Lives rebuilt FIVE YEARS ON
Five years ago, Japan was devastated by its most deadly, and costly, natural disaster. Almost 26 trillion yen (NZD$350 billion) later, the rebuild is in full swing. Ashleigh Stewart returns to the worst-affected areas, exactly five years after her initial
Toshihiko Fujita’s face is not weathered by age, or the years of struggle and tragedy. If anything, time has been kind to him. His tousled hair is still held back by a bandanna as his arms fly in all directions, spiritedly handing out orders to those encircling him. He looks well rested, happy.
He is a different man to the one I happened upon half a decade earlier wandering listlessly through the streets of the devastated port town considering his fate.
From the second floor of his house, Fujita had watched a wall of water engulf his town as his mother struggled downstairs to help her elderly sister out of harm’s way.
‘‘Mum!’’ he called as the water advanced on their house. ‘‘Mum,’’ he called again, as cars floated by and the water level rose to the windows. She never replied. Four days later, Fujita was rescued from the roof. For 96 hours he could see his mother’s lifeless body lying in the water below.
The city lost 3162 people, and about 430 are still missing.
Three weeks after the tsunami, while in Ishinomaki volunteering, I saw Fujita walking his bike along the street, and approached seeking directions.
Instead, Fujita indicated the crumbling building behind him, which had once been his family home. He described yelling to his mother from upstairs as the water lapped at his door. The force of the initial earthquake had jammed the front door shut, locking his aunty outside. His mother had opened a window and grabbed her hand when a giant wave came along.
Much has changed since then. He ran a soup kitchen in the area for a while, and founded a small organisation co-ordinating teams of volunteers. He has rebuilt the kindergarten he owned that had been swept away by the tsunami. His house has been rebuilt too. And today, exactly five years on from the day it all changed, he is volunteering again.
Almost 9000 people still live in Ishinomaki’s temporary housing shelters, a large slice of the 57,667 evacuees across three prefectures. Many are showing signs of depression and stress.
This anniversary, like every one before it, a group from Japan’s southernmost island has arrived at one shelter to dole out homemade ramen. Refugees, mostly elderly, stream from the prison camp-like rows of makeshift housing.
Tears fall as hands are clasped for a minute of silence.
Exiting Ishinomaki Station, it’s unclear anything ever happened here. Five years ago buildings were stacked sideways on top of each other, huge barges found their resting places on rows of houses, and piles of debris clogged the roads. Now, every inch of mud has been scrubbed from every corner. Life goes on.
But the closer to the sea you get, the more reminders appear. House foundations still dot the streets, albeit guarded by barriers made of cute, smiling ducks. The sounds of hammering and power tools is constant, as is the sight of scaffolding.
The flattened land right beside the coast has been condemned, and has been earmarked for a memorial national park.
When the clock finally ticked over to 2.46pm, the Japanese stopped in their tracks. Some stood in the same spot they had five years ago, watching the water wash their livelihoods away.
Comforting words from the Prime Minister and Emperor rang out across the nation, via live stream from Tokyo.
In Minamisanriku, they gathered at the mangled wreckage of the former disaster management centre, which issued the last warnings of the impending 16-metre waves and has been left as a makeshift memorial.
Just two other buildings interrupt the vast dirty wasteland; a ravaged white shell that served as an evacuation centre, and a brandnew 7-Eleven.
The rest is a giant construction zone. Giant convoys of trucks endlessly ferry in dirt from the surrounding hills, which are being gnawed away to raise the land by over 10 metres. The convoys continue well after 9pm.
Upon spotting a foreigner in their midst, residents muster every English word in their arsenal to wish them well. Since the disaster, tourists are few and far between, they say, and they’re desperate to have them back.
Nowhere is that more apparent than Fukushima. On any given day, 20,000 Japanese workers are out in force in Fukushima’s evacuation zone, scrupulously scrubbing buildings, and scraping away the top layer of radiation-poisoned dirt from every inch of the area. The dirt is bagged, and the bags transported to ‘‘temporary’’ catchment areas— namely, the Fukushima countryside.
Hundreds of thousands of stacks of radioactive waste litter the landscape. They are stacked at the base of roadside tree trunks, behind a house, in paddocks. From here they will be transported to an ‘‘interim’’ holding place, and from there an unknown ‘‘final’’ destination. Greenpeace Japan estimates 9 million cubic metres of it is scattered over at least 113,000 locations. They also cast doubt on assertions from the Government it is safe for residents to return.
Twenty-five kilometres north of the stricken power plant, parts of the town of Minamisoma recently rejoined the world after an evacuation order was lifted earlier this year.
Shops remain shuttered and houses deserted. Coastal houses have retreated, and now look out over vast, deserted plains.
Minamisoma mayor Katsunobu Sakurai blasts Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (Tepco) plans to restart two reactors at its mammoth Kashiwazaki-kariwa plant. It will be the company’s first restarts since the Fukushima meltdown.
Speaking from their Tokyo headquarters, Tepco spokeswoman Yukako Handa is quick to admit the under-fire company’s mistakes.
In February, three former Tepco executives were charged with contributing to deaths and injuries stemming from the meltdown.
In Fukushima City, authorities are desperately vying for tourists to return to the city.
The aptly named Decontamination Information Plaza outlays every detail of the recovery, featuring eager Englishspeaking guides.
The city authority handed out personal radiation meters in 2015 and found 96 per cent of the participants were exposed to half the internationally accepted annual dose of radiation.
The levels in Fukushima City were lower than that of Paris.
Japan’s standard for radiation in foods is already less than onetenth of regulations imposed by the rest of the world on tap water and general foodstuffs, and Fukushima-produced food was well within those guidelines.
Regardless, the rest of Japan are still steering clear of Fukushima-grown produce and meats – a serious blow to its economy.
Kiwi William Vosburgh moved to Fukushima City two and a half years ago. He eats the produce and drinks tap water.
Hailing from Christchurch, Vosburgh is not ill informed on natural disasters. His family lost its home in the quakes.
‘‘I really like living here. What has really impressed me is the speed of rebuilding. They don’t ask for people’s opinions here, they just go out and fix things.’’
‘‘Initially I was worried coming here, but it comes from a lack of knowledge about radiation.’’
This year, Vosburgh was working with his colleagues to restart an exchange programme between Fukushima and New Zealand, which was cancelled after the disaster.
‘‘There’s a lot that can be learnt here,’’ he says.
Further south in Tokyo, Luke Bradley still returns to Tohoku every chance he can. He still remembers March 11, when the earth started to move at the school where he was teaching English in the northern city of Yamagata. ‘‘Our school had practised earthquake drills so many times so I thought the teachers would be cool, but they lost the plot.
‘‘The ground was moving so much the kids were smashing their heads on the desks.’’
He had originally planned to be in Matsushima that day, directly in the tsunami’s path, but changed his plans last-minute.
But his heart remains in the north. He still returns to help with beach clean-ups, charity events and to run cultural ceremonies such as kapa haka. He believes his second home is ‘‘bouncing back’’.
‘‘Everyone was quite shaken up for a while. Japanese don’t show their emotion very well, so for me to see them at breaking point was hard.
‘‘A lot of my friends have flashbacks of certain things.
‘‘But I’ll keep going up. I can’t stay away.’’