{"id":96,"date":"2021-08-23T18:52:51","date_gmt":"2021-08-23T18:52:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/reverberations-part-1\/"},"modified":"2021-08-23T20:20:23","modified_gmt":"2021-08-23T20:20:23","slug":"reverberations-part-1","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/migrated-posts\/reverberations-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Reverberations (part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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One thing that struck me repeatedly while I was in Tohoku was how the disaster seemed to still be going on for many of the people in the hisaichi<\/em>, and in many different ways.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure it seems odd to put it like that.\u00a0 The last waves have of course long since receded, and in most areas the chaotic clutter of debris has at least been cleared and placed in tremendous piles that represent the first big step in salvaging order from chaos.\u00a0 Even for the most dislocated of the survivors, the hinanjo<\/em> shelters too are poised to become a thing of the past, meaning that they will be on their way to regaining their privacy and \u2013 with any luck \u2013 financial independence as well.<\/div>\n
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And yet, the landscape in the hisaichi<\/em> still looks like a bizarre moonscape in parts, with busted buildings and the naked foundations of now absent structures everywhere one looks.\u00a0 On the psychological level, too; survivors still seem to want to talk about the early days, whether to \u201coutsiders\u201d or among themselves, as if the things they experience are still replaying in their heads.\u00a0 Many do so in a way that suggests a sense of awe at what they witnessed, but otherwise they seem to have come to terms with it.\u00a0 Deep down, however, I doubt this is the case; they replay the events because they are still searching for something in them, some element of meaning, perhaps, that once found will allow them to relegate March 11th<\/sup> and its aftermath to the realm of memories that don\u2019t have to constantly be recalled and relived \u2013 if that is possible for events of such enormity.\u00a0 For others, however, the need to recall and relive what they saw is more like the curse we outsiders might expect it to be; they would rather forget, but can\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The disaster thus lives on, although you would hardly know it outside of the hisaichi<\/em> areas or the prefectures of Tohoku that contain them.\u00a0 I felt this contrast most after I left Tohoku for the Tokyo area.\u00a0 There, the disaster is tucked away in the background, or present only in the corner of one\u2019s eye. It is visible only through occasional public service announcements urging people \u201cnot to forget\u201d the plight of folks in the northeast, and human interest stories on the news that give the viewer brief glimpses of the area and the folks living there.\u00a0 There is also plenty of news coverage of the ongoing disaster in Fukushima, as the pall of \u201chot spots\u201d seems to cast an ever-widening net of uncertainty over Japan.<\/p>\n

From only watching the national news, though, one might come away with the impression that, aside from the nuclear catastrophe and the fact that some people are still living in shelters, Tohoku must be on its way to recovery by now.\u00a0 Both in Fukushima and the areas north of it, though, that is simply not the case.\u00a0 Recovery efforts are only just beginning to gain traction, and there are no assurances that many of the smaller communities will ever make a come back.<\/p>\n

What follows \u2013 in two separate posts, to keep the length manageable \u2013 are some random observations about what lies in store, I think, for the people of the region as they try to move forward with their lives, as well as what I believe to be some of the lasting after effects, or reverberations, of the disaster.\u00a0 I focus here on human impacts, rather than exploring issues of economics or infrastructure, etc.\u00a0 The media and various analysts will no doubt cover the impact on Japan\u2019s economy and infrastructure in thorough detail.\u00a0 If that is the \u201cmain story\u201d \u2013 the heart of what this disaster means to people for whom Tohoku is just another disaster stricken area in a world system that continues to move on in spite of nature\u2019s disruptions \u2013 then what I will discuss below are matters of more psychological and cultural significance for survivors and other Japanese alike.<\/p>\n

Ghosts<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

In the town of Rifuch\u014d, just a bit east-northeast of Sendai along the coast that leads on to Ishinomaki, there is a large prefectural sports complex called \u201cGrande 21\u201d that was untouched by the tsunami.\u00a0 One of the buildings within this complex is the Sekisui Heim Super Arena, pictured to the left.\u00a0 This multipurpose indoor stadium can seat seven thousand spectators.\u00a0 The floor is 4,473 square yards: enough space to fit four basketball courts.\u00a0 In better days, it was also used as a venue for concerts by big stars.\u00a0 Soon after 3\/11, however, it became the largest of several temporary morgues in the prefecture.\u00a0 Refrigeration units were installed to keep large numbers of bodies on ice during the night; during the day, however, most of these were apparently brought out onto the main floor, so that people who came to look for deceased loved ones could view them.\u00a0 I have no idea how many bodies came here, but the selection of this arena, with its large floor, would seem to suggest that it must have been a lot.\u00a0 Many of the bodies recovered from the ocean end up here when it is impossible to determine what town they were washed away from.<\/p>\n

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

The sign that Hariu-san and I passed as we returned from my first trip to Ishinomaki was in fact for Grande 21.\u00a0 Later that evening I asked about the place, and Hariu-san and his wife told me some of the rumors surrounding it.\u00a0 The word was that the arena would eventually be torn down, because the stench of death has seeped into everything.\u00a0 Visitors claim that the arena has a cold and foreboding atmosphere.\u00a0 There have also been sightings of ghosts, the most active of which is that of a little girl who wanders the floor and aisles of the arena, searching for her mother. \u00a0Because of this, the turnover rate for security guards at the complex is supposedly quite high.<\/p>\n

Whether there are ghosts or not \u2013 at Grande 21 or anywhere else, for that matter \u2013 I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 The idea of making the trip out to Grande 21 did cross my mind after I returned to Sendai from Ishinomaki, but by then the heat and humidity had become so oppressive that the 3km, mostly up-hill walk from the nearest station to the complex just didn\u2019t seem like a good idea, and the thought of haling a cab and asking the driver to take me up to the facility \u2013 when everyone in the area knew very well what it was being used for \u2013 seemed more than a bit awkward; going to a mass morgue just to see the unidentified dead and perhaps catch a glimpse of their ghosts has to be one of the most lurid and crass examples of disaster tourism.\u00a0 It seems fairly certain, however, to expect that urban legends of haunted places will become common across the Tohoku area in the years to come \u2013 if they haven\u2019t already.\u00a0 That might be a topic worthy of further scholarly exploration in itself (not the question of whether these stories are \u201ctrue\u201d or not, so much as how and when they get started, and what the nature of these tales and the timing of their appearance says about the way people come to terms with catastrophic loss).<\/p>\n

What I find interesting, however, is how these sites are actually in the process of reverting to their former purposes, despite serving as exhibition halls for the most tragic aspect of the tsunami\u2019s destructive power.\u00a0 The rumors that the Sekisui Heim Super Arena will have to be demolished turned out to be just that: rumors.\u00a0 As of July 1st<\/sup>, the temporary morgue was moved to another building in the Grande 21 sports complex.\u00a0 On September 10th<\/sup>, the arena is scheduled to be the venue for a concert by Japanese pop legend Kuwata Keisuke, billed as \u201cLive in Miyagi \u2013Marching towards tomorrow!\u201d (source: http:\/\/ja.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/\u5bae\u57ce\u770c\u7dcf\u5408\u904b\u52d5\u516c\u5712\u7dcf\u5408\u4f53\u80b2\u9928<\/a>) This will mark its return to service in the purpose it was designed for, ghosts or no ghosts.\u00a0 The same seems to be the case with many other public facilities that served as morgues across the region.\u00a0 A page on the Miyagi Prefectural Police website (the same one where I learned that the morgue at Grande 21 had been relocated), provides information on the changing locations of such facilities across the prefecture. (http:\/\/www.police.pref.miyagi.jp\/hp\/jishin\/itai\/itai.html<\/a>).\u00a0 As the numbers of new bodies being found and remains left unidentified declines, it appears that the police are closing the temporary morgues and turning whatever bodies that remain in them over to municipal authorities for preservation in local morgues.<\/p>\n

Some bodies \u2013 or parts of bodies \u2013 may never be identified.\u00a0 Others will probably never be found.\u00a0 As I write this, nearly six months since the disaster, 4,122 people remain missing.<\/p>\n

The fact that these facilities are reverting to their original uses, after bearing such a close association with death and loss, seems symbolic of both the recovery process and the way those left among the living in the hisaichi<\/em> may view their villages, towns, and cities from now on \u2013 perhaps even after the last vestiges of destruction are gone.\u00a0 The scale of the devastation was so enormous and the loss of life so great that in the aftermath there was no way to segregate death away from the living, in the way that we usually try to do.\u00a0 Death invaded the public spaces in which ordinary life usually takes place.\u00a0 As the survivors have to get their lives back on track, however, there is no time or room to relegate these former morgues to the liminal spaces that they usually occupy in everyday life; they have to go back to being what they were before, as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place in them.\u00a0 Yet the survivors will remember the aberration that occurred in these spaces in the months after 3\/11.\u00a0 The recognition of this fact will live on in the various ghost stories that will come to be associated with these places.\u00a0 The urban legends that tend to emerge in such situations seldom identify who the spirits were in life.\u00a0 Rather, the ghosts are generic; they serve as representatives for the dead in general, reminders that this was a place where death once erupted into the world of the living.<\/p>\n

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

A member of the Japan Self Defense Forces praying for the soul of a victim found in the rubble<\/em><\/p>\n

But death remains with the living in other ways, too.\u00a0 A case in point are the men and women in the Self Defense Forces who were mobilized in the wake of the tsunami to search for the living and the dead amidst the rubble.\u00a0 At peak, a force of roughly 200,000 troops from regiments throughout the country spread out across the 600km of devastated coastline to engage in these important tasks, as well as in clearing debris and rebuilding vital roads and communication networks.\u00a0 After the first week or so, search and rescue shifted to search and recovery.\u00a0 Apparently it was around this time that the SDF instituted a revealing system of hardship pay for those engaged in the work of finding bodies in the rubble: troops received 3,000 yen for each cadaver they found intact and in good condition, and 4,000 for body parts, bodies missing heads and\/or limbs, or else those that had suffered severe damage or were uncovered in advanced stages of decomposition.\u00a0 The rationale for this rather macabre pricing system was that finding bodies in the latter state was deemed more disturbing to those who found them than finding those who had died but had not been horribly disfigured.\u00a0 No matter what the compensation scheme, though, this work takes its toll: in the weeks and months after the SDF began the process of recovering bodies, stories emerged of the increasing numbers of troops suffering symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder: insomnia; loss of appetite; avoiding making eye-contact with others; and staring up at the sky purposelessly for long periods of time.<\/p>\n

The troops weren\u2019t the only ones.\u00a0 Back in Sendai after volunteer work in Ishinomaki, I had the opportunity to meet a man introduced to me only as Ken-chan.\u00a0 He was the cousin of Hariu-san\u2019s wife.\u00a0 He dropped by the house for dinner one evening after working all day in Watari, taking down the remnants of buildings there.\u00a0 Ken-chan worked in the public works and demolition business, and business across the region was good.\u00a0 He and his crew had been steadily employed in Watari since the water receded and the SDF had made the roads throughout the area passable \u2013 just about four months by that point.\u00a0 He told me that on average it took his crew two days to take a structure down to the foundation and clear the lot.\u00a0 Four months of work meant a lot of buildings, but there was still a lot of work left to do.<\/p>\n

For the first few weeks after the tsunami, however, Ken-chan had been employed at another task.\u00a0 Aside from the SDF, search and rescue squads from fire departments throughout Japan headed up to Tohoku.\u00a0 They brought with them dogs trained to find the living and the dead buried under rubble, as well as shovels and other rescue equipment vital to the task.\u00a0 Due to the damaged state of the roads into the area, though, they could not bring heavy equipment.\u00a0 Ken-chan was thus contracted by a rescue squad from Nagoya to do the heavy lifting with his company\u2019s hydraulic shovel.<\/p>\n

As things turned out, though, they recovered lots of dead bodies but found no survivors.<\/p>\n

\u201cI worked with the Nagoya squad for about two weeks,\u201d Ken-chan told me.\u00a0 \u201cThey had strict rules concerning how long their guys could work without some down time.\u00a0 I think they had a rotation of two days on duty followed by one day off.\u00a0 But for the guys they contracted with, like me, there were no such rules, so I worked every day \u2013 no down time. \u00a0During that time, I don\u2019t know how many dead bodies I saw.\u00a0 Sometimes, I had to help the squad guys load them on the trucks by hand.\u00a0 The kids were the hardest to see.\u00a0 That really stays with you\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Just from observing his expressions as he recalled this, I could see that it had.\u00a0 Ken-chan had the look of a haunted man.\u00a0 He swallowed hard as he finished his story and then sighed deeply.\u00a0 Hariu-san asked him how he was sleeping these days, and he admitted that he was still having problems.\u00a0 Visions of the dead people he had carried came to him in nightmares.\u00a0 Sometimes he awoke in a state of sleep paralysis, a condition that in Japanese folklore is associated with temporary spirit possession.<\/p>\n

Ken-chan stayed for a little bit after this conversation, but soon excused himself.\u00a0 The crews kept early hours, he explained, so he had to get to bed early.\u00a0 I wondered how much sleep he would get tonight, and how long it would be before he could enjoy the kind of \u201csleep of the dead,\u201d which is the only kind of sleep fully worthy of the name.<\/p>\n

As I thought about Ken-chan\u2019s situation \u2013 a civilian who was most likely suffering from PTSD \u2013 I couldn\u2019t help thinking two things.\u00a0 The first was that there must be countless Ken-chans out there, scattered across the Tohoku region and beyond.\u00a0 The second was the realization that Ken-chan\u2019s experience and Takumi\u2019s experience, although similar in respects to finding bodies over a week after the tsunami, were quite different \u2013 fundamentally so, perhaps.\u00a0 Takumi, you may recall, crawled over mountains of rubble in his neighborhood in Ishinomaki, and on the 12th<\/sup> day found the body of his 15-year-old daughter.\u00a0 As he told me in the uncannily matter-of-fact style that so many people who lost loved ones seem to speak in, she had apparently been taking a nap at the time.\u00a0 Since it was still winter, she had wrapped herself in a down comforter.\u00a0 Oddly enough, this had preserved her body from quite a bit of decomposition.\u00a0\u00a0 A day after that, not too far from the spot where he found his daughter, he found his wife.\u00a0 Unlike their daughter, she was probably awake and wondering what to do when the tsunami hit Mitsumata.\u00a0 Her body had not survived 12 days of waiting as well.\u00a0 Takumi told me all of this just as if we were discussing the weather or the most commonplace of daily occurrences.<\/p>\n

So why the difference?\u00a0 Why was Ken-chan so unnerved by all he had seen, but Takumi could discover the bodies of his wife and daughter \u2013 as well as others he glimpsed in the rubble of Watanoha after the tsunami \u2013 but still seem so positive (yes, that\u2019s the best adjective I can come up with to describe it) and relaxed (another odd choice, but it does fit, believe me) about it?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 Individual personalities come into play here, or course.\u00a0 But, at the risk of reading too much into it, I believe that there are two fundamentally different perspectives and contexts involved here.<\/p>\n

Takumi saw plenty of death in the days after the tsunami, but it was not his task to confront it.\u00a0 He did not have to pick it up and carry it.\u00a0 He did have to bear the burden of discovering the corpses of his wife and daughter.\u00a0 Even if he did not actually carry them to where the authorities would perform whatever procedures needed to be done, I\u2019m sure he must have touched them, held them, and felt overwhelmed by shock and grief in that moment.\u00a0 For Takumi, however, there were many people around him who had experienced much the same kind of loss.\u00a0 Through talking about it amongst themselves \u2013 repeatedly \u2013 they may have helped each other work through the worst of the trauma.<\/p>\n

Ken-chan, by contrast, was on his own; there is no support group for people in his situation.\u00a0 No one he knows can say to him \u201cyeah, I know what you mean \u2013 I manned a power shovel in those early days, too.\u201d\u00a0 Even if such people are out there, there is no ready-made and sustained context in which they can have those conversations.\u00a0 On top of that, the bodies Ken-chan carried were those of total strangers.\u00a0 He knew nothing about them, and never will.\u00a0 There are no memories from life to ameliorate the coldness of their lifeless forms \u2013 especially the kids, who just shouldn\u2019t be dead at such a young age.<\/p>\n

When I thought about things this way, I really couldn\u2019t decide who had the worse situation, Takumi or Ken-chan.\u00a0 Most people would choose Takumi, and for reasons I can certainly agree with.\u00a0 As I\u2019ve said before, put me under similar circumstances and I sincerely doubt I would hold up as well as my friend has.\u00a0 \u00a0Still, he knows what he has lost, and knows what he has left.\u00a0 The grief will never completely go away, but perhaps \u2013 and this is purely my conjecture as one who has never had to face such a challenge \u2013 what he has left (his son) provides him with a sense of focus around which to move forward and build a new life.\u00a0 Takumi may well be very lucky in this regard, albeit in a tragic way.\u00a0 But someone like Ken-chan \u2013 a hisaisha<\/em> who blurs the line between primary and secondary \u2013 has no such focus.\u00a0 He\u2019d seen numerous dead individuals to whom he had no connection in life.\u00a0 Under \u201cnormal\u201d circumstances \u2013 say, if they had been victims of isolated accidents \u2013 he would probably have no reason to feel anything more for them than the sense of pity we feel at the loss of human life in general, but there is nothing about what he, or they, went through that is normal.\u00a0 The enormity of the tsunami and the defenselessness of the victims, accentuated by their sheer anonymity, hits hardest, perhaps, as one is left wondering who they were and who might be frantically searching for them at this very moment.\u00a0 Without answers to these questions, how does one put the experience of holding their bodies behind one?<\/p>\n

Put in Ken-chan\u2019s position, I doubt I would have faired any better than he did.\u00a0 There is something about the way we are wired \u2013 at least under the best, most natural of circumstances \u2013 that makes witnessing the suffering of others intolerable.\u00a0 By extension, it also makes imagining what they must have suffered, and what those who will miss them will suffer at their passing, just as painful.\u00a0 These impulses are all-too easily thwarted by our propensity to mistrust others based upon prejudice and misguided self-interest.\u00a0 In the teeth of a disaster, when the normality that underlies such bigotry and selfishness is suspended, some of us \u2013 maybe more of us than we realize \u2013 rise to the occasion by falling back on our better instincts.\u00a0 Ken-chan had done just that \u2013 but was now paying the price for it.<\/p>\n

Children<\/strong><\/p>\n

One group I haven\u2019t talked about much at all in this blog so far is children.\u00a0 The image of Tohoku that the foreign media projected in the wake of the disaster was that of a traditional, even rustic, area populated overwhelmingly by old folks. \u00a0Recall, for example, David Sanger\u2019s portrait of the northeast, which I commented upon at the outset of this blog.\u00a0 While it may be true that young people tend to move away from coastal towns like Ishinomaki upon finishing high school \u2013 especially those who enter four-year colleges that are typically located in urban areas \u2013 the image of Tohoku as a place for the elderly is really something of a trope: the traditional (and thus old) countryside, juxtaposed to the modern (thus young) metropolis.\u00a0 As I mentioned in regard to the Kawabiraki Festival, though, there are in fact young people in places like Ishinomaki.\u00a0 Many of them never leave.\u00a0 Others return after they finish college.\u00a0 They marry and have kids, and these children experienced the tsunami much like everyone else.<\/p>\n

Yet those children dealt with the tsunami and its aftermath in their own way, although in some respects it was in keeping with the kind of resilient strength I had seen in survivors who lost so much, like Takumi and his son Hiromu.\u00a0 In other respects, it reveals glimpses of the tremendous stress that children who witnessed the tsunami live under.\u00a0 My evidence here is, as usual, anecdotal.\u00a0 Much of it comes from discussions I had with some of Hariu-san\u2019s students who had recently returned from two weeks as student-helpers in nursery schools located in various towns in the hisaichi<\/em>.\u00a0 Hariu-san also shared with me some of the essays and illustrations that his students produced as part of a class assignment of the impact of the disaster on young children.<\/p>\n

The signs of stress in these very young children appear most frequently in the form of separation anxiety.\u00a0 Many of the students mentioned that the most difficult time of the day at the nursery schools they visited was at the start.\u00a0 Little children clung frantically to the legs of parents who were trying to drop them off, and pleaded not to be left behind.\u00a0 Some continued to cry for nearly and hour after their parents finally left.\u00a0 The students learn from the regular staff at their schools that many of these children had not suffered from such anxiety prior to March 11th<\/sup>.\u00a0\u00a0 Restlessness throughout the day was another problem.\u00a0 Children who had been good about napping during the day prior to the tsunami now had difficulty doing so.\u00a0 Additionally, kids who had been good about going to the bathroom in time to relieve themselves seemed to have regressed to wetting themselves in the months since the disaster.\u00a0 Most obviously and understandably, many of the children would be sent into a panic at the slightest tremor \u2013 and weak (and not so weak) quakes continued to hit Tohoku frequently throughout the spring and early summer.<\/p>\n

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

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

Student drawings of \u201c<\/em>jishin-gokko\u201d<\/em> (top, by Hayasaka Aimi) and \u201c<\/em>tsunami-gokko\u201d (bottom, by Yamada Ayano)<\/em><\/p>\n

While their parents worked through their experiences by talking about them with other survivors, little children had their own strategies for processing the traumatic past.\u00a0 Many students remarked on two new forms of group play that were very popular in the nursery schools they visited.\u00a0 One was \u201cjishin-gokko<\/em>,\u201d or \u201cpretend earthquake.\u201d\u00a0 This usually started with one child shaking a table \u2013 often after he or she had built something out of blocks on top of it \u2013 and accompanying this with a shout of \u201cJishin da!<\/em>\u201d (\u201cEarthquake!\u201d).\u00a0 Other children would then run away from the table in mock (or real) panic, or else hide under it, as if protecting themselves from falling debris.\u00a0 \u201cTsunami-gokko<\/em>\u201d worked much the same way: one student would suddenly cry out \u201cTsunami da!<\/em>\u201d and dash frantically in a straight line, as if trying to outrun the wave.\u00a0 As soon as he or she did, others would join in, running in more or less the same direction.\u00a0 Some of the kids would intentionally fall down and lie there struggling, pretending to be overtaken by the water.\u00a0 The students often said that they found these forms of play vaguely disturbing the first time they saw them, but soon realized that the children were actually trying to work through things by doing so.\u00a0 This became clear in the reactions of some of the children who were newly enrolled at the nursery school.\u00a0 At first, many of these very little ones found this kind of play upsetting; pretending to take refuge from the quake or flee from the tsunami brought back too many frightening memories, perhaps.\u00a0 Within a week or two, however, even these children were joining in, sometimes even as the instigators.<\/p>\n

At the same time, though, many of the students also expressed a sense of awe at how matter-of-factly children who were only four of five years old could talk about their experiences.\u00a0 The topic would come up without any prompting on the student\u2019s part; indeed, they had been instructed not to raise the issue of the disaster at all with the kids or their parents.\u00a0 In spite of this, a young child might suddenly come out with a statement like \u201cDaddy cried all day long when we learned that grandma had died,\u201d or \u201cthere were dead people in the field near our house after the tsunami.\u201d\u00a0 The students suspected that this might have been a form of dissociation, and perhaps it was just that.\u00a0 At the same time, it seems surprisingly similar to the kind of steadiness with which adult survivors would often speak of what they had seen and all that they had lost.<\/p>\n

And children of all ages, but especially those in the higher elementary school grades and junior high, also seem to have displayed a tremendous amount of psychological strength and resourcefulness in the immediate aftermath.\u00a0 I\u2019ve already mentioned the spontaneous outpouring of public spirit among an ad hoc group of junior high school students in Watari, who became the de facto caretakers of the shelter there.\u00a0 In a similar vein, children suddenly robbed of the comforts of home seemed to find ways to cope, and adapted quickly to their new reality.\u00a0 This was nowhere more evident than in the way older siblings took on the duties of a parent lost to the tsunami for their younger sisters and brothers.\u00a0 The Japanese media ran many stories of this kind in the months after the disaster; especially when mothers were taken, older sisters and brothers took over many of the myriad jobs that women in Japan tend to do in the role of both mother and wife, and especially that of trying to comfort their younger siblings.\u00a0 Such cases revealed a truly remarkable sense of responsibility, as well as an underlying desperation; it was as if the older children feared the fabric of the family would completely dissolve if the youngest children were allowed to give themselves up to a despair that would no doubt become infectious.<\/p>\n

One of the most moving cases of this kind of fortitude and maturity, displayed by a young child years before one would expect it, came from Toba Futoshi, the mayor of Rikuzen Takata, which was all-but obliterated by the tsunami.\u00a0 In his account of the city since the tsunami, Let\u2019s Talk about What\u2019s Really Going On in the Hisaichi<\/em> (\u6238\u7fbd\u592a\u8457\u3001\u300e\u88ab\u707d\u5730\u306e\u672c\u5f53\u306e\u8a71\u3092\u3057\u3088\u3046\uff1a\u9678\u524d\u9ad8\u7530\u5e02\u9577\u304c\u7db4\u3058\u308b\u3042\u306e\u65e5\u3068\u3053\u308c\u304b\u3089\u300f\u30ef\u30cb\u30d6\u30c3\u30af\u30b9PLUS\u65b0\u66f8\u3001\uff12\uff10\uff11\uff11\u5e74\uff18\u6708\uff12\uff15\u65e5\u51fa\u7248), he recounts the turmoil of the first few weeks after the disaster.\u00a0 Toba took refuge on the roof of city hall, where he and 126 others barely managed to stay above the water.\u00a0 From this vantage point, six floors above street level, he could see that the school where his two sons were was out of the water\u2019s reach.\u00a0 He also saw that the area in which their home had stood \u2013 the home where his wife had been when he last spoke to her, just moments before the quake \u2013 was completely submerged.\u00a0 The days that followed kept the mayor and other members of the city government who had survived busy around the clock, as they frantically tried to assess the situation and get in contact with prefectural and central government authorities, as well as the SDF.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until two days later that he was finally reunited with his sons, in grades 4 and 6 of elementary school, when their grandfather brought them from the school to the building in which the emergency city government had been established.\u00a0 There was still no word about their mother.<\/p>\n

Mayor Toba, in fact, hadn\u2019t even filed the paperwork with the local police to declare her missing.\u00a0 His reasons for not doing so lie partially in the fact that he was hellishly busy trying to obtain the basic necessities for the survivors of his city.\u00a0 Beyond this, however, was the sense of pride \u2013 and responsibility \u2013 he felt in being an elected official: if he were to take time out from his duties as mayor to concern himself with the health and welfare of his own loved ones, when so many people in the city needed help, wouldn\u2019t this be a horribly self-interested breach of duty? \u00a0It wasn\u2019t until days later, when he found himself looking at the list of missing persons circulated by the local police, that he noticed someone had, in fact, submitted the paperwork to declare his wife a missing person: his older son, still in 6th<\/sup> grade.\u00a0 Seeing his son\u2019s name listed as the person searching for his mother rather than Toba\u2019s own made the mayor doubt whether he was fit to be a father after all.<\/p>\n

Whatever one may think of Toba\u2019s reasons for not declaring his wife missing, the thought of a boy of no more than 11 years old taking it upon himself to go to the police in order to submit the required forms, and to do all this in such a way as to not disturb his father, is as remarkable as it is moving.\u00a0 Under the force of necessity, the boy had assumed adult responsibilities.\u00a0 Perhaps with it, too, came a mature ability to gauge the possibilities before him and resign himself to what seemed the most likely fate.\u00a0 When Toba\u2019s wife\u2019s body was finally discovered, over two weeks after the tsunami, decomposition had taken its toll.\u00a0 A police officer who was an in-law informed the mayor of the discovery, rather than his son, out of concern for the shock it might cause.\u00a0 For similar reasons, Toba had the body cremated before telling his children that their mother had been found dead.\u00a0 When he finally approached his eldest son with the news, the boy accepted it without crying: he told his father that he had already come to the conclusion that there was no hope left of finding his mother alive.<\/p>\n

Again, the toughness of the bereaved survivors.\u00a0 At the same time, though, I can\u2019t help but feeling that these children face problems down the road, problems arising from the necessity to assume an adult \u2013 perhaps even superhuman \u2013 sense of personal responsibility, acceptance of the fundamentally unbearable, and capacity for forbearance in the face of this disaster far ahead of their years.\u00a0\u00a0 At present, the Ministry of Welfare and Labor lists 234 children under the age of 18 in the three prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima who lost both parents on March 11th<\/sup>.\u00a0 In addition to these, there are 1,295 children like Mayor Toba\u2019s and Takumi\u2019s, who lost one parent to the tsunami.\u00a0 Their parents may have found a way to talk through the pain of loss; for the children, though, it is hard to imagine that such opportunities will occur as spontaneously.\u00a0 The time to act on this may be rapidly slipping away.<\/p>\n

One last observation about the youngest of the hisaisha<\/em> who have remained in their shattered hometowns is worth making: the longer one spends in these communities, surrounded by reminders of the destructive power of water, the less one notices it; gutted buildings that look as though an enormous fist had punched through them, flayed automobiles in the middle of rice fields, and enormous piles of debris \u2013 after only a few weeks in the area all of theses sights become part of a new normal, everyday perception of life in the hisaichi<\/em>.\u00a0 If this is true for adults, it must be even more so for young children, whose memories of the way things were before 3\/11 is less firmly established.\u00a0 As these children grow older, how will growing up amidst such a landscape come to affect them (assuming that they stay, which is another question)?\u00a0 How will the natural phenomenon of growing accustomed to a landscape bearing the scars of the tsunami \u2013 as it will continue to do so for years to come, at the present rate of reconstruction \u2013 influence the way these youths see themselves, their future, and their country?<\/p>\n

Thinking of what the youngest hisaisha<\/em> \u2013 the survivors\/victims \u2013 must be going through fills those of us who have passed through childhood with a sense of pity.\u00a0 Yet that could be to a great extent because as adults we are constantly underestimating them.\u00a0 Any of us who can recall details from our own childhood will most likely recall getting brushed off because we were \u201cjust kids.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019m not trying to claim that there is nothing to worry about in regard to the future of these children \u2013 not at all \u2013 but they might roll with things better than we as adults could ever expect.\u00a0 Children have been the victims of disasters throughout human history, after all, but peoples everywhere seem to continue surviving \u2013 in spite of often forgetting what it meant to survive.<\/p>\n

If there is one thing I have learned from visiting the hisaichi<\/em> this summer, it is this: as animals, people are surprisingly fragile physically \u2013 we\u2019re by nature environment-changers, after all, so when nature decides to destroy our little attempts to stave its extremes off, we don\u2019t fare so well.\u00a0 But, those who survive can be<\/em> (and I stress that, because I know it doesn\u2019t apply to every case) extremely resilient.\u00a0 We talk about certain kinds of loss and despair as \u201csoul-crushing.\u201d\u00a0 I have heard plenty of stories this summer that deserved the same description \u2013 except for the fact that the people who told them to me were not crushed, spiritually or psychologically.\u00a0 Will they have problems further down the line?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 But I feel I have learned something from these folks, even in the stories of the youngest of these.\u00a0 They have faced death \u2013 not just as a threat to themselves, but more significantly as a reality surrounding them \u2013 and have not given themselves up to despair.\u00a0 Not yet, anyway.<\/p>\n

Which is not to say that everything is fine, of course.\u00a0 In the hisaichi<\/em>, as in rest of Japan, the impact of 3\/11 has different meanings \u2013 some positive, some not so.\u00a0 More on that next time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One thing that struck me repeatedly while I was in Tohoku was how the disaster seemed to still be going on for many of the people in the hisaichi, and in many different ways.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure it seems odd to put it like that.\u00a0 The last waves have of course long since receded, and in […]<\/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\/96"}],"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=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/96\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":723,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/96\/revisions\/723"}],"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=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}