath in it, no less!), an interview, and materials to work from in formulating my questions for Kat\u014d-san.\u00a0 In my line of work, it doesn\u2019t get much better than this.<\/p>\n

While I was checking in, I also caught a glimpse of the Chinese characters for \u201cB\u014dy\u014d\u201d \u2013 \u671b\u6d0b.\u00a0 To translate the name of the establishment into something analogous in English, I was staying at the \u201cHotel Grand Vista,\u201d or the characters could also be interpreted as \u201cHotel Ocean View.\u201d\u00a0 Thinking back to the steep road I took up to this place, I figured that during the day, and even at night in better times, either would have been a very apt name for the place.\u00a0 The harbor had to be right out there, in front of the entrance, below the hill I had just climbed.\u00a0 At night, however, everything below disappeared into the same abyss of darkness I had seen from the other hotel I had just left with POJ.<\/p>\n

The place looked even larger from the inside, and had a very nostalgic \u201cSh\u014dwa\u201d atmosphere to it.\u00a0 My room was as traditional as it was large (especially in comparison to the walk-in closet sized room I had spent the past ten days in at a suburban Tokyo business hotel) \u2013 a full eight tatami mats, complete with a low table and futon laid out in the middle of it, plus a small sitting room along the outside window.\u00a0 The room reminded me of places I had stayed in years ago during one of my early extended stays in Japan, when I used to take trips up to onsen<\/em> towns in Akita and Yamagata.\u00a0 I had the momentary, uncanny impression that I had slipped back in time to those days.\u00a0 After a night on a bus and a day in the sun, I felt I deserved another leisurely soak in a hot spring bath, followed by a good read (Kat\u014d-san\u2019s article), and a good night\u2019s sleep.<\/p>\n

The Jazz Fanatic<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Mr. Eiichi Kat\u014d, in front of his establishment<\/em><\/p>\n

Kat\u014d-san meets me in the lobby the next morning at nine.\u00a0 He is a very youthful 56, with a kind of gregarious nature that seems to radiate from him within the first few minutes of conversation.<\/p>\n

\u201cKonuma-kun tells me that you\u2019re a bit of a jazz fan,\u201d I say as we sit down across from each other at one of the coffee tables in the lobby.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot just \u2018a bit\u2019 of a fan,\u201d he clarifies.\u00a0 \u201cMore like a die-hard fanatic.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his twenties, Kat\u014d-san spent two years learning English at the University of Oregon, after which he pursued his dream of visiting some of the greatest jazz clubs across the US, with extended stays in New Orleans and New York in particular.\u00a0 He once had a collection of roughly 1,700 jazz albums on vinyl and CD.\u00a0 Almost all of it was washed away by the tsunami.<\/p>\n

\u201cExcept for one,\u201d he tells me, as he rises swiftly and hurries off into a section of the lobby behind a partition.\u00a0 He returns shortly with an LP jacket in his hand.\u00a0 It is a recording of the Waseda University Jazz Band \u2013 one of the best university jazz groups in Japan.\u00a0 The record inside appears to have warped under intense heat. The album cover, too, has taken a beating.\u00a0 But the cover art is still clear, as is a handwritten dedication and autograph, \u201cto Mr. Eiichi Kat\u014d,\u201d scrawled in marker on the front.\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s how I knew this belonged to me,\u201d he says (as if there would be numerous copies of this particular jazz album circulating in Kesennuma).\u00a0 \u201c I got this years ago from the producer of the album, who signed it for me.\u00a0 I found this when I went back to the site of our house to see if anything was left.\u00a0 It was lying in a pile of debris about 300 meters from where the house had stood \u2013 it\u2019s the only one I ever found.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of the LPs I brought back from America.\u00a0 Some I sent by surface mail; others I just packaged up and carried on my back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Being old enough to remember vinyl LPs \u2013 and how heavy a substantial stack of wax could be \u2013 I had to admire his dedication.<\/p>\n

Kat\u014d-san may have lost his record collection in the tsunami, but it did not rob him of his English ability.\u00a0 Although we speak mostly in Japanese, he shifts seamlessly from Japanese into English at certain points \u2013 even for just a word or phrase, sometimes for a whole paragraph \u2013 without interrupting the flow of his narrative.<\/p>\n

3\/11\/11 \u2013 The Black Wall, The Burning Sea<\/strong><\/p>\n

After reading the English translation he left for me the night before, I realized that I would be asking Kat\u014d-san to repeat many of the details described in it.\u00a0 I apologize for this up front: that\u2019s just the way interviewing works, after all, and sometimes neglected details emerge in the course of subsequent retellings.\u00a0 He seems to have no problem with the idea of covering old ground once again.<\/p>\n

What follows in this installment and the next is mostly from my interview with Kat\u014d-san, plus a few details taken from the aforementioned \u201cFire Equipment and Safety Center of Japan\u201d article.\u00a0 I will also try to make it as clear as possible when I am adding my own interpretations of what might have happened, and why.<\/p>\n

We start at the most obvious point \u2013 \u201cthat day\u201d \u2013 shortly before the quake hit at 2:46pm.\u00a0 March is a slow month for tourist hotels in Kesennuma, since the area is still in the grip of winter.\u00a0 There were few guests anyway, because it was a Friday, and most of the guests from the previous night had already checked out.\u00a0 The only big reservation in the immediate future was for a group of 80 kids and coaches coming the following day for the weekend to take part in a soccer tournament.\u00a0 The hotel had laid in extra supplies of rice and other produce in preparation for this group \u2013 something that turned out to be fortuitous.\u00a0 But Kat\u014d-san had no way of knowing this at 2pm.\u00a0 The middle of the afternoon is a slow time of day in the hotel business, a period of relative peace between check-out and check-in.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san was taking advantage of it to get some work done in the office; his wife was down at the tax office, taking care of business for the upcoming filing deadline.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re from Kesennuma, you\u2019re pretty used to earthquakes.\u00a0 A level 3 or 4\u201d \u2013 on the Japanese scale, worthy of being considered a fairly strong quake almost anywhere else in Japan \u2013 \u201cis no big deal here.\u00a0 This area is like earthquake Mecca,\u201d he says with a chuckle.<\/p>\n

But the quake that hit at 2:46pm on March 11th<\/sup>, 2011, was different.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san knew it right away.\u00a0 It was stronger than any he had ever felt, and lasted much longer \u2013 he guesses as much as five minutes.\u00a0 Afraid that the forty-year old building might collapse on top of him and his staff, he ordered everyone outside.\u00a0 As the shaking subsided, one employee, who had been on one of the upper floors when the temblor struck, yelled from a window that water was pouring down the walls from the roof, where the quake had apparently damaged water supply pipes to the building.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san raced up to the machine room and tried to close the valves, but aftershocks almost as strong as the first quake rocked the building in rapid succession and convinced him that is was not safe to stay in the structure any longer.\u00a0 In any case, however, despite this water damage and many cracks in the walls, the Hotel B\u014dy\u014d remained reasonably sound.<\/p>\n

About ten minutes after the first quake subsided, the hotel\u2019s wireless receiver for the national disaster information system began to broadcast a \u201cmajor tsunami warning\u201d for the town.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san had heard tsunami warnings issued many times before, but this was the first \u201cmajor tsunami warning\u201d he could remember.\u00a0 Just the term for \u201cmajor tsunami\u201d in Japanese \u2013 \u014dtsunami<\/em> \u2013 conjured up images of enormously high, killer waves.\u00a0 The warning strongly urged people to seek higher ground immediately.<\/p>\n

Kat\u014d-san thought of his family.\u00a0 His wife was at the tax office, where she would no doubt hear the warning.\u00a0 One son was away at college in Chiba, the other at a high school in town that was probably high up enough on a hill to be out of harm\u2019s way.\u00a0 But his mother was probably still at the family home, in the neighborhood below, not far for the water\u2019s edge.<\/p>\n

As he drove down the hill, people from the neighborhood were just starting to climb the slope in the direction of the hotel.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san reached his home in the Shishiori neighborhood, but his mother was nowhere to be found.\u00a0 In fact, no one seemed to be around.\u00a0 Hoping that she had fled with some of their neighbors, he grabbed the family dog and headed back up the hill to his hotel.\u00a0 He recalls that there was surprisingly little damage to be seen at that point, despite the quake and aftershocks.\u00a0 Maybe a broken row of roof tiles here and there or a toppled cinder block wall along the side of the road, but nothing more than that.<\/p>\n

By this point, driving up the hill was a slower process than descending it had been, due to a steady stream of people climbing it to take refuge.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san navigated his way through the throng with one hand on the horn.\u00a0 He arrived at the parking spaces in front of the hotel to find a crowd of neighbors standing around, wondering what would happen next.\u00a0 His wife, Tomiko, returned from the tax office at around this point, somewhat unnerved by the quake and the tsunami warning but otherwise all right.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The harbor as seen from the front entrance of the hotel.\u00a0 The building to the right \u2013 a factory \u2013 was one of the few in the neighborhood below to survive the tsunami with some semblance of structural integrity.<\/em><\/p>\n

Then, cries of \u201ctsunami!\u201d began to cascade through the crowd.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san looked out at the harbor, and saw the water receding from it as if a giant plug had been pulled out of the bottom of the ocean.\u00a0 The support pylons of the wharf soon became visible \u2013 something which he had never seen, even at the lowest of low tides \u2013 and then even the concrete supports at the bases of these emerged from the water.\u00a0 Casting his gaze out farther into the Pacific, he could make out the white crest of a tall wave, approaching rapidly.\u00a0 This was something he had seen in previous tsunamis, but what he saw behind it was entirely new to him: a black wall, rising from the surface of the ocean, now towering above the white crest of the wave in front of it.\u00a0 The horizon disappeared.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hotel B\u014dy\u014d, as seen from a street in the devastated area below.<\/em><\/p>\n

The hotel stood about 15 meters above sea level and 100 or so from the edge of the harbor.\u00a0 Even so, the enormity and speed of the approaching black wall made Kat\u014d-san fear for their safety here.\u00a0 \u201cI told the people that we needed to get to higher ground.\u00a0 There were about 80 to 100 people in front of the hotel by that point, so I led them up the hill that stands right behind it.\u00a0 I figured we\u2019d be safe there.\u201d<\/p>\n

As it turned out, the waves never made it up as far as the road in front of his hotel, but they came within two meters of it.\u00a0 From the hilltop, they watched as wave after wave rushed across the neighborhoods below.\u00a0 At the same time, a cacophony of bizarre sounds reached their ears.\u00a0 The chains and ropes used to secure large fishing vessels to the wharf snapped like threads, with sharp, explosive pops, as the tsunami propelled the boats further inland.\u00a0 Ship\u2019s hulls collided with buildings, crushing them, or crashed and scraped against one another.\u00a0 The din was deafening.\u00a0 The sights were just as alarming.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san saw a 300-ton fishing vessel spinning helplessly in the current immediately over the neighborhood where his house had stood, as if it was a toy boat circling above the bathtub drain.<\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t recall how many waves rolled through, but after a while, they stopped.\u00a0 If the crashing, popping, and scraping sounds of the town coming apart in the tsunami had been frightening, the utter and completely lack of any sound at all in the aftermath was eerier still.\u00a0 No sound, no light, no motion; the town lay dead under several feet of water that had yet to recede.\u00a0 The sky grew dark with clouds and dusk.\u00a0 Then it started to snow.<\/p>\n

Shivering from the cold and the shock of what they saw around them, the survivors, led by Kat\u014d-san, descended from the hill and headed back toward the hotel entrance.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san recalls the curious sight of fishing boats floating in the water just beyond the road in front of his hotel, an area that had once been a precipitous drop-off to the neighborhood below.\u00a0 It was as if his hotel had suddenly become oceanfront property.<\/p>\n

Then the storage tanks at the oil refinery that stood across Kesennuma harbor to the east began to explode, as oil spilled in the quake and tsunami was ignited by sparks from high-voltage electric wires laid bare by the receding water.\u00a0 In all, about twenty large storage tanks blew, hurling flaming oil far and wide across the surface of the water and any debris floating in it.\u00a0 The conflagration started to drift across the harbor, and the smoke became hard to tolerate.\u00a0 At first, the survivors decided to climb back up the hill to get away from the smoke, but gave up on this idea when it became apparent that the children and elderly among them were beginning to suffer from hypothermia.\u00a0 Not knowing where else to go, Kat\u014d-san urged the refugees inside his hotel and led they up to a large, tatami-floored banquet hall on the second floor; at least there they wouldn\u2019t be terrorized by the sight of the flames moving ever closer to the hotel.<\/p>\n

As it turned out, the fire never reached the Hotel B\u014dy\u014d, although many of the neighborhoods below it \u2013 or what was left of them \u2013 burned.\u00a0 A prevailing wind out of the west saved the structure and the people inside.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san didn\u2019t realize it at the time, but the moment he opened the doors of his establishment and led the traumatized refugees up to the second floor banquet hall, the Hotel B\u014dy\u014d effectively became \u201chinanjo<\/em> B\u014dy\u014d.\u201d<\/p>\n

Birth of a Hinanjo<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The vast majority of places that became long-term shelters for people displaced by the disaster were public buildings: schools, municipal offices, and town gymnasiums were the most common sites.\u00a0 Most of these were also places that had been designated as evacuation shelters in the case of a disaster long before March 11th<\/sup>, 2011.\u00a0 The Hotel B\u014dy\u014d was neither of these; it became a shelter purely out of the necessity of the moment and the large-heartedness of its proprietor.\u00a0 I ask Kat\u014d-san up front how long the hotel provided a place to live for people displaced by the tsunami \u2013 when did the last refugees finally move out?<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, in a sense it is still a shelter, because my family and I are still living here,\u201d he gestures over toward the part of the lobby behind the partition, from where he had retrieved the only surviving LP from his collection earlier.\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s the Kat\u014d family\u2019s living quarters \u2013 until we find a place to build a new home.\u201d<\/p>\n

But aside from his immediate family, when did the last of the refugees leave, I ask.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe day before yesterday.\u201d\u00a0 The owner of the factory just below the hotel moved in during the immediate aftermath of the tsunami and stayed on, renting out the second floor for his home and for use as office space for his company after the rest of the people had left.\u00a0 \u201cTrue, he was renting the space from me, so it was a bit different than the typical hinanjo<\/em> situation, but it was the tsunami that made him end up here in the first place, and made this just about the only place he could rent within reasonable distance from where he was rebuilding his company.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the vast majority, though, their stay at hinanjo<\/em> B\u014dy\u014d was less than 70 days.<\/p>\n

That first night, Kat\u014d-san, his wife, and the Hotel B\u014dy\u014d staff distributed futons and blankets from the guest rooms to the 80 to 100 people in the second floor banquet hall.\u00a0 They also brought in kerosene heaters, which doubled as a source of warmth for groups of people to huddle around, and stoves on which the Kat\u014ds and their staff cooked some of the rice and other foods that the hotel had stocked up on in preparation for the kids\u2019 soccer teams that would obviously not be checking in tomorrow. \u00a0\u00a0This too they distributed to everyone.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san recalls how moved he felt to see people crying and thanking them for this.\u00a0 It was the only decent thing to do, and yet their gratitude was genuine.<\/p>\n

The night outside was pitch dark, with the exception of fires that continued to burn here and there on the debris below but offered no signs of life. \u00a0As far as they knew at this point, they were the only people in the immediate vicinity left alive by the tsunami.<\/p>\n

Except for one person: a dockworker who had been carried by the tsunami all the way to the slope leading up to the hotel after trying valiantly to save his coworkers.\u00a0 He showed up at the hotel entrance soaking wet and shivering violently.\u00a0 The Kat\u014ds removed his wet clothes, wrapped him in blankets, and laid him down in front of a kerosene heater among the others.<\/p>\n

Kat\u014d-san spent a sleepless night worrying about his mother and son, as strong aftershocks continued to rattle the building.\u00a0 The next morning he stepped out of the front door of the hotel to survey a hellish landscape below.\u00a0 Heaps of debris, some of it still smoldering, lay strewn across what had been the harbor side neighborhoods below.\u00a0 Here and there, hulking cargo ships and fishing vessels had come to rest within the debris field, on top of land that had once been covered with houses.\u00a0 Although the water had continued to recede over night, there were still areas completely covered by it to an unknown depth.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san realized that between the residual water, the fires, and the seemingly insurmountable debris everywhere, they were essentially cut off from the rest of the town.<\/p>\n

Still, they had it better than some.\u00a0 During the second day the workers for the factory directly below the hotel (the same factory whose owner would later rent out the second floor of the hotel), who had managed to ride out the tsunami on the roof of the plant, made their way across the space between the factory and the road up the hill, and began arriving at the hotel.\u00a0 Among them was the head of the company, who asked Kat\u014d-san if he could put his employees up for the night.\u00a0 He agreed, but it turned out that there were too many to house and feed.\u00a0 They decided that the young and able bodied would have to make a long, precarious trek along the base of the hill to the closest designated evacuation arena, about 3km away by such a circuitous route, and seek shelter there.\u00a0 The hotel took in a little over 100 workers, mostly those who were older, injured, ill, or otherwise in too poor physical condition to make the journey.<\/p>\n

This meant that on the second night, 200 or more refugees huddled together for warmth on the second floor of the Hotel B\u014dy\u014d.\u00a0 It also meant that, by the next morning, the hotel\u2019s supply of food was nearly exhausted.<\/p>\n

Even with the new arrivals, though, the sense of isolation wasn\u2019t really alleviated.\u00a0 Cell phones were useless, as was the internet, or indeed anything that required power from the grid.\u00a0 \u201cNothing digital worked, so we had to rely on analog stuff,\u201d Kat\u014d-san recalls.<\/p>\n

One piece of analog stuff that did provide information about the outside world was a battery-powered radio in the office.\u00a0 The news Kat\u014d-san and the others heard, however, only reinforced their feelings of isolation.\u00a0 They learned that Kesennuma was not the only town to get hit; killer waves had destroyed communities all along the Pacific coast of Tohoku, and the estimated death toll kept rising.\u00a0 Then they head about the first hydrogen explosion at Fukushima Daiichi.\u00a0 \u201cI really began to think, \u2018this is it \u2013 this is the end of Japan.\u2019\u00a0 After hearing that first bit of news about Fukushima, we decided to stay inside at much as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even the helicopters that began to buzz over Kesennuma on the second day did little to comfort them.\u00a0 They flew by with increasing frequency, but with no safe place to land near the hotel they passed without showing any sign that those inside had even noticed the people below.<\/p>\n

By the morning of the third day, the fires had died down and the water had receded enough from the town to make it possible for people to begin picking their way through the debris-clogged street in search of their loved ones.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san recalls moving reunions at the hotel, when people were reunited with family members that they had not seen since the 11th<\/sup> \u2013 which seemed like a lifetime in the past now.\u00a0 There were also the heart wrenching scenes of those who struggled up the hill to the hotel, only to leave without finding those they came in search of.<\/p>\n

Kat\u014d-san decided to take the opportunity presented by the retreating water to look at what had become of their home.\u00a0 The Shishiori neighborhood was unrecognizable.\u00a0 Fires that still smoldered nearby covered the area in an acrid haze, mixed with the foul smells of putrefying ocean matter and death.\u00a0 He later learned that over 100 of his neighbors died in the disaster, some by water, others by fire.\u00a0 Physically and emotionally overwhelmed, he left the neighborhood quickly without finding anything to give him hope.<\/p>\n

The third day did have some positive developments, however.\u00a0 For one, a friend who reached the hotel told him that he had seen Kat\u014d-san\u2019s mother among the survivors at the shelter 3km away.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san found her there later that day, alive, but suffering from symptoms of PTSD.\u00a0 She had spent the entire first night alone on the roof of a building in the neighborhood, surrounded by burning oil slicks and water that came up to her feet.\u00a0 The day after Kat\u014d-san found her, a rescue squad from the Tokyo Fire Department transported her to a hospital further inland, where she spent a month being treated for severe ulcers and other health problems.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san was also reunited with his son, who found his way to his uncle\u2019s house after spending the first night in a shelter.<\/p>\n

Back at the hotel, from a peak of 200 or more taking refuge there on the second night, the numbers began to steadily decline from the third day on, as people came to find family members from whom they had become separated by the disaster, and others took advantage of the receding water to find friends or relatives to stay with elsewhere.\u00a0 For those who stayed, the major development on the third day was the arrival of a rescue squad from the Japanese Self-Defense Forces.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san recalls that when they arrived they seemed to have no idea how many people were staying at the hotel \u2013 not surprising at all under the circumstances.\u00a0 The problem was that, although they did come with food and other supplies, since they were moving through the town looking for pockets of survivors, they didn\u2019t bring enough food with them on the first day for everyone remaining at the hotel.<\/p>\n

The arrival of the SDF may mark a subtle but important turning point in the Hotel B\u014dy\u014d\u2019s history as a hinanjo<\/em>, for it brought about two new developments.\u00a0 First of all, it marked the point at which the hotel went from being a completely isolated, ad-hoc shelter, one that came together out of necessity and the altruistic sensitivity of Kat\u014d-san, Tomiko-san, and their employees, to one that was officially recognized by the authorities in charge of coping with the problems faced by (and posed by) survivors in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.\u00a0 This shift in character was made clear on the very next day \u2013 Day 4 \u2013 when an SDF team returned to the hotel again to deliver adequate food and supplies for the number of refugees they had counted on the previous day.\u00a0 Along with the supplies, they also gave Kat\u014d-san a newssheet of sorts, with vital disaster and relief information from around Kesennuma.\u00a0 One column was a list of shelters, with the number of persons staying at each, as of March 13th<\/sup>.\u00a0 Kat\u014d-san recalls that he was surprised to find \u201cHotel B\u014dy\u014d \u2013 150\u201d among the entries listed.\u00a0 No one in the city government or from the SDF had asked him whether his hotel could be designated as an official shelter.<\/p>\n

The second development is directly related to the first: once the hotel became recognized as a shelter, it began to receive supplies through from the authorities, be they the SDF, other Japanese government agencies, or even the US military as part of its \u201cOperation Tomodachi\u201d aid mission (who delivered emergency rations of pasta primavera, Which Kat\u014d-san preferred to the less appetizing SDF rations). \u00a0\u00a0What this meant was that, while supplies might have never been as plentiful as the people who remained at the hotel might had wished, they could be fairly certain that more supplies would eventually arrive, and that when they did, they as individuals maintained some sort of right to receive a share of them<\/em>.\u00a0 This may seem obvious, but it is a very different situation from what the people who took refuge at the hotel on the first two nights faced, when no one expected the Kat\u014ds to share the food they had in store, and no one knew how long what they had on hand might last, or even if more would be coming anytime soon.<\/p>\n

Just how that is significant is something I will explore in Part Two of Kat\u014d-san\u2019s story.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The place where I was to stay the night was called the Hotel B\u014dy\u014d.\u00a0 \u201cB\u014dy\u014d\u201d is not exactly a common term in Japanese, and when I reached the top of the incline where it stood, the sign over the entrance \u2013 \u201cHotel B\u014dy\u014d,\u201d spelled out in the roman alphabet rather than in katana and Chinese […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"parent":694,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/112"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":731,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/112\/revisions\/731"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}