Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (38 page)

Keiko Kiyama, secretary-general of Japan Emergency NGOs, which had operated in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and which organized volunteers to Tohoku, agreed there had been a lot of improvement since Kobe. But Japan’s volunteer sector, she told me, still hadn’t caught up with its counterparts in the US and Europe. ‘Even now, I feel that civil society is not strong enough. I feel that we Japanese are fine working individually or in a small group, but we are not strong on organizational management. We need to be
able to kill small differences for the bigger objective. We are not so good at coming to one big idea.’ Kiyama didn’t think the government knew how to handle the upsurge in volunteers. Bureaucracy was sometimes stifling, she said, and government departments were reluctant to let go. They found it hard to deal with proposals outside their immediate bureaucratic experience, such as those coming from volunteer groups that wanted to provide badly needed psychological counselling to disaster victims. An official from Give2Asia, a volunteer group, told me a story that seemed to back up Kiyama’s impression of a rules-bound bureaucracy jealously guarding its turf. Some groups had been told that, for the sake of fairness, they had to distribute exactly the same items to all recipients. ‘They had to provide 70,000 of every item, the exact same brand and everything,’ the Give2Asia official said. ‘We heard of one group that brought 197 bananas [to an evacuation centre], but there were 199 people so they refused to take the shipment – because there wasn’t enough for everyone.’
⁷

Such obstacles aside, Miura of the
Asahi
said that something had definitely changed. For months after the tsunami, one of his friends, a law school graduate, volunteered to go to Tohoku every weekend, travelling north under his own steam, taking supplies and helping local communities. ‘It’s now quite natural for the best and brightest people to think that way and do volunteer work. This is very, very new,’ Miura said. I too was impressed by the number of volunteers I saw in Tohoku, not only in the days immediately following the tsunami, but for months after. Driving through devastated coastal towns, one frequently came across a school baseball team from Hiroshima or a clutch of salarymen from Mitsubishi, digging out an inundated rice field or carefully sorting through photograph albums salvaged from flooded houses. The Self Defence Forces were everywhere too, searching for the bodies of the dead and bringing food for the living. In one town, they had set up a mobile communal bath in a car park under a military green tarpaulin, so that tsunami survivors could enjoy their all-important bathing ritual. ‘I do kind of believe that a new spirit and new ideas are emerging in many parts of society,’ Miura said of the changes he detected after the tsunami. ‘This crisis I believe has sown the seeds of new thinking. Although we have not yet come up with any new ideology or new types of leaders, people have begun to think differently.’

It would be rash to claim that a single event, even one as traumatic as the March 2011 tsunami, could change society overnight. More likely, it illuminated changes that had been going on for many years. Certainly, as Japan has adjusted to much slower levels of economic growth, there were many ways in which individuals and groups of individuals had sought to become more actively engaged. I had seen, for example, how small towns and villages, for example in Oita prefecture in southern Kyushu, had come together to look after their old people. They organized a roster of home visits and put on activities, such as calligraphy or local history classes, for the older members of their community. The creation of a vibrant civil society was partly a matter of changing customs and partly a matter of legislation, said Jeff Kingston, a long-time scholar of Japan. In his book
Japan’s Quiet Transformation
, he documented the way in which laws, and with them attitudes, had been slowly shifting, extending and invigorating what he characterized as a ‘stunted’ civil society. ‘Ordinary citizens are demanding a more democratic society marked by more transparent governance, more public participation and oversight, and greater accountability based on the rule of law.’
⁸

One area of significant progress, he said, had been information, the public’s right to know. Since the 1990s, there had been an accelerating push for government disclosure. Pressure for transparency had gone all the way back to at least the 1960s, when citizens’ groups demanded, mostly unsuccessfully, information about pesticide use, food additives and pharmaceutical side effects. In 1985, families of the more than 520 people who had died in the country’s deadliest air crash were driven to use the US Freedom of Information Act to find out what had happened, exposing the inadequacy of Japan’s own laws. Grassroots groups eventually forced local prefectural governments to enact information disclosure ordinances. By 1996, the year after Kobe, all forty-seven prefectures had passed such legislation. Citizens were quick to use their new-found powers to expose wrongdoing, including bureaucrats’ fake travel expense claims and improbably large entertainment allowances. In one case, officials had claimed dozens of journeys on a bullet train line that was not even in operation.

The courts became more supportive of citizens’ demands for the right to know. In 2001, after years of pressure, a national information
disclosure bill was finally enacted. Kingston said that public scepticism over the Fukushima nuclear disaster showed how far things had come. People were in no mood to be fobbed off by bland official assurances or pre-cooked ‘town hall meetings’. They would not accept, as they once might have done, government sleights of hand, such as the attempt to render school playgrounds ‘safe’ by the dishonest manoeuvre of simply raising the limit of acceptable levels of radiation. Nor would they tolerate a government that they judged to have been dishonest and incompetent in its handling of the disaster. In the end, such public pressure toppled the government and yielded an independent parliamentary inquiry into the nuclear crisis. There were public hearings with archived testimony and widespread dissemination of findings over the internet, including the release (eventually) of video tapes showing scenes inside the reactors as the nuclear crisis was unfolding. ‘Despite some shortcomings, it marked a milestone in transparency,’ Kingston said.
⁹

There were many other examples of a more active citizenry. Some, such as the installation of lay judges in criminal trials, were the initiative of the government. Others, such as opposition to the introduction of a state identification system, were the result of citizens pushing back against what they considered an overbearing state. Launched in 2002, the Juki Net proposed to collect a database of every citizen, listing their name, age, sex, date of birth, place of residency, together with an eleven-digit identification number. Given the ordered nature of Japanese society and the well-established family registry, dating back to at least 1872, one might not have expected the Juki Net to have provoked much alarm. Citizens groups, however, reacted furiously, pursuing no fewer than thirty-five lawsuits against the scheme. Yoshiaki Takashi, a retired trading company employee, spoke for many when he told me, ‘The government has given a number to human beings as if we were animals or industrial products. I am furious at the men who want to know my private data when they have no business with such things.’
¹⁰

During the tsunami, citizen journalists had also blazed a trail. Not only had they used new media to spread information about what was going on, many had done reporting shunned by the more established media. Newspapers had pulled their reporters out of areas
contaminated with radiation en masse, but freelance journalists moved in to fill the gap. Reports from foreign media or experts that contradicted the official line were quickly translated and disseminated over the internet. Some journalists streamed press conferences live, bypassing the mainstream media, which often gave an anodyne account of proceedings. An academic study into the impact of social media during the disaster found ‘evidence that the social media activities of these rogue journalists/translators emboldened and empowered other reporters to pose more challenging questions’.
¹¹

Toshiki Senoue, my photographer friend, spent weeks on end in the no-go zone around Fukushima, documenting what had happened to the abandoned towns and villages in the shadow of the nuclear plant. He had found a trail into the exclusion zone, away from the strictly controlled checkpoints, that enabled him to enter and leave the area undetected. He took photographs and detailed notes and planned to publish a book so that people would know what had gone on inside a nuclear disaster zone that was officially out of bounds to the media. On one occasion he was detained by police and warned it was illegal for him to be in the area. Toshiki was having none of it. ‘The government is not going to tell me where I can and cannot go in my own country,’ he told me. By this time, at least, he had got hold of a Geiger counter.

After the Tsunami

Seizaburo Sato, who went on to be a carpenter and a volunteer fireman, was born in Iwate prefecture in 1929. He remembered learning as a teenager how to fight with a sharpened bamboo stick in case the Americans invaded. Towards the end of the war, US planes would fly low over the fields, strafing them with bullets. All he could do was hide. Once, he remembered, he squatted behind a tiny trunk as a plane roared above him. When Japan surrendered, the planes came back. This time they dropped barrels containing clothes and medicine. There was no transport in those days, Sato said, so he never got to the barrels in time. They always seemed to land on some distant hillside. ‘We’d lost the war, so there were food shortages and no jobs,’ he recalled of those years after defeat. ‘Back then they needed carpenters, wall plasterers. Those people could get work.’
¹
Sato’s parents sent him away on an apprenticeship to Sendai, then, as now, the ‘capital’ of the north. He stayed for four years, receiving no salary, just pocket money – enough to buy the occasional movie ticket. In Sendai, the American soldiers used to thunder by in trucks. Once he went to a baseball match to see them play. ‘That’s when I drank my first Coca Cola.’ He was terrified of girls in those days. Besides, it wasn’t thought proper to talk to them in public. The only ones he could relax around were the ‘shampoo girls’ who worked in the barber shops. In his early twenties, he moved back to his home town in Iwate prefecture, where he learned how to make
shoji
screens and doors. He was getting paid now and he dreamed of buying a bicycle, a radio or even a watch. ‘My parents told me there’s this girl. Why don’t you marry her?’ There were fewer ‘love matches’ in those days with many marriages cemented by go-betweens. Sato did as he was told. He moved with his new bride
to the fishing town where her relatives went back eighteen generations. The name of the town was Ofunato.

•   •   •

The first time I met Sato was a week after the tsunami. I had spotted an old man in a white hard hat picking through the rubble of what was once his home. Unlike many of the buildings, which had crumpled into unrecognizable mounds, Sato’s house was just about standing. It had a roof and a frame, though no walls to speak of. Everything that had once been inside had been pushed outside by the force of the water. Even the tatami matting, almost the sacred essence of a Japanese home, was spewed all over the mud. A white sedan car sat in what must have been his living room. Or perhaps it was just outside. In the indescribable wreckage and detritus of Ofunato it was hard to tell.

I clambered down a steep embankment to find out what the old man was doing. He appeared to be bagging up little mementos, any small item he could salvage from the salt and the mud. The thing that struck me most was his sense of purpose. Everything was so wrecked and mangled and waterlogged, there seemed little point to his activity. It was like trying to tidy up a municipal rubbish dump. But Sato had somehow summoned the will to go about his task. ‘
Gambarimasu
,’ he said, when I asked him what he was doing, employing the ubiquitous Japanese word. ‘We must struggle on.’

Sato was eighty-two years old. Aside from his hard hat, which gave him an almost comic appearance, he was wearing a bluish windbreaker and purple rubber boots. He was blind in one eye, the result of a construction accident forty years before. It didn’t seem to have inconvenienced him unduly. He had gone on to be a volunteer fireman. One of the items he had salvaged from the wreckage was his peaked fireman’s cap. He removed his hard hat, put the cap on and saluted. It was full of water, which trickled down his face, even as he kept his pose. Sato’s living room smelled of seawater. I gingerly stepped over the threshold and onto the debris-strewn floor. I was still wearing my shoes, an affront in normal times. These were not normal times, though, and Sato, too, was wearing his boots. He pointed to a solid-looking shrine of gold and black lacquer that he had built for his mother, who had died the previous year. It was a treasured item, and
miraculously the only piece of furniture in the house that had survived the onrush of the sea.

I returned to Ofunato twice after that initial encounter to find out how Sato was getting on. The first time was in August 2011, five months later. He was standing in the street, bent over something, with a drill in his hand. It turned out he was making a screen door. Better than buying one, he said. He was wearing a yellow towel around his head to soak up the sweat. He had on shorts, a short-sleeve shirt and scruffy leather shoes with the backs trodden down so that he might slip in and out of them more easily. Sato had moved with his wife and daughter into a little house at the top of the steep embankment, a stone’s throw from the destroyed house where I had first met him. All the debris had been removed. The government paid the rent on his new home, he said. He could live there for two years. It smelled of freshly laid tatami. The old tatami flooring, drenched in seawater, had been thrown out. With the help of a few neighbours, Sato had somehow managed to drag the heavy
butsudan
shrine, the one built for his mother, up the embankment and into his new home. It was a bulky item and it overwhelmed its new, smaller surroundings. ‘Only two people in this area managed to save their
butsudan
,’ he said. On the wall hung a picture of the Showa emperor, Hirohito, and a certificate of thirty years’ service as a volunteer fireman.

Sato took me to his allotment in the hills above the town. He rode up the steep path every day on his little Honda CD Benly. (Benly, or
benri
, means ‘convenient’ in Japanese.) It was a large piece of land and on it he grew an amazing variety of plants and vegetables – persimmon,
daikon
radishes, tomatoes, onions,
shiso
plants, cucumbers, peppers,
mikan
oranges, potatoes, aubergines,
edamame
, soybean pods and corn. He had put up netting to keep the crows away and a wind-catcher in the shape of a Japanese plane with a Rising Sun flag. A scarecrow in one corner was dressed in a crash helmet rather like the one Sato had been wearing five months before.

I came again the following summer. It was June 2012 and Sato was still going strong. He had just laid a floor in a nearby house. When I arrived, he was pottering around his tool shed. I had never once seen him sit still. Sato had featured in a magazine article that I’d written and he had kept a copy in a special wooden box with the magazine’s
cover – a picture of devastation – glued to the lid.
²
‘It’s my tsunami treasure,’ he said, carefully taking the magazine out and flicking through the pages. Ofunato, Sato said, was less badly damaged than Rikuzentakata in the next valley. ‘They’ve got nothing. Here in Ofunato we are able to eat rice and we have temporary housing,’ he said. ‘After the war, people picked up tin from the rubble to build their houses. These days people complain if they don’t have heating or air-conditioning.’ He snorted at how soft Japan had become.

Ofunato had indeed begun to stir slowly back to life, as Sato said. Most of the seafront area was still bare land, though all the rubble had been cleared away. A little set back from the water, a ‘temporary high street’ had been erected, an area of prefabricated buildings on a couple of ‘streets’ on raised wooden decking. There were shops selling electronics, cosmetics, books, CDs and cakes. There was the Chou-Chou Apparel Shop – what self-respecting high street, even a temporary one, could be without? – and a beer and
gyoza
fried dumpling restaurant. I had come to see one particular establishment: Hy’s Café. It was run by Hiromi Shimodate and Yasuko Kimura, the two women I had spotted, all that time ago, walking like refugees along the railway tracks after the tsunami. The original Hy’s Café had been destroyed, but here it was again, resurrected.

On that day by the twisted railway tracks, the two women had been sifting the wreckage. Hundreds of yards from where her café had once stood, Shimodate had found a tiny sieve. After I’d left, they discovered more items in the rubble. There were parfait glasses, miraculously intact, and a frying pan good enough to use. There was an espresso machine and an electric ice shaver to make
kakigori
, a dessert, though both were broken beyond repair. They found wooden furniture shredded by the force of the water and some steel chairs still intact. ‘They were perfectly fine,’ Shimodate said. ‘I put them to one side for the next day, but when I went back for them they were gone.’

The new Hy’s was cosy. There was a blackboard with a chalked menu. The noodle salad came recommended. I ordered a ‘French press coffee’. It seemed surreal to be sitting there drinking it with the women I’d seen picking through the rubble on that bleak, freezing day. Shimodate had moved into temporary housing, a compact prefab. Before that, she had been staying with her older brother who runs Shimodate
Auto Body Shop, but the house had begun to lean at a worrying angle after a series of aftershocks. These rumbled on for months and, with each new tremor, the house tilted a little further. Shimodate decided it was best to move. She started volunteering. She helped distribute care packages sent from other parts of Japan. She had an actress friend in Tokyo who had collected clothes from her acquaintances and sent them to Ofunato. Soon the fishermen’s wives were parading around in outfits worn by Tokyo’s fashionable thespians. More than anything, Shimodate said, everyone wanted to eat fresh fish again. Some months after the tsunami, they were overjoyed to see the lights from the squid boats flashing in the bay at night. ‘But we felt guilty about eating things from the sea. All those people had died because of the sea. Everybody felt it would be better to wait the hundred days,’ she said, referring to the Buddhist period of mourning.

The name of Hy’s Café was taken from the first initial of each of their names, Hiromi and Yasuko. Shimodate had worried that people would have neither the will nor the money to eat out, but the little restaurant had been doing brisk business since it had reopened a few months before. Both women were in good spirits. ‘We probably looked really poor that day you saw us walking along in the cold, looking at the ground,’ said Kimura. Now, without her facemask, she looked like a different person, pretty and nicely dressed. A tiny pink teddy bear hung from her phone strap.

Ofunato had got back on its feet quicker than some of the other towns along the coast. Rikuzentakata, which was more severely damaged, hadn’t yet been able to build a temporary high street, Kimura said. Even so, Ofunato’s population had shrunk since the tsunami, if only slightly. People had drifted away looking for work in Sendai, the centre of what had become a ‘reconstruction boom’, or in Tokyo. The two didn’t know where they were supposed to live once they moved out of temporary housing. There was discussion about building homes in the hills, but nothing had been decided. ‘There’s not much suitable land to build houses higher up,’ Shimodate said. ‘They could flatten the mountain and build apartments, but I think it would be hard to persuade people to move. So the city itself may have to be rebuilt here,’ she added, by which she meant exactly where it had always been. ‘They may have to bring in soil to make it higher.’ Up and down the coast, the
land had sunk by up to five feet, making it more dangerous than ever before to live by the water. Even if suitable land could be found, Shimodate didn’t know if she could afford to build a new house. Some people were still paying mortgages on homes that had been washed out to sea.

On the wall of the café was a concert poster. The star act was a rap band by the name of Deftech, the support a local band called Lawblow. The concert would be held that July. Lawblow had made a video of their song ‘
Ie ni kaerou
’, ‘Let’s go home’. It featured ordinary people from Ofunato walking through the debris-strewn streets, but singing of their wish to start again. It was pure schmaltz but, when people heard the song, they cried, Kimura said. A couple of customers came into the café, two young women who fancied an evening out. They ordered a glass of draught beer each, and a Caesar salad, fried potatoes and a portion of
edamame
to share. Shimodate went off to prepare it. The coffee, she said as she vanished into the kitchen, was on the house.

There were signs in Ofunato of a community coming together, building something that resembled a town from the rubble and the vacant lots. But Ofunato was far from normal. Someone told me that one of the town’s taxi drivers continued to wait outside the train station even though the small building had been entirely washed away. The story reminded me of Hachiko, the dog who waited for his master outside Shibuya station each evening. One day the master died and so did not appear. Undeterred, Hachiko returned to the station the next evening to wait. Every evening for nine years the dog went back to wait until it too eventually died. I couldn’t help but think of Ofunato’s loyal taxi driver in the same terms, waiting for non-existent passengers to disembark from a non-existent train.

•   •   •

In the year or so since Kazuyoshi Sasaki showed me around the gutted interior of the Capital Hotel a lot had changed. For starters, Sasaki had become a city councillor, elected overwhelmingly with 1,400 votes. The Capital Hotel still stood empty. But there were plans to build a new one in a different location sixty feet above sea level. Construction was due to begin in August, with funding of several hundred million yen provided by the government. Yoshimori Oyama, the manager of the old hotel, said it would be about half the size of the original.
It was due to be finished in the spring of 2013. Oyama had wanted to rebuild the hotel on its original site. It had been designed to withstand a tsunami, he said, and the wave had indeed crashed through leaving the basic structure intact. He argued his case, but others disagreed. Hotel guests, they said, would be nervous sleeping by the water. They would prefer the safety of somewhat higher ground.

The flat valley floor where Rikuzentakata once stood had been cleared of debris. Where the wreckage had been, thin grasses had sprung up, reclaiming the land for nature. I arrived on a cool summer’s evening and from a vantage point just above the flat, empty valley I heard birds twittering and the sounds of children playing baseball. About a dozen structures remained of what had been a town of 23,000 inhabitants. Even they were gutted. The people who once lived here were in temporary housing, or with friends and relatives in the hills around. Some had left altogether, perhaps never to return. More than 1,900 had died. A few cars crawled along the valley floor, tracing the roads that formed the grid of a town half-remembered. Beyond was the sea, flat as a pale blue mirror. It was hard to imagine it boiling up to devour the buildings and the people. There was still a smell of pine in the air from the densely forested hills around, though the 70,000 pines by the seashore had gone. I was standing near a stone pillar, a few feet tall, engraved with the date 3/11. The small municipal monument marked the highest point the water had reached. Like the ancient stone markers scattered along the coast, it stood as a warning to future generations.