Disaster rebuild, the Japanese way
PAUL GORMAN
CHILLING MEMORIES: The March 2011 tsunami reached up to 15m high along the hills at the back of Onagawa.
You can tell the tears are not far away. Mine are close too, the first pinpricks of salt water stinging my eyes.
But Masaki Takahashi remains stoic as he recalls what the March 11, 2011, tsunami did to his home town and how he lost his grandfather to the ocean that terrible day.
It may have been a path he didn't intend to stray down this particular day nearly four years later but, like Christchurch people unable to resist recalling their earthquake stories, it was nigh on impossible for him to avoid.
Takahashi, the director of long-time family business Takamasa & Co, has just given us a tour of the fish-processing factory famous in Japan and parts of Southeast Asia for its special delicacy of kamaboko - fish cakes.
But now, conversing more casually while drinking green tea, the story of that day surfaces. This is a man who has pledged to do everything possible to rebuild Onagawa in the Miyagi Prefecture, about 400km north of Tokyo.
This beautiful small town, in a quiet cove embraced by wooded hills, was among the coastal settlements worst affected by the tsunami. The day we visit it is a scene of tranquility - the sun glinting off the harbour, the black kites hovering above the hills, catching what few winter thermals they can in their search for food, the cutting wind slicing through us.
But this is the same body of water that swept more than 800 people to their deaths that snowy Friday afternoon. The high-tide mark of the tsunami is still visible in places along the hill slopes, temporary housing and a trailer hotel provide homes for many hundreds and the thin air is filled with the sound of the rebuild - the "ttrrrrrrrrrrr" of drills, the beep of trucks and the "chunka-chunka" of diggers and bulldozers.
At the back of your mind are those awful, chilling clips still on YouTube of the tsunami washing in, quickly building and inexorably overwhelming Onagawa, nearby Ishinomaki and the city of Sendai.
It was just 70km out to sea from here that titanic forces were unleashed by the Great East Japan, or Tohoku, Earthquake, the world's fourth largest since modern instruments began recording quakes in 1900. The magnitude 9.0 quake, which lasted several minutes, began at 2.46pm and is the most powerful known to have hit Japan.
The megathrust quake occurred when the Okhotsk Plate adjacent to the North American Plate, rucked up by the motion of the Pacific Plate subducting below it, suddenly gave way, springing back up along a rupture of several hundred kilometres in length and generating the massive earthquake. The sea floor rose by up to eight-metres initiating the tsunami, which in under half an hour later began rolling into bays facing the epicentre as a series of increasingly large surges.
The earthquake was so large it moved northeastern Japan 2.4m closer to North America and dropped 400km of coastline by 0.6m, which made it easier for the tsunami to swamp places far inland. Nasa scientists calculated the quake redistributed the Earth's mass and affected its rotation, and our days are now 1.8 microseconds shorter as a result.
The tsunami, later stated as a 1-in-1000 year event, inundated 561 sq km of land, running many kilometres inland. Sea-level rose about 15m in Onagawa but reached more than twice that height along some parts of the coasts of Miyagi and Iwate prefectures. In all, 15,900 are believed to have been killed by the tsunami, with another 2600 people missing.
Onagawa lost 827 people from a population of about 10,000, or about one in every 12 residents. Imagine if the February 22, 2011, quake had killed 30,000 people in Christchurch? That harrowing comparison to this day continues rebounding inside my head. In Onagawa, 75 per cent of buildings were destroyed by the tsunami waves, which lasted up to six hours. Yet those we met were unbelievably positive about the future and staying in the town, despite losing family members in the most terrifying experience imaginable.
Damage from the tsunami becomes more evident the closer you get to Onagawa. Christchurch residents would recognise the empty blocks of land in the middle of residential districts and empathise with strings of cones marking broken roads. Brightly lit drink-vending machines dot the landscape. Bulldozers are working on a new sea-wall.
'TREASURE FROM HEAVEN'
Takahashi, 40, says his fish-processing company is the largest private company in Onagawa, employing about 200 workers from the town, double the number from before the tsunami. With each employee supporting three or four family members, he feels responsible for the wellbeing of about 10 per cent of the town.
"I haven't had a day off since the tsunami. I sleep four hours a day. I spend 60 per cent of my time at work, 30 per cent working on [rebuilding] Onagawa town and 10 per cent left for my family only." He says he feels the guiding hand from heaven of his late grandfather when he is making company decisions affecting so many Onagawans.
"My grandfather didn't want any retirement pay when he retired. Instead, he asked for ¥7.8 million (NZ$88,000) when he left, because he wanted to get the town the best model of ambulance he could. That was about 10 years ago. Then the tsunami washed away the ambulance and my grandfather."
Before the tsunami there were 12 privately owned inns in Onagawa, says El Faro trailer hotel proprietor Sasaki Satoko , who lost her parents and her home. "The disaster destroyed all 12 inns. There was no place to stay, so volunteers who came here to help us had to stay away from here in Sendai. They needed two hours just to get here. They were so tired.
"The idea came to us of using trailers - they didn't need any foundation work and can be moved anywhere to be used." Forty wooden trailers painted in red, yellow, green and blue pastel shades offer 63 rooms of up to 20 sq m, for about ¥6500 (NZ$73) a night. A variety of guests, including rebuild workers, stay here on rising ground behind where the town was.
"After the tsunami, a lot of people wanted us to start the hotel again. The good relationship between me and my guests is a treasure from heaven from my parents."
'FOLLOW OUR LIGHT'
Satoko's horrific experience of the tsunami left me speechless. After the quake she left her home, rushed to pick up two of her children from school and was driving towards the hills with the tsunami following just 15m behind her. When she reached safety above Onagawa, the sight of houses and buildings being crushed and swept away, and the sound of explosions and glimpses of fire spreading across the water, were impossible to believe.
She had another son in Sendai. "I didn't know how my son was for four days. On the fifth day my son appeared from out of the blue. Now, with the hotel, I can show my happiness in front of my children."
She believes Onagawa will become better than before the disaster and chose El Faro, or lighthouse in Spanish, as the hotel's name. "It's our turn to be a guide and give light to the affected area. They can follow our light." Onagawa Mayor Yoshiaki Suda's business card says it all: "Let's regain it! Full of smile, Onagawa town!" He shows us a temporary housing development - where he lives - partly designed by Transitional Cathedral designer Shigeru Ban and which takes us up a hill overlooking the town's reconstruction.
Onagawa, he says, had a sea wall to protect it from the expected one-in-100 year, 5m-high, tsunami, but not the one-in-1000 year event. The new sea wall will be closer to 10m. Six of his relatives died in the tsunami, including his uncle and aunt.
"I was out of town. I felt a big shock and expected the tsunami to be 5m. I just reached the town, but the town was already filled with water, so I couldn't come in. The next day I looked at the state of my town and was lost for words." Suda hopes that even though the town's population has shrunk to around 7000, it will grow again. Seventy-five per cent of residents have chosen to relocate to higher ground.
"Workers from all over Japan are working on the rebuild. We are trying to build a new town, not make a restoration. I can't say I'm 100 per cent satisfied [with progress] but I see the completion of the roads - this makes me very happy.
"I'd like to thank people from all around the world for their support, especially to the people in Christchurch, which came a few weeks before us with an earthquake."
ROAD TO RECOVERY
Unlike Onagawa, Kobe is well down the recovery track. It is now more than 20 years since the magnitude 7.3 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, which struck at 5.46am on January 17, 1995. The quake and subsequent fires killed 6434 people and injured 44,000 others, most of the casualties in Kobe.
The quake was centred about 20km from the city on Awaji Island, on the Nojima Fault that scientists knew about and had studied. Yet it seems hardly anybody in Kobe thought an earthquake was possible, given the historic record. Did the scientists not warn them they were wrong? Or did nobody listen to them? Or were they not given authority to speak? Or was it because in Japan there is a superstition that if you think or talk about the worst, it makes it more likely to happen? It seems incredible to think that in the most seismically active country in the world, there was a belief that quakes never happened in one particular area, especially given that nearby fault.
The authorities in Kobe say the population is now much better prepared for an earthquake, with advice about emergency kits and Shakeout drills, but I still feel uneasy about how big a mindset change there has been. The next big quake expected to affect Kobe would be from the Nankai Trough, south of Nagoya, likely to be around magnitude 8.0 and given a 70 per cent chance of happening in the next 10 years. Those are pretty high odds. It would generate a tsunami, which some estimate could be up to 4.5m in this region.
There is little evidence left of the 1995 quake, except for a small area left as a memorial near the waterfront. Liquefaction was a major problem and here the lampposts are on a crazy angle, the concrete has been uplifted and cracked, and metal railings are leaning drunkenly. It shows the force of the quake very well.
The 20th commemoration of the quake was a moving experience. In the cold, pre-dawn darkness about 12,000 gathered to remember, light candles, pray, listen to civic leaders speak and visit the underground memorial with the names of the victims carved into the bricks. The passing years have dulled the intensity of the pain for many.
Up in Onagawa, though, that pain is still palpable. It defies belief that such a blue and placid harbour could rise up in anger and wipe out nearly 10 per cent of the town. This cove which has taken so much punishment is still beautiful. The residents are determined to build something beautiful to go with it.
- The Press
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