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.
But not destroyed, I came to agree, when I returned to join the volunteer crews in July. Our work was hot, dirty, often unpleasant, and sometimes unbearably sad. One day we might be clearing out the Marine Pal, a four-story fish market, aquarium, and maritime museum at the waterfront. Inundated by the tsunami, it was piled high with debris and stinking with maggots. Other days, we sat in a basement under the bleachers of the athletics track, cleaning and archiving water-damaged family photographs we had salvaged from residential areas. It was satisfying though. It all felt like progress.
Seven months later, and a year to the day after the tsunami, the change in Onagawa is the difference between a warzone and a wasteland. Where there was wreckage, soldiers, and heavy machinery when I left last summer, there is now a razed plain leading down to the sea. There are new streetlights and power lines in place, but there is even less town here to speak of. “The debris has been removed,” says Fujinaka today, “but nothing else has been done. Different groups have different ideas, but they don’t really talk to each other, so their proposals don’t match up. The rest of us are waiting, waiting, waiting for a plan.” We are sitting in the temporary home he calls his “rabbit house”, one of 159 container units assembled on the rugby pitch beside the town sports hall. It is snowing outside, and there is condensation dripping through the panels in his ceiling. This has been a chronic problem all winter, but the on-site Reconstruction Support Centre can only offer duct tape. This is the new name for the volunteer centre, and two of my former workmates now have permanent jobs there.
Satoshi Ito dropped out of his economics degree at Chiba University to be an events organiser and “problem solver” for residents of the container units. “A lot of people went to help in Kobe after the earthquake [in 1995], and they ended up staying,” he says. “Onagawa’s going to take a lot longer to fix, maybe 10, or 20 years. I feel like I want to be a part of it, for as long as people still want me around.” Keigo Ito (no relation) has quit his job as a nurse in Tokyo to work as a counsellor here. The shock of the tsunami is wearing off, he says, and there’s a growing sense of “munashi” among evacuees – emptiness, or lack of purpose – after so many months without houses and jobs. Many spend their unemployment benefit at pachinko parlours in Ishinomaki. “If it makes them feel better, I can’t tell them not to do it.” More generally, says Keigo, people are beginning to realise that these homes, and these conditions, might not be so temporary. Fujinaka is showing symptoms of munashi himself.
“Since January, I’ve been feeling worn out. I don’t have so much hope for the future.” Some of his neighbours have already left for land that they can build on, and he doesn’t blame them. “The more time passes, and the more that nothing happens, the more people will leave,” he says. I hear the same complaint all over town, and the same basic question: what’s taking so long? “Government,” sighs Kiso Kikawada, local businessman and chairman of the non-profit Onagawa Reconstruction Committee. “The way things are done in Japan.
“Small departments doing their own thing, instead of making a concerted effort.” Formed within weeks of the disaster, his committee submitted its first proposals to the town hall within a few months. In the absence of municipal movement, Kikawada petitioned the Finance Ministry in Tokyo, and won vocal support in parliament, but none of his proposals have been implemented as yet. A new and bolder document is almost ready to go, addressing not just post-tsunami necessities, but the long-term survival of an aging rural community that was already dying a slow death by population decline. “Looking at the town as it was,” says Kikawada, “something had to change. We need new ideas for what a small town can be.” At his prefab headquarters near Mangokura Lake, Kikawada outlines some of those ideas – shopping malls, Spanish-style street art, imported grapes from France and flowers from Holland. “This is more like an ideal vision,” says his colleague Takahiro Aoyama, of the Onagawa chamber of commerce. “New houses have to come first. But to do this hard work, you need to have a bigger picture in mind. You need to think about your children living here, and laughing.”
By way of illustration, Aoyama tells his own tsunami story. This day last year, he and three others were clinging to a water tower on the roof of their building while successive waves pushed over the town centre, rising up their legs. Certain he was going to die, he could only think about his two small daughters, and how he’d failed to kiss them goodbye before they went to school that morning. He tied his necktie to the tower in case his body was never recovered. (Of the 922 Onagawans registered dead or missing in the tsunami, 347 have not yet been found.) After the relief of surviving, to find his house intact and his daughters alive, he became newly sensitive to their limited prospects. “In this town, the most common job for women is to work in the fisheries,” says Aoyama.
“Gutting the fish and cutting off their heads. Onagawa will always be a fishing town first, but I’d like to think my daughters could do something else if they wanted.” The other main employer is the Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant, but this has been in cold shutdown since soon after the earthquake. In the past the town has been well compensated for energy generation. The newly-elected young mayor Yoshiyaki Suda wants to switch it back on to help pay for reconstruction, but the same elections returned a number of anti-nuclear candidates to the town council. “After Fukushima, people know that nuclear power is not as safe as they’ve been told,” says veteran council member Hiroshi Tanako, a 40-year card-carrying member of Japan’s Communist Party, now increasingly popular with the local public. “And given the cost of recovery, those revenues would barely scratch the surface.” Funding, when it finally comes, will be allocated at national level, through the government’s new Reconstruction Agency – a body only formalised in December, after months of wrangling in Tokyo.
But the building, when it finally begins, will be run from Onagawa’s planning department, which has played its own small part in the delays so far. This was only to be expected, says architect Masunori Kusaka, whose Osaka-based firm Urban Renaissance has been brought in to handle logistics. “The staff were affected by the tsunami. Many of them lost their homes or loved ones. They have been emotionally damaged. They had no experience of anything like this, and they didn’t know what to do.” From his office in the new prefabricated town hall, we drive down past the old one, which was flooded to the top floor last March 11. That empty building is one of the few still standing near the waterfront, along with the now-gutted Marine Pal. Three others lie where they fell on the day, ripped out at the concrete roots – the Enoshima ferry waiting room, a police box, and vitamin supplement retailer. It’s been proposed that these buildings should be left as they are, reminders of what the sea can do to man-made structures. “I’m wondering if that’s a good idea,” says Kusaka. “My home town is Hiroshima, so I know that memorials are important, but I would understand if people didn’t want to see these buildings any more.”
When the work begins he is hoping to put a park in this area. The town centre will be zoned for commercial use only. Post-tsunami legislation won’t permit anyone to live down here. Civil engineers will terrace the surrounding mountains to make room for new homes at high elevations, and the earth they dig out will be used to raise the lower land and roads by 5.4 metres. That’s the basic plan, subject to inevitable complications and “bad ideas from outside consultants”, as Kusaka puts it. An outsider himself, he has made a point of getting to know the locals, and asking them what they want. Higher ground is the general consensus, though this coastline doesn’t offer much alternative – stay close to the water and take your chances, or climb the slopes and survive. “Almost everyone agrees that it’s the only thing we can do,” says community leader Shigeo Suzuki, when we drive out to meet him in Takenoura, one of 15 fishing villages linked to Onagawa. Eleven of its 160 residents were killed on March 11, and another six in the days that followed, all elderly people suffering from shock and cold.
“The village was like one family,” says Suzuki, “so we lost almost 20 members.” Of the 60 homes that stood here before the tsunami, only two remain, and only one of those is occupied, by an old couple who won’t be moved. “It’s a sensitive issue,” he says. “They don’t want to relocate with the rest of us. They think that it will take too long, and they won’t live to see it. They would rather keep living on the previous site, even if the government says it’s too dangerous.” Suzuki concedes that these old people have a point, but he’s duty-bound to think of the other villagers, now dispersed to temporary housing in more than 30 separate locations.
Consulting with a civil engineer friend in Ishinomaki, several design firms, and all his former neighbours by phone, Suzuki had a detailed reconstruction plan ready as early as last September.He showed it to Kusaka, who showed it in turn to the town staff as a template for how these things should be done. No longer in existence and not yet rebuilt, Takenoura has become a model village. “We lost everything,” says Suzuki, “but we will still have our relations, our traditions even if we move to a higher place. Our hearts and our feelings will be the same. And the good thing is, we’ll have a better view.” In other words, Takenoura was not destroyed.
There’s a historical pattern to all this, almost like a wave. Among the few things still standing in the village is a stone marker for local victims of a tsunami in 1933. Tsunamis come, and people retreat. Time passes, and people forget. They move back to the waterline. The next one could happen tomorrow. But the last tsunami of this size on this coast was more than 1000 years ago. How long can people be expected to remember? Suzuki, who comes from a long line of fishermen, says he doesn’t know.
“All we can do is go higher, so we don’t have to worry about our children and our grandchildren. Hopefully this tsunami will be told from generation to generation, like a warning.” Speaking perfect English, Suzuki then says something that sounds like a Japanese valediction. “It has only been a year. So many people washed away. Those who suffered in this tsunami, their hearts are still floating in the sea.”
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