Couple in the Rubble

This couple retired from Tokyo to Tohoku to live out a quiet life.  Their home was spared but they spend their days patrolling the wreckage, keeping out looters.  This whole valley was lined by homes.  You can neither see nor hear the sea from here, but the tsunami raced up it destroying everything.

My original caption:

(March, 29th, 2011)  Minamisanriku, Miyagi, Japan.  The town is still in ruins more than two weeks after the tsunami.  In Nijuichihama, Mr. and Mrs. Sukui patrol the empty streets for thieves.  "We retired here from Tokyo to live in the country, then this happened."

The Wave on the Hill

There is a section of photos that I took that I can't find.  

I took my wife's old laptop to Tohoku and I am glad that anythng worked out using that case of gears and oil.

Ths photo is from that lost set.  The Yoshitaro family lived on top of the highest hill in the Koizumi.  Mr.  Yoshitaro is a carpenter and built the family's two story house.  When they heard the tsunami sirens the chidren went to the second floor window to watch an see if a tsunami came in to the coast about a kilometer away.  The hill they lived on was so high that the idea of a tsunami reaching it was absurd.  As the black wave destroyed the bridges and train station below the house and rushed up the river valley next to it, it became apparent that the wave would overtake the house.

The family ran up the small rise behind their house to the shrine where they heard they would be safe.  The water stopped a few feet below them.  The water came above the first floor.  

Here is my original caption:

(March 29th, 2011)  More than two weeks after the tsunami the rural area between Kesennuma and Minamisanriku lies in ruin. Moriya Yoshitaro, 60, lived on the highest land in the area and still had to run to a shrine behind his house to escape the deluge.

Ms. Oyama

With the anniversary of the Tohoku Disaster approaching I am trying to wrap up the narrative that I started almost a year ago.  It has been quite the year.  We had a son and I started graduate school at Tulane.  All of this had to go on the backburner for a bit.  To tell the truth I have felt odd going back through all of it.  In one sense I would have rather been there this whole time.  I feel like I am cheating, being here.  In another I feel like it is something that I don't want to or have the mental energy to think about.  But how fair is that?  I almost wrote, 'I get to sit here in a city that is functional.'  But then I remembered that I live in New Orleans, so in some ways I never  did leave, I just moved laterally across the great disaster that continually exists but slowly migrates.

When this photo was taken, Ethan and I had stopped beside some castle ruins next to a clear stream to eat lunch.  An older lady pushing a wheel barrow full of empty water jugs emerged around a bend on a road leading down out of the mountains.  Here is my original caption.

(March 29th, 2011)  More than two weeks after the tsunami the rural area between Kesennuma and Minamisanriku lies in ruin.  Masako Oyama comes down the hill from her home everyday to get water from a friend's house.  "My home isn't damaged, so I can't complain."  

There was a lot of not complaining going on with these people who suffered so much.  But they would always assure you that someone else had it much worse so you shouldn't worry about them.  I have a hard time picturing Ms. Oyama pushing that same wheelbarrow filled with full jugs of water back up that hill, then again I lived in Japan long enough to know that she did.

JA Minamisanriku

 Apologies for my absence.  There has been a lot going on, both with school and photographs.

This JA gas station, located as far south as you can go in Kesennuma and not be in Minami San Riku, had just opened last September.  This is its last day in business.  It sits just back from a cove, next to a river.  The landscape is barren. If you have hard anyone speak on Minamisanriku, you will know that it is a wasteland.  The wind blows and the birds cry and cars are in the water and trains hang from bridges.  This is where the tragic shifts to the unreal.  Taori Sato, who owns this station, makes change from a box for the head of Miyagi Prefecture's JA, Masashi Takeshi. 

 JA provided this machine, from Kyoto,  that is pedaled to draw gas up from the ground.

 I went ahead and bought gas from them because, why wouldn't you?  Again, people didn't just lose their jobs, they lost the places where there were to go to work in.  Will there ever be a gas station here again?

Takuya Oyama, 21, when told about the Japanese soccer all-star charity game that night said, "How am I supposed to watch it, nobody has power?"  I told him that star player, Nagatomo, had acknowledged that and hoped that people without power could feel that everyone was pulling for them.  Oyama laughed and said, "I don't feel it."

Yoshinori Oikawa, 21, who also worked at the station said, "Why don't those famous guys just come up here and take us out drinking.  We could pick up chicks.  We were famous for a serial killer, now we are famous for this.  It sucks."

Happy Mother's Day

These are carnations from the Sugai family's greenhouse in Natori, Miyagi, Japan.  This greenhouse is just inside the area where the tsunami stopped.  You can see it on the infamous NHK video that most of us in Japan, if we watched the tsunami hit in real time, saw.  If you look out the windows in the back you can see the wreckage.  The ground was ruined by all of the seawater.  So were the electronics.  The Sugais have seven greenhouses in total and hope to try growing flowers in one of them next year.  They spent a month or so cleaning out their house and now they have power and water.  Their home is surrounded by wreckage and bodies are still being dug out.  I spent Wednesday afternoon helping pull garbage from the greenhouse they hope to get back on line.  The large wreckage, boats on houses, cars in houses, buildings in fields, draws the eye.  The small, sentimental remnants of life do as well; the stuffed animals and photographs.  But it is the pieces of wall, the shattered glass the scraps of plastic the shards of wood that take hours to clear from a few square feet.  It is tiring work and it is going to go on and on.  The Sugai's would like to sell these carnations for Mother's Day, but the flower market isn't open anymore.  The equipment to harvest them won't work.  Distribution isn't running.  But they fed me lunch for three days and welcomed us into their home.  The mother told me, "We have met so many new people due to this disaster, I can't say it is all bad.  You meet people and they tell you where they are from and what their relatives do.  That has been a good experience."  I know my mother and grandmother would be happy that she made lunch for me the same way my mom didn't hesitate to take in people after Katrina.  The same way my great-grandmother would invite strangers in off the road to eat dinner and the way my grandmother would make incredible meals for anybody I happened to drag over.  I wish I could give them the Sugai's carnations, but they wouldn't stand up to the travel so I left them in a shrine for the protection of travelers and children because everybody is one of those at some point.  I left them for all the moms in Tohoku who can't see their kids anymore and for all the kids who don't have moms anymore.

Thanks to all the moms who took the time to worry about us and made sure we had lunch.

I will try and get back on the previous Tohoku trip narrative before moving on to the last one.  I am so happy that a lot of people got the chance to go up over Golden Week.  It is important, I think, for all of us.