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Mangled cars in the Arahama District of Sendai City still lie where they were deposited by the Japan tsunami on March 11. The now overgrown fields were thriving farms before the disaster. (Cindy Drukier/The Epoch Times)
MIYAGI, Japan—Getting off the bullet train in Sendai, there are no obvious scars from the disaster eight months ago. Despite being the closest city to the epicenter of the monster magnitude-9.0 quake—Japan’s most powerful in recorded history—downtown suffered only modest damage and recovered quickly.
A mere 10-minute drive away from the city center, entire coastal communities were swallowed by giant waves as tsunami defenses like concrete dykes and pine forest buffers proved useless. It is a similar story across the Tohoku region: the unprecedented death and destruction was not wrought by the quake, but by the tsunami that followed.
The enormity of what must be rebuilt is apparent the moment you reach the Tohoku coast. Where family homes and productive farms once stood are now vast fields of overgrown weeds and ragged rice. Here and there a crumpled car or catapulted boat still lie in situ.
Multistory mounds of neatly separated rubble dot the landscape: mangled cars, toppled electric polls, and the remains of bulldozed houses. The parking lot of an abandoned elementary school is a graveyard of tsunami-chewed motorbikes.
Disaster relief was provided to every single municipality in the three worst hit prefectures, Miyagi, Fukushima, and Iwate, plus 113 municipalities in another seven prefectures.
There is a yawning gap between the survivors, and those elsewhere in Japan where life is essentially normal and March 11 is in the past.
For survivors, their lives remain shattered. Many will live in “temporary” housing for years to come. They are scattered and traumatized, having lost homes, livelihoods, worldly possessions, and loved ones. Most difficult of all, they have no idea what the future holds.
The Displaced
Isolation and fears about the future are particularly hard on the elderly, who comprise the bulk of the victims. About one in three living in Tohoku are over 65, which is far higher than the national average of 22.7 percent.
As of late October, the government had provided 51,537 temporary housing units. Many are far from the victims’ original homes, sometimes in different prefectures, and often far from their displaced neighbors. There are complaints of inadequate winterization, poor access to health facilities, cramped quarters, and minimal income opportunities, while also being cut off from food aid. This week, The Daily Yomiuri reported that 3,000 temporary housing units in Fukushima haven’t been occupied because evacuees say they fail to meet their basic needs.
The Kaihoku temporary housing site in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, is a single pre-fab bunker of seven units on the edge of a park parking lot. Most sites are bigger, housing as many as 100 families. But the government has erected units wherever they can find a suitable plot of land.
The Jyobon temporary housing park in Miyagi Prefecture is home to 100 families. Some tsunami survivors, many of them elderly, complain that the units are too small, poorly insulated, and far from jobs and amenities. (Cindy Drukier/The Epoch Times)
Inside, Takeo Iwanami, 74, spends most of the day sitting on his cot staring blankly at the TV. After spending four months at the Ishinomaki Minato Elementary School relief center, he was moved here.
“I’m not getting used to it,” he says, pulling on a cigarette. Life was better at the evacuation center, he says, because “everyone was there.” Here his neighbors are strangers; they don’t talk except for a polite “good morning.” He’s told most of his former neighbors are at a different temporary housing site (assignments were made by lottery), a much bigger one, but he’s never been there and doesn’t know where it is.
His loneliness is palpable, but ironically people envy him because he has the space to himself and his structure is bigger than most. Iwanami complains that it’s too quiet. Although children play outside the building, the double glass of his sliding door deadens their voices, and he closes the curtains so they won’t stare.
Kindness of Strangers
In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, thousands of Japanese and foreigners flocked to the afflicted coast to help. Most volunteers have gone home; the challenge is to keep reminding the rest of Japan, and the world, that help is still needed.
Some who answered the call decided to stay. On April 10, Chun Kawara, a 31-year-old bike mechanic from Kyoto packed his pickup truck with a year’s worth of food and drove to Ishinomaki. He’d heard that with roads destroyed and debris everywhere, bicycles were the best way to get around, but there were no volunteers specializing in fixing bikes.
When he arrived, he set up shop in a corner of the Ishinomaki Minato Elementary School evacuation center. In the early days, he fixed about 50 bikes per day—recovered bikes dredged up from the sludge, and bikes donated from all over Japan. There wasn’t even water then to wash his hands clean of the bike grease, fish, and rancid mud that permeated everything. In six months he estimates he worked on 4,000 bikes.
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