Stephen Phelan

BY Japanese standards, Onagawa was a young town. Or, at least, a relatively new port, formally founded in 1926 but incorporating much older fishing hamlets. It was located near the north-east limit of Japan’s main island, Honshu – on the Sanriku coast of the Tohoku region – where thickly forested mountains drop into the Pacific, and submerged river valleys form a fjord-like landscape of deep bays and narrow inlets. Human settlers have been living in those margins for centuries, feeding off two fertile ocean currents that converge just offshore, carrying saury and silver salmon practically into their mouths. Less than 50 miles out, there is also a volatile tectonic fault plane, in the trench between the Japan and Okhotsk plates.

ONAGAWA was not destroyed, they kept saying. The survivors were insistent on that point when I first visited last April, less than one month after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011, which had effectively wiped this small port town off the map. “We are still here,” said local teacher Ikuo Fujinaka, standing in the ruin of his house. “Onagawa still exists.” More in memory than reality, I thought. In percentage terms, it had suffered greater losses than anywhere else along the Tohoku coast – over 80% of its buildings, more than 50% of its homes, and almost 10% of the population, leaving Onagawa literally decimated.

My girlfriend and I moved to Japan in the autumn of 2008. We had our reasons, and they boiled down to boredom. I’m Irish, she’s Scottish, we were both sick of living in the UK – the sort of middle-class Westerners who suppose that their lives might be more meaningful as foreigners in some faraway place. Japan seemed so distant and different as to make us look brave, but also secretly appealed to us as one of the safest, cleanest nations on Earth.

RONALDO Quinn was 21 when he was sent to liberate the Malvinas Islands. Thirty years ago tomorrow, on April 2, 1982, Argentina’s ruling military junta dispatched a small force to reclaim those tiny, distant South Atlantic islands from the British who called them the Falklands. Though already two months over his mandatory year of national service, Quinn was “invited to participate”, as he puts it today. “I was just a conscript in the army,” he says, “and probably one of the worst. My performance was always poor. I used to oversleep. I was not made to be a soldier at all. Then suddenly I was a part of Argentina’s history.”

I FELT the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, in the same way that you might get a spot of drizzle from the tip of the tail of a hurricane. At 2.46pm on Friday, March 11, I was walking home from the library in a small, quiet town called Daishoji, some 400 miles west of the epicentre. The pavement shifted side to side, ever so slightly. I had been drinking the night before, and my first thought was for my lost youth, when I could handle a few beers and a couple of shots without wobbling off a footpath the following afternoon. It took a full five seconds to register that this movement was occurring outside my skull, and a little longer to recognise the sensation.

THE Cobden Working Men’s Club was the first of its kind in London, built in 1870 for the confluence and improvement of serious-minded proletarian males. Its Victorian façade has been preserved with a grade two listing, but the refurbished interior is now occupied by a private membership of high-profile unisex patrons from the arts and media. There is still one smoke-filled back room that seems to be an original feature. And there are three men inside who look like they’ve been coming here for a century – men who roll their own cigarettes, cultivate facial hair, and work for a living. Nick Cave sits behind a dark oak table, flanked by two of his Bad Seeds, who have also joined his new splinter group, Grinderman.

TWO people climb a mountain, connected by a rope. They go up together in concerted motion, taking turns to carve out a path. If one falls, so does the other. This method is known as “alpine-style” – the purest kind of mountaineering. It has the simplicity of a proverb and it loads the rope with meaning. When Simon Yates cut the cord between himself and his friend Joe Simpson during their fraught descent from the summit of Peru’s Siula Grande in 1985, he was taking the only possible, practical action. The act itself was resounding. There were only two people on the mountain, but everybody heard about it.

ON October 11, 1996, a banquet was held in the Painted Hall of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich – a huge room designed by the astronomer-architect Sir Christopher Wren, its ceilings detailed with images of British maritime power. This was where Admiral Nelson’s body lay in state after it was shipped back from the… Read more »

AFTER his kidnap in Beirut on April 11, 1986, Brian Keenan did not see the sun for 1596 days. Held hostage by members of the fundamentalist Shi’ite group Islamic Jihad at various locations around Lebanon, he was eventually released on August 24, 1990. Blind Flight, the new feature film based on Keenan’s ordeal and that of fellow hostage John McCarthy – who was not released until one year later – condenses their experience into a screen time of 96 minutes.

DUBLIN is the one city where people know Roddy Doyle when they see him. It’s the only place he has ever lived, and up until his new novel Oh, Play That Thing!, it was the only place he ever set his stories. Today, he tells a true one from a few weeks ago. Doyle was waiting for a friend at Tara Street train station, and a bunch of little hoods were hanging around nearby. In Glasgow they would be neds, in Dublin they’re called gurriers. One of them broke off and came over to stare at him. “Are you Roddy Doyle?” he asked. “Yeah,” said Doyle. “So what?” said the kid, and walked away again.