Tsunami-hit Japan city now a model for other nations
SIX years ago, the seaside city of Higashi-Matsushima, famed for its bays and beaches, was destroyed in minutes by the tsunami that struck Japan’s northeastern coast.
The giant wave killed 1,134 people, or 3 percent of the city’s population, destroyed 73 percent of its homes and submerged two-thirds of its urban area.
Today, it has become a model for other cities tackling reconstruction and disaster risk management.
The lessons it learned are now being passed on to Southeast Asian nations. Take Indonesia, where Banda Aceh province has yet to get back on its feet after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, and the Philippines, hit by Typhoon Haiyan in 2013.
Through the Japan International Cooperation Agency, Higashi-Matsushima signed a memorandum of agreement with Banda Aceh City to cooperate in disaster prevention, reconstruction, economic revitalisation and other areas.
So far, the city has hosted 30 officials from Banda Aceh, some of whom were part of a year training prgramme.
Yagi Shigekazu, a section chief in the city’s reconstruction department said, “As two cities that suffered very much . . . they share an agenda of regional revitalisation.”
The 2011 tsunami left 1 billion kilograms of rubble in Higashi-Matsushima – 110 times the amount of general waste generated by the city in a year.
Amazingly, it succeeded in recycling 99.2 percent of the disaster waste, made up mainly of wood scraps, concrete pieces and incombustible mixed waste.
“This initiative can be implemented in any community if it is prepared in advance,” Shigekazu said, adding that the key is cooperation between local construction associations, the city and its citizens.
Higashi-Matsushima, in fact, had signed an agreement in 2003 with the local construction association, which promised the aid of its men and equipment should disaster strike the area.
The city’s prescience was based on science. It had been hit by three earthquakes registering 5 to 6.2 on the Richter scale on July 26, 2003.
After these quakes, scientists warned of a 90 percent chance of a large quake on the shores of its prefecture in the following 20 years.
“Higashi-Matsushima prepared for the 2011 disaster because it knew it was coming,” Shigekazu said.
The tsunami also showed the city where it was vulnerable and, to avoid being crippled by floods in the future, it laid down stricter rules for new buildings in tsunami-prone areas.
Houses and medical and child care facilities can no longer be built in the zone closest to the seashore.
Even buildings farther inland must have foundations made of reinforced concrete. Along the coast, tsunami surveillance remote cameras were installed. To every house, new disaster-prevention radios were given.
Information to evacuate to higher ground saved lives in 2011, said locals such as Emiko Saitou of Miyato Island.
“We islanders have a folk tale – if you feel an earthquake, a tsunami is sure to come – so you need to go to higher ground if an earthquake happens,” said Saitou, 47.
“That’s why only a handful of people died in my community. But my daughter saw the big black wall of water. She still doesn’t want to talk about it to this day,” she said.
They survived by climbing up the mountain on which their house had been built.
Higashi-Matsushima also hopes its Asean partners can consider some of its more creative solutions.
For instance, the town built Kizuna Solar Park, a mega solar facility that generates 2.1 million kilowatt hours a year.
But the city, which counts commercial fishing and tourism as its main industries, faces an uphill task in wooing back tourists, whose annual num- bers took a plunge from nearly 1 million to merely 41,000 after the tsunami.
“We used to see many visitors,” said Shinichi Kishima, 67, a local tour guide.
Tourism here has yet to recover fully. Last year, one of the six closed beaches was reopened, and sightseeing boats to Sagakei Gorge were restarted in 2015.