The wave recedes slowly

It has been 654 days since the earthquake and the devastating tsunami it triggered, and the residents of Ishinomaki, one of the worst-hit cities in Miyagi prefecture, are still far from fully recovered. They continue to rebuild, but the catastrophe of a lifetime has left a sadness they might never overcome.

The shops and hotels have reopened, again welcoming visitors from around the world. Other damaged buildings have been repaired and repainted. Roads and bridges again function as they did before.

The city's landfills bulge with an estimated hundred billion tonnes of debris.

The Kahoku Shimpo, the local daily newspaper, quickly got back on its feet after its ground floor was completely inundated on March 11, 2011. "We had to ask a newspaper in another city to print ours," says executive director Yoshihisa Nishikawa.

Citizens were soon being informed what had happened, what was being done, and what lay ahead. "We couldn't stop printing the paper even for one day - people needed to know what was going on and how the relief effort was progressing."

The Kahoku Shimpo's destroyed equipment was eventually replaced and the premises repaired. In the meantime Nishikawa worked on the second floor, which doubled as living quarters for many tsunami victims.

Today the walls on the restored first floor bear framed photos reminding visitors of the tragic events.

The earthquake - a rare and massive magnitude 9 - rocked the seabed off Japan's Pacific coast and set off tsunami waves that topped 10 metres in height. The force of the water travelling inland killed 3,236 people.

The recovery effort was immense, and yet 491 people were still listed as missing as of the end of this past August.

The tsunami "sea" that rampaged across the prefecture submerged 73 square kilometres - 30 per cent of the coastal lowland - including the city's central district. Nearly 54,000 homes were damaged beyond repair. Some 30,000 people moved to temporary housing.

Municipal authorities calculated the amount of debris across the city at more than 6.8 million tonnes.

In some places, the loss was far greater.

Seventy of the 108 students and nine of the 13 teachers and staff members were killed when Onagawa Elementary School was utterly destroyed. Some of the youngsters who lived through that awful day still show signs of mental trauma. Their terror began with the sound of a warning siren, the city's earthquake Recovery Office notes in a report.

Ishinomaki's wholesale fish markets - among the world's largest - were wiped out, along with jetties, processing plants, seawater-purification plants and management facilities, crushed under the rolling power of the tsunami.

Kanijo Snow, head of a local association of fish-processing firms, says the destruction went far beyond bricks and timber, leaving several businessmen, who lost everything, in dire mental states.

In the wake of the disaster, a significant proportion of their skilled labour moved to jobs in other cities, like Sendai and Tokyo. "And once they get a job somewhere else, it's very difficult to get them to come back," Snow says.

Some of the marine-related businesses also moved elsewhere, but the government's recovery effort convinced 60 per cent of the affected fish processors to remain and rebuild.

Snow says a third are now preparing to start over and another 10 per cent are still thinking it through. Those figures would jump if there were more incentive, he adds. "It would help us a lot if the government could provide us financial assistance to rebuild all the damaged infrastructure within three years."

Three years is too tall an order, though, for Masatoshi Hoshi, who runs the city's Disaster Reconstruction Department. The municipality will need 10 years to implement its full recovery plan and restore life to what it was, he says. Nevertheless, much has been achieved in the past 19 months, with most buildings repaired or replaced.

Hoshi says the city might relocate its residential areas away from the coast so they're safer, leaving the shoreline an industrial and commercial zone.

A 7.2-metre-tall embankment is to be erected along the shore, a safeguard against another tsunami, though the phenomenon is relatively rare in any destructive form.

More important for Tomoko Otsuka is safeguarding future generations by giving them a plan for what to do when calamity strikes.

Otsuka's work with the Ishinomaki Disaster Recovery Assistance Council has shown her ample evidence of the suffering that ensues and how people cope with it.

For one thing, she says, the survivors in general dislike expressing their feelings about what happened. Most instead look forward to getting on with their lives and leaving the sadness behind. They need time to restore the normalcy, Otsuka says.

"It's better for them not to talk about what happened in the past. Let's do something else to keep their lives moving forward. This earthquake should be a lesson learned for the next generation, in terms of how to prepare for unprecedented disaster."

Tuesday 25 December 2012

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