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.

According to earth-scientists, the topography and bathymetry of that shoreline expose the inhabitants to a heightened risk from seismic hazards. In the event of a major “tsunamigenic” earthquake, displaced seawater is funnelled through the contours of the terrain, pushing waves inland and upward to the surrounding slopes. This had happened 30 years before Onagawa was established – the “Sanriku tsunami” of 1896. It happened again seven years after, in 1933.

In both cases, devastated towns and villages were rebuilt at slightly higher elevations, and memorial stones were carved warning future generations not to live below those markers. In later years, these were largely ignored. Residents of Japanese harbour towns, or “minato-machi”, tend to self-identify as people of the sea, and have always been inclined to return. And mountainous volcanic islands don’t leave developers much land to work with, except for low-lying coastal plains.

After the second world war, Japan’s increasingly almighty construction firms encased the ravaged islands in a hard shell of concrete, which would provide a greater degree of protection against fire and flood. Throughout the fighting, Onagawa Bay had been an anchor point for the Japanese navy, and a target for allied bombers. In the very last moments of the war, a few days after Hiroshima and just a few hours before Nagasaki, a Canadian airman named Robert Hampton Gray was shot down over the town, having hit and sunk the escort ship Amakusa.

Decades later, a monument to Gray was erected in Onagawa – the only such concession to a foreign combatant on Japanese soil, and perhaps the town’s only claim to fame outside the country. Domestically, it was barely known outside the Tohoku region, unless as a source of decent seafood, or as a semi-regular vector for tsunamis. On May 22 1960, a monumental earthquake near Valdivia, Chile (which remains the most powerful ever recorded) sent destructive waves to the far side of the Pacific. When they reached northeast Japan the next day, they rose to heights of almost 20 feet, swamping Onagawa in particular. Known locally as the “Chile tsunami”, that event became the basis for disaster planning in the area.

Having seen and suffered it themselves, town officials shared the general opinion that 20 feet was about as high as tsunami waves would ever get. Breakwaters, seawalls, and evacuation shelters were configured accordingly. But the earthquake that occurred in the offshore fault plane at 2.46pm on Friday, March 11, 2011, was the most powerful in Japanese history. And the waves that followed forty minutes later were the largest to strike this coast in more than 1000 years.

There were four or five of them, according to some witnesses, but just one, according to others – a possible effect of separate waves piling up and over each other. They rose to heights of 15, 18, 20 metres (between 50 and 65 feet), depending on which post-tsunami survey you read. They drowned and dragged away almost 10% of the town’s population – close to 1000 people, from a total of just over 10,000, amounting to a literal decimation – and destroyed more than 80% of its buildings. Tsutomu Yamanaka, of the on-site relief agency Japan Platform, described Onagawa as “the most damaged town on the coast”.

I was living on the other side of Japan at the time, near the opposite, northwest coast, where the earthquake barely registered as a tremor. All I felt of it had been a slight lateral wobble through my kitchen table. The only sign I could attest to was a low and steady seismographic pulse across the washing line outside my window. When the tsunami alerts were issued minutes later, warning maps on TV showed up danger areas in red, orange and purple, but my own stretch of the Honshu Island perimeter had not been colour coded.

My apartment, in a small, declining town called Daishoji, might have been the safest address on the landmass. I said as much to my editors in Ireland and the UK, who called and emailed non-stop that first weekend. I was seeing the same images as they were – shaky cellphone footage of the ocean spilling into unfamiliar streets, and overhead shots of wrecked fishing villages NHK news helicopters.  They told me I was close enough. My byline said that I was in Japan, and their headlines would soon read: “Japan In Ruins.”

“What about the Japanese spirit?” I was asked, live on air, by a radio anchor from Dublin. “Do you think it’s been broken?” I may have rolled my eyes. For all their sympathy and worry, my Japanese friends and neighbours were going about their business as usual. I wasn’t qualified to speak for their spirits. But I told him what he wanted to hear – that this nation has a long history of natural and man-made disasters, and its people a proven ability to rebuild their homes and lives from zero. This was not untrue, but that didn’t mean I knew what I was talking about.

I first went to Onagawa five weeks later, ostensibly as a reporter. By that time, the wider disaster had been given its official historical title by then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan – The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011 – and was already dropping off the international news agenda. Reactor fires and failures at the crippled, flooded Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant had not sent radiation clouds across the Pacific, or at least not on a scale to justify the reported panic-buying of iodine capsules in US pharmacies. Many foreign nationals had fled Japan during that crisis, and those of us who stayed called those people “flyjins” – a crude play on “gaijin”, the pejorative Japanese term for all non-Japanese.

As it turned out later, initial fears of meltdown were entirely valid. The long-term effects are still being quantified, and will be felt in and around Fukushima Prefecture for decades to come. In other countries, and even other parts of Japan, “Fukushima” will likely be the only place name by which this disaster is remembered. Onagawa had its own nuclear power plant, some 75 miles north of Fukushima, and 30 miles closer to the epicentre. Its three reactors were “remarkably undamaged”, according to a later study by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the plant itself was now serving as an evacuation shelter for residents of nearby fishing hamlets. But the main port was effectively wiped off the map that afternoon, along with any number of other towns. Privately, I wanted to see this for myself – a place in the modern world that had suddenly passed from existence. Like Pompeii, or, more fancifully, Atlantis.

The survivors I met on that first visit did not find those comparisons frivolous. Their shock and grief was still tinged with a kind of awe. In the other public shelters at the Sogotaikan sports complex, the Shogen-ji zen temple, the Kinroseishonen boarding house for local fishery workers, the survivors that I spoke to described the unreality of the disaster as it happened – their feeling that the incoming tsunami had been a waking dream or nightmare. One teenage boy, who had watched the wave draw out again from the relative safety of his junior high school, pulling trees and houses with it, said he remembered thinking it was like a bad special effect, and actually “unrealistic”.

“I can’t believe the truth,” said local teacher Ikuo Fujinaka, standing in the ruins near the waterfront, at the former centre of town. Consider this, he told me: there was nowhere we could walk within a few blocks, or a few minutes, that had not been at the bottom of the sea on March 11. He provided a tour of the impossible sights that a tsunami leaves behind – not merely disorder, but a new and weirder order of its own making. Cars flipped upside-down onto the rooftops of four-story buildings. Trucks teetering over each other like see-saws.

Trains rolled sideways into graveyards. Motionless fishing boats cresting solid waves of debris, a mile or more from the shoreline. Fujinaka’s own house was now not much more than a floorplan on a plot of wasteland. He pointed out where his kitchen had been, his living room, the study where he’d been working when the earthquake hit – he was a private “juku” teacher, and hosted his lessons at home.

The shaking had lasted for about a minute, throwing all his books from the shelves, and his roof slates into the street. When it stopped, he went outside and started cleaning up, until the tidal gauges fell and the alerts sounded from the waterfront. Fujinaka and a neighbour ran to high ground at the Dai-Ni (or second) elementary school. From there, he looked back to see the ocean roll over Onagawa.

Fujinaka thought himself comparatively lucky. His three grown daughters had been shaken but unhurt in Sendai and Tokyo. His ex-wife survived the tsunami in the neighbouring port city of Ishinomaki. His elderly mother had been relatively safe at the Eirakukai care centre on the inland edge of town. By his own count he had lost much less than others: five close friends, his home, and all possessions – including three motorcycles, two of them vintage, and one of them a 1968 Yamaha DT1 that he mourned in particular. He was also grieving for the town itself.

“I wish you could have seen it before,” he said. “It was the most beautiful place in the world.” I wasn’t sure if I would have thought so, but it was difficult to tell. Most modern Japanese towns, including the one I lived in, were pretty in their green spots but grey and ugly everywhere else, all concrete blight and rusting sheet metal. In a country so prone to seismic violence, architectural aesthetics are now considered almost beside the point. The building codes developed in response to past disasters are designed to help structures withstand the ground force of earthquakes, and they worked pretty well in Onagawa.

As far as anyone could tell me, the initial quake had caused limited damage and very few deaths, even this close to the epicentre. But the same structures hadn’t offered much resistance to the horizontal force of the tsunami. At the waterfront, only the Marine Pal was still standing – a multi-story fish market, maritime museum and seafood restaurant, that had been the town’s only tourist attraction, and was swamped to the fourth floor on March 11.

The Enoshima Ferry terminal was lying on its side, near two other ferro-concrete buildings that were ripped out at the foundations – a small police station, and a diet supplement outlet. The latter three would stay where they lay even when the rest of the debris was removed. (They are still there today, serving as memorials that most remaining residents don’t want to look at, and as objects of study for engineers and researchers in fluid dynamics.)

But orbiting the ruins were the mountains and pines, and the calm sea that had caused all this. The water in the bay was so bright blue that Onagawa’s soccer team was named Cobaltore, after its particular shade and sheen. Fujinaka, unlike some others I would meet, had not been made afraid of it. His attitude was more or less that of Hemingway: a town can be destroyed, but not defeated.

I would come to know Fujinaka pretty well, and Onagawa in its post-tsunami state, through repeat visits and long stays as a volunteer relief worker.  Whenever I went back to my own prefecture, Ishikawa, the absence of destruction was almost jarring. Stepping off the nightbus in Kanazawa City, the sight of workers, shoppers, and commuters seemed incongruous and vaguely distasteful. I couldn’t look at tall buildings without seeing them collapse. I lay under the vast glass canopy of the train station, and imagined it raining down shards. Daishoji, my adoptive hometown, made me sad and restless in its intactness.

Most of my fellow volunteers were Japanese from other undamaged prefectures – students with time on their hands, older retirees, or people in their early-to-middle years who were so casually employed that they could get off work or quit altogether. Many of these were what you might call “dropout” types – musicians and the like. Such people constitute a rare breed in Japan, and the mix made for good company in our shanty of tents around the Sogotaikan sports centre, which was Onagawa’s main evacuation shelter for months after the disaster.

Some of the younger ones effectively became locals, and said they wouldn’t leave until the place was fixed, however many years that might take. They reminded me of a line from the movie Shortbus, in which the New York drag artist Justin Bond sings of all the heartland teens and twentysomethings who moved into that city after 9/11, and because of 9/11, “because it was the only real thing that ever happened to them”. I could not be sure if this was solipsism in action, or a bid to shake that solipsism off. Few of us could say that anything had happened to us on March 11. But we all came to feel we had a stake in Onagawa, which we had planted there ourselves, and which allowed us to claim that we loved the place too.

Through the summer of 2011, the work itself was hot, tough, and often unpleasant, but also mentally and morally straightforward. Sometimes, it was fun. We loaded little Japanese “k-trucks” with debris and drove them to the huge piles in the former Shimizu-Cho district. We shovelled sand into bags for flood defence – the earthquake had caused major subsidence at the waterfront, where every high tide submerged the streets again. We mixed hundreds of bottles of sake, sugar, and vinegar to catch the flies that swarmed out of all the dead fish in the rubble.

We spent weeks clearing out the Marine Pal, filling wheelbarrows with black mud and other stinking matter from the seabed. I assumed that we were salvaging the building, as part of the general recovery. I only learned much later that the volunteer centre was just giving us something to do – letting us feel useful.

One afternoon out on the roof, months before the Marine Pal was torn down anyway, a local volunteer tried to tell me. “I think this town is finished,” said Yoshiaki Miura, who was the only one among us who had been born here. “There’s nothing we can do about it. They can rebuild but there won’t be much point. Almost everyone I know is leaving, and they’ll only come back once a year for Obon [Japan’s annual festival of remembrance for the spirits of dead ancestors].”

He was halfway gone himself, even before the disaster – living in Onagawa but working at the paper factory in Ishinomaki. Some of his friends had commuted much further. None of them, he said, had wanted to work in the local fisheries, so they didn’t have much of a choice. (The other main employer was the nuclear power plant, but most of its workers were outside hires and specialists.) Miura was 32 years old, which put him squarely in the town’s smallest demographic.

In those terms, Onagawa had long been aging even faster than the rest of Japan. At the time of the tsunami, almost 40% of the population was over 65, as compared to 24% nationwide. The majority of those now registered dead or missing had been among the oldest residents. I heard many accounts of elderly relatives and neighbours who had not been able to run for high ground, or to hang on when they were engulfed. Some had told their children or grandchildren to save themselves. A sad irony of Japanese disaster awareness, and an oversight in local emergency planning: those old enough to remember the last tsunami may also be too old to easily escape it, even given 30 minutes warning. Another, bigger issue: many younger people had not even tried to run, or climb any higher than their second floor, because they thought they had a rough idea what to expect.

But there had not been a tsunami like this one, on this coast, since the so-called “Jogan Event”. In seismological post-mortems of March 11, that previous event had often been cited: a “tsunamigenic” earthquake of similar proportions, occurring in the same offshore fault plane, in the year 869 CE. Japanese forecasting science is based on known patterns of recurrence, and there’s an argument that a repeat event was broadly predictable, if not inevitable.

It’s been further argued (most vocally by Robert J Geller of Tokyo University), that this latest rupture shows the limits of that system, and the falsity of claims made on its behalf. But if Japan’s most advanced computer models and seismic risk maps could not anticipate this disaster, then the victims can hardly be blamed for forgetting, or never even knowing, what happened here 10 or 15 lifetimes ago.

“If you live your whole live in Onagawa, you will probably experience a tsunami,” said Tabayashi Tamura, a 70-year old survivor that I met toward the end of the summer. “If you’re lucky, it will be a fairly small one. If you’re not, well … There’s no way to stop it. You can’t go up against nature. You can’t win. All you can do is rebuild, and rebuild again.”  But you could also move, I suggested – perhaps a moot point in Tamura’s case, since his own house was one of the few still standing, amid tall pines on the rearward slope of Shimizu-Cho.

He had built it himself from those trees a few years earlier, as a kind of retirement project. He showed me the point on the porch that the tsunami had reached on March 11, and invited me in for cold tea. His living room still smelled of fresh wood, and of the books stacked on his hand-made shelves. He was very thin and walked with a cane, but stylishly dressed in a cap and long-sleeved t-shirt.

Tamura said he had no reason to move, and especially not now, having just lived through his second tsunami, which he felt sure was his last. “Although I don’t feel quite as comfortable as I used to, being this close to the coast. I find the beach quite frightening now.” Now the debris had been mostly cleared from this area, the scene reminded him what Onagawa looked like when he was a boy, especially here in the interior – all forests or rice fields, no cars or concrete buildings.

At the same time, he could remember when the port itself was full of boats and people, and the population almost double what it had been even before the disaster – a smaller, busier town of 18,000 or more. “People started disappearing a long time ago,” he said. “The young people, anyway.” Tamura been a career commuter himself – to an administration job at the University of Tohoku in Sendai – and said he couldn’t blame anyone for not wanting to partake in the business of Onagawa: “Catching fish, processing fish, sending fish to market.”

But he suspected that the future Onagawa, in whatever form it might take, would be even smaller, emptier, quieter, and older. “I know they’re making plans but it will take years for them to build it. By the time they do, I’ll probably be gone.” I didn’t know then that Tamura had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, and I was not in Onagawa when he died, in December 2011.

I returned for the one-year anniversary of the disaster in March 2012. By that time the town had been further erased, and the former centre was an empty snowfield running down to the sea. There were new roads and streetlights in place, but no people around – the remaining population had since been dispersed to cramped and prefabricated temporary housing units (known as “kasetsu”) around the edges of town and beyond.

The only activity was at the waterfront, where the leading local fisheries had pooled resources and installed replacement processing and cold storage facilities.  In a prefab office to one side of the harbour, Tatsuo Hayashi said his own company, Kyodo Seafoods, was only “medium-sized”.

Hayashi had lost two of his three factories in the tsunami, and he could just about afford to build a new plant for producing kamoboko (fish cakes). “But then what?” Tatsuo asked, referring to the Tokyo’s plan for a “special fishing zone” that would merge the different companies into a kind of super-cooperative.

“Let’s say we rebuild the harbour, and try to develop a big industry here, instead of lots of smaller, separate businesses like before. We’d need more boats, more money, more equipment, and more people. We would have to make a bigger Onagawa. But after this disaster, I can only see it getting smaller. And the town is still deciding what it wants to do.”

By “town”, Tatsuo might have meant its government, or public, or both. From what I could gather, the relationship between the two had always been much the same as elsewhere in Japan – generally defined by apathy, bad faith, and a mutual agreement to uphold the appearance of consensus. The disaster seemed to negate this, exposing anger and ambivalence on every issue.

Most pressingly, the town could not agree about the Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant. Even relatively minor damage and a slight spike in local radiation levels had spooked many to change long-held views on the subject. “If these reactors are so safe, why don’t they build them in Tokyo?” said Toshihiko Sato, a carpenter and calligrapher I had first met at the shelter in the Shogen-ji temple.

“All the power they generate is going there anyway.” He never liked the plant, he told me, but it had never actively worried him until last March 11.  His son worked there, and they argued about it. The reactors had been in cold shutdown since then – along with every other reactor in Japan – generating no power for Tokyo, but also no money for Onagawa. Before the tsunami, taxes and subsidies from the plant had provided up to 60% of the town’s revenue.

Its owners, the Tohoku Electric Power Company (not to be confused with the Tokyo Electric Power Company, owners of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which shares the same acronym, Tepco), had bankrolled the construction of the Marine Pal, the municipal hospital, and the Sogotaikan sports centre – all of Onagawa’s latter-day landmarks. Nobutaka Azumi, the mayor at the time of the disaster, had insisted that the plant would help to fund the recovery, if and when the power was switched back on. But Azumi had never been especially popular.

He had another home, outside Onagawa, and was seen to be an infrequent presence after the tsunami. He’d been defeated in the local elections of November 2011, and the town council largely replaced with candidates who were less openly supportive of the power plant – including three card-carrying members of Japan’s Communist Party, who were actively opposed to it.

One of them, Hiroshi Takano, later told me that the money from the plant would not “scratch the surface” of the costs from the tsunami, even if it were reactivated, and the public believed it was safe. “Which they don’t,” said Takano. “Not any more.” A new and much younger mayor, Yoshiaki Suda, promised a “1000-year plan” for the future of Onagawa, which prompted some of his elders to joke that even a 2-year plan would do.

There had, in fact, been an abundance of proposals since the disaster, and the Onagawa Reconstruction Design Committee (ORDC) – a select panel of local planners and outside consultants – had slowly advanced a simple yet logistically complex masterplan to clear and level 10 sites for new residential areas on surrounding mountainsides, and use the extracted earth used to raise the level of the lower town and waterfront, for commercial and industrial use only.

The design firm Urban Renaissance (UR) was drafted in to oversee the project, and the construction giant Kajima was later contracted to perform the engineering work. But that work hadn’t even begun yet, for reasons that UR chief architect Masunori Kusaka took hours to unload, when I asked him in his office at the new town hall – another prefab “kasetsu” building, the original having been destroyed. For one thing, he said, the town couldn’t afford it. The estimated cost of even basic reconstruction was 300 billion yen (over $3 billion) – more than 20 times the Onagawa’s annual budget, and post-disaster funding from Tokyo was capped in such a way that most of that burden would fall back on the town. Tokyo, for its own part, had been chronically slow to make decisions and allocate funds.

(This perceived inaction had effectively forced the resignation of Prime Minister Naoto Kan the previous August.) The nearest branch of the newly-formed national Reconstruction Agency had only three full-time staff to consider and approve the plans for hundreds of towns and villages. The issue of outstanding mortgage payments on destroyed homes had not yet been settled (though the banks would eventually agree to drop 5 million yen, or $55,000, of each outstanding debt).

Inheritance rights on those properties conflicted with the government’s attempts to purchase the land they had stood on. On a local level, he said, Onagawa’s own planning department had not inherited any useful experience from the long-ago Chile tsunami, and its current staff had suffered their own losses in this one.

“I am not sure they can do this job,” said Kusaka. “But I’m also starting to doubt that the job can actually be done. We are talking about altering 236 hectares of land. It’s too much, and it’s too complicated. It’s like trying to rebuild Troy after the siege.” Most fundamentally, he told me, “many people here don’t want the place to change”. I had heard this confirmed by a lot of local fishermen, and fisherwomen too. “No boats, no equipment, no work,” admitted Chikako Kimura, a former kakimuki, or oyster-opener, in one of Onagawa’s smaller hamlets, Oura.

Through the vagaries of the wave last March 11, her house had survived. But even if it hadn’t, said Kimura, she would not go along with the town’s proposed consolidation of those 15 separate hamlets into three combined new villages at a higher elevation. “We don’t want to live where we can’t see our boats,” she told me, those boats being purely figurative at this point. “The tsunami was scary, but the sea hasn’t changed. Everything is still about the sea.”

On the day of the anniversary itself, the official memorial ceremony was held at the Sogotaikan centre, but I stayed down at the waterfront with some other visitors and ex-volunteers. Coast guard crews were still out looking for the bodies of more than 300 missing residents. One of their boats sounded a long blast on its siren at 2.46pm, the moment of the earthquake. A freezing wind blew in off the bay, and I tried to imagine how cold that water must have been a year ago.

I was last in Onagawa in October 2012. Autumn is the best time to be in Japan, and Ikuo Fujinaka had invited me to go walking in the mountains above the town. He was still living in the grim kasetsu unit that he called his “rabbit house”, and was still waiting for construction to begin on new public housing, now scheduled for 2014. Like most of those still left in Onagawa, he didn’t have much of a choice.

Between the compensation, the compulsory purchase of his land, and a minimal payout from Japan’s government-underwritten disaster insurance system, he’d be left with less than half of what he needed to rebuild privately. Those who could afford it, or couldn’t wait until the town had new homes and jobs to offer, were now leaving at a rate of two or three families per day. The most recent population count was around 6000, but Fujinaka guessed that it was now below 4000.

He was teaching again, at his own classroom in the new “shopping village” made from repurposed shipping containers on the high school grounds.

I sat in on a couple of his English classes, and asked the students if they had any bright ideas for the future of Onagawa. They all said, unanimously, that they wanted it the way it was before. When I asked them if they wanted to be fishermen and women, they laughed and admitted that they didn’t.

On a warm and cloudless morning we hiked up to the summit of Kuromori yama, or “black forest mountain”. Fujinaka marked our route out with a GPS, and took pictures of the native flowers and plants – the town hall had asked him to help develop local nature trails and eco-tourism as a strand of the ongoing recovery. He hadn’t been up this way for years, and it didn’t look like anyone else had either.

The trail was so overgrown that we had to cut our way through with machetes, and the view from the top was obscured by almost primal forest. We didn’t really talk about the tsunami, though I asked about his mother, who had moved in with Fujinaka’s sister in Tokyo after the disaster. She was 97 years old, and suffering from dementia. Some days, he told me, she could not remember that she ever lived in Onagawa. And some days she forgot there ever was an Onagawa.