Nothing was left’
SCOTT FARDY recalls March 11, 2011 like it was yesterday. He was in his apartment near the Kamaishi Seawaves’ training ground when the walls started shaking. Alarmingly. It was an earthquake, a colossal one, 8.9 on the Richter scale.
Fearing the building would collapse, the club’s Australian back row raced outside and stood in a car park. Three minutes later the tsunami warning sirens went off.
In the open air, inland, he was safe but Kamaishi’s harbour town area was not. A five-metre-high wave was racing across the Pacific towards the east coast of Japan. Twenty-five minutes later, it hit.
When the killer wave had finished its devastation, the scene resembled a nuclear winter. The death toll, out of a population of 35,000, was 1,145.
“Kamaishi was a well-built town and it had stood up to the earthquake. Then we started hearing the tsunami had taken out the city. I wasn’t really aware of the size of it and the damage it had caused at first,” said Fardy.
Tomorrow marks one year to go until the kick-off of the first Rugby World Cup to be staged in Asia. Japan 2019 will REPORTS feature matches at 12 grounds, including the Kamaishi Recovery Memorial Stadium, built on the land where two schools were wiped out by the tsunami. Fardy, a 2015 World Cup finalist with the Wallabies, plans to be there.
The Leinster flanker will be welcomed as a returning hero. He was one of the Seawaves’ gaijins – or foreigners – who refused to leave in Kamaishi’s hour of need. When, after a freezing week without power and with food supplies running low, outside help began to filter through and Australian Embassy staff offered Fardy a route out of hell he, like the rest of his team, declined.
“It was a fairly easy decision. We were young and all of us, Japanese and non-Japanese, were keen to stay on and help out if we could,” he said.
“We had a pretty close bond. If one of us had left I don’t think there would have been any coming back from that. We were a team and we wanted to help our community. We went to the volunteer centre in our tracksuits. Our job was to unload the trucks coming in with rice and other supplies and put them into smaller trucks to distribute. There was a big shortage of food.
“We went in to take some supplies to friends of ours in Otsuchi. It was complete devastation. Most of the houses were paper and timber and they had been completely destroyed by the tsunami. There was nothing left. It was incredibly tough to see.
“If it happened in other places around the world there would have been riots but the Japanese were incredibly calm and compassionate to each other, and organised as well. They did a fantastic job. I think I saw the best of Japan in my time there and the best of the people.”
Less than three months after the terrible event, he was lacing up his boots again for the Seawaves in the opening match of their new season against Yamaha Jubilo. A rugby match felt trivial but significant too. “In some ways we became a symbol of the recovery of the area. Getting us to play again was important to the town,” he said. “To have spent all that time together and gone through what we had, it was pretty special to get out there and do what we loved doing.
“I stayed for the remainder of the year for the clean-up phase until I went to the Brumbies in December.
“There wasn’t much progress in those first eight or nine months. It was more a case of getting things in order. But I went back this year on March 11 and the town has changed so much. The shops and everything were all coming back. The school now overlooks the stadium on the hill where the kids ran to during the tsunami.”
Tickets go on general sale for the tournament today. While Fiji versus Uruguay and Namibia against a play-off winner are not A-list games, the venue, Kamaishi, could not be more special.
“The World Cup is going to be great for the town and that area of Japan,” said Fardy. “It isn’t visited much by foreigners and it’s an opportunity for people to get out of the cities and see a really traditional part of Japan. There’s some spectacular scenery around there and amazing people.
“And the stadium is stadium with a story.”
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It was incredibly tough to see, most houses were completely destroyed
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