In northeast Japan, families sift through the wreckage of their lives, writes DAVID McNEILLin Rikuzen-Takata
MITSUHIDE Kanno (36) is standing on a pile of muddy firewood where his home used to be. He has come to salvage what he can and has found a single object: a hibachi, a traditional Japanese charcoal heater.
“We could only locate the house because of this,” he says, pointing at an old green water pump still clinging stubbornly to solid ground. The small family car is 200 metres away, upside down, across the ruined landscape of Rikuzen-Takata.
A few days ago, Kanno gave up the search for his father, Ken (68), who was washed out to sea. “We think he was in his car, trying to reach relatives when the tsunami came. Everybody ran up there,” he says, nodding up toward a temple.
His mother has gone to the local makeshift morgue to identify the bloated, partly decomposed body of her husband. A few days ago the police showed her the wrong corpse. “She was terribly upset.”
Rikuzen-Takata was once a picturesque fishing town boasting a 900-year-old festival of floats and a coastline bathed in the azure-blue Pacific waters. Today it exists only in name. The quake and muddy deluge has torn the town from its roots, leaving a gaping wound of smashed cars, pulverised wooden houses and twisted metal girders. Car navigation systems still direct visitors to the post office and the local government building, which are no longer there.
Across the town, and up and down Japan’s ruined northeast coast, families like the Konnos are sifting through the wreckage of their lives. The human suffering is almost overwhelming: 27,600 people dead or missing, perhaps 300,000 left homeless, sleeping on the floors of school gymnasiums and sports centres.
Of the roughly 23,000 people who lived in this town before the Pacific plates shifted on March 11th, 2,400 are dead or presumed so, says mayor Fotoshi Toba, who surveys the ruins from his makeshift offices in Disaster HQ on a hill above the town.
Among the missing townspeople is his wife.
“I’m human too, a husband and a father of two,” he says, rubbing a hand over his unshaven face. “Of course it’s difficult. I’ve asked myself if I shouldn’t be out searching for my wife, but I’m no worse than many of the people around me and sometimes better off. Everybody is putting their own feelings aside and working for us so I must do the same.
“We have one man here, a fireman, who lost his two children, his father, mother and wife. He is the only one left.”
About 400 of Rikuzen-Takata’s homeless can be found in the Daiichi Junior High School a few hundred metres from Toda’s office. Old people doze, bored youngsters read comics, legs dangling in the air, their lives in limbo. In a couple of weeks, the school must be handed back to its students, scattering this community across the region to hotels, ryokans and temporary shelters.
Many are bereaved and few have insurance to rebuild. “I lost my mother, father and younger brother,” says Yurie Sasaki, face wet from crying behind a pollen mask. Her teenage daughter sits beside her, eyes cast downwards.
“Everything is so dark right now. We don’t know where we’re going to live or if the prefecture [government] will help us. Families are going have to support each other financially, but ours has no money.”
Older children will have to look after younger children. Adults will move in with parents or grandparents, if they still have them, says Yurie Sasaki (42), who survived the tsunami with her mother. “My father is missing. His body will never be found. It’s okay, I don’t want to see it.”
Many people in the gymnasium will have to go into debt to rebuild, she predicts.
After millenniums of quakes and tsunamis, the fear of what the ocean can bring runs deep among people in fishing towns all along the northeast. Thick reinforced concrete walls dot the coastline.
“We thought we were safe,” says fisherman Kenji Nakajima, standing on the rubble of his home in the village of Sakihama, 30 minutes drive away.
Behind him is a 10-metre high wall, blocking the sea. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw the water coming over the barrier. It was 15 or 20 metres high. I ran for my life.” His wife, Miwa, stops sifting through the rubble to lift her head. “Another tsunami will come in 50 or 60 years. We’ll be dead but our son will be alive. I’m not coming back here.” Her husband says they have already argued. “I want to rebuild here with concrete but my family is against it.”
Mayor Toba co-ordinates rehousing from Disaster HQ, crowded with hundreds of people and soldiers. Over 3,600 buildings in Rikuzen-Takata were swept into the sea, including many apartment blocks; about half the rest are partially or irreparably damaged, leaving over a third of the townspeople homeless.
In front of the school, 200 temporary 30sq-m homes are already almost built, the first of 40,000 all across the three hardest-hit prefectures of Miyagi, Fukushima and Iwate. The agonising calculus of who will get this scarce resource has already begun.
The elderly, the physically disabled and women with children will be allocated the first batch of houses, the rest will be chosen by lottery. Some pensioners may have to wait for months. “I’m by myself, so I imagine I’ll be last in line,” frets Tami Konno (75), who has no children and lost her husband years ago. Even mothers face rationing.
Yurie Sasaki will be low on the list because her children are older, she predicts, “but everyone is suffering now so I understand”.