Ezo Seafoods-Hokkaido Seafoods Specialists

After a busy winter season at Ezo Seafoods in Niseko, I hit the road again in mid-April to visit fishing villages along the Pacific Coast of Japan. Only this time, my mission wasn’t to seek out new varieties of oysters or try local seafood dishes. I was going to deliver emergency supplies and help out with the clean up along the roughly 500km stretch of coastline that was devastated by the 3/11 Earthquake and Tsunami. I don’t use the word “devastated” lightly. Viewing the unbelievable wreckage and random debris for nine days straight, I continually found myself muttering “Oh my god, what on earth happened here.” But I was reduced to tears only once.

JAPAN'S BIGGEST EVER QUAKE
The earthquake that struck on March 11 at around 2:46pm was no ordinary quake. At magnitude 9 on the Richter scale, the quake was the largest ever recorded in Japan and the fifth largest ever (Wikipedia). A Tsunami warning was issued immediately. Defying the warnings, many people left their work desks in a desperate dash to salvage belongings in their homes near the coast, or escort their elderly relatives to safety. It was a fatal dash for many of them. At around 3:50pm, the Tsunami hit. Waves of 10 and 33 meters were recorded. Rivers of debris-thick water pushed relentlessly inland as far as it could and subsided after about 3 days. Some of the TV footage captures the raw destructive power, but it’s hard to grasp the actual scope of the destruction from the TV footage.

EXTENSIVE DAMAGES SUSTAINED ALONG 500KMS
At least 10 major towns along the 500km coastline were partially or totally wiped out. The impact was greatest on commercial fishing towns in Iwate Prefecture situated in narrow bays, such as Ofunato, where the water rose to up to 33 meters as it was funneled into the narrow bays. The three major towns that I visited along only a 40km stretch north of Sendai including Ofunato, Rikuzentakata and Kesennuma were essentially wiped out. That's 40kms of a roughly 500km coastline. For the lesser populated farming communities along the coastline such as Natori and Watari, houses, cars and expensive farm equipment were washed away, and seawater, sand, mud and debris settled on hundreds of thousands of acres of farming land, rendering the soil unfertile for potentially years. Sixteen thousand cars were wrecked in Miyagi Prefecture alone. Fishermen that have not lost their boats or aqua-culture farms face diminishing demand for their catch due to potential contamination from the well-documented dumping of radioactive water into the Pacific. Dairy farmers within a 20 km radius of the Fukushima plant have had to abandon their livestock, which have been left to starve. Propped up by support and encouragement from the rest of the country and the world, there are signs of resilience, but the situation is dire and getting worse as the full economic impact unfolds across Japan.

MOBILIZING FOR THE RECOVERY
From the top down, and vice versa, Japan is pouring all of its resources into the recovery. The police and the army control the disaster areas as the search for bodies continues. Contractors have been bought in from all over the country to restore essential services. The State is scoping out potential sites to build temporary evacuation shelters for displaced people. In the meantime, around 130,000 evacuees are still living in school gymnasiums or public facilities. All of the hotels or Onsen resorts in northern Japan, no matter how far inland, have been deployed to accommodate the workers. Each town now has a dedicated radio channel for communicating vital information for evacuees, volunteers and the community. Police lights flashing everywhere, army vehicles of all descriptions up and down the roads. There’s absolutely nothing to laugh about or funny down there.

VOLUNTEERS HELPING OUT
Around 80 Volunteer centers have sprung up along the coastline and inland, dispatching groups of volunteers to homes that have applied for help. I spent my first five days volunteering in Watari Town (pop. Approx 35,000), a farming community south of Sendai city in Miyagi Prefecture. Like dozens of other volunteers, young and old from around the country, I slept in the back of my van each night. There is a good spirit amongst the volunteers and various networks and friendships are emerging. With the support from family members back in Australia, I delivered boxes of fruit, stationery, gas cannisters, toilet paper, shovels and water to the Watari volunteer center. Some other volunteers bought much more, others offered their labour only and some bought their skills, such as the Taiko drummer who performed on my final night in Rikuzentakata. The conditions for volunteers were very good, with a well-organized center, a temporary Onsen hotspring set up by the army, and a supermarket and coin laundry within 5 minutes.

If the conditions were good, the volunteer work itself was generally dirty and physically hard. The day started at around 8:30am and finished around 3:30pm. Common work included shoveling mud out of people’s homes or gardens; salvaging items from houses and clearing heavy debris from gardens, such as cars, sofas, electrical appliances and any number of things that have floated in from other houses. Most of the owners were elderly and were clearly distressed during the clean up. Many will face mental problems going forward having lost family members, friends and their possessions, in short – their whole life’s security. Unfortunately, a huge slice of Japanese culture has also been savaged: I saw many traditional old farm houses and shops that had collapsed. I had to throw out smashed Japanese Tansu chests, Bhuddhist alters; Kimonos and Shoji paper screens, “Mikoshi” festival floats – the list goes on. These things cannot be replaced easily as flat screen TV’s.

INTO THE DEATH ZONES
After five days in Watari I traveled north to Iwate Prefecture, where I had heard the volunteer efforts and organization was less evolved than in Miyagi Prefecture – which was one of the reasons I wanted to go. Entering Rikuzentakata on Day 6 of my mission, I could see that this area was clearly worse than Watari, where at least some houses were still standing. Driving past vast tracts of ruble, upturned cars and the occasional semi-intact building, I could sense for the first time the large-scale loss of human life before me. It was like entering a death zone. I later discovered that about 2,300 of the population’s 26,000 were killed or remain unaccounted for, including 45 young firemen who were washed away when trying to close the town’s harbour gates manually. I spent the next 3 days there, working in micro-teams of 10-15 clearing ruble and mud mainly from fields and yards. In my search for somewhere to stay after working – just a carpark with a toilet – I traveled north to commercial fishing town of Ofunato, also badly devastated; and south to the now obliterated Kesennuma (pop. 73,000), which burned for four days after fuel from commercial fishing fleet caught fire. Obliteration and destruction was everywhere.

SIGNS OF HOPE
On day nine, after two days of lifting heavy debris and shoveling mud, scrambling along the coastline to find a hot bath, laundry and food, I was starting to tire. Unfortunately the Iwate government has not yet mobilized to accommodate volunteer workers, and they actually discourage non-Iwate residents from volunteering there which makes it hard. I spent my final night in the carpark of something like a shanty town emerging on the outskirts of the worst hit area above Rikuzentakata. Local carpenters erected a temporary hot spring bath for the evacuees and workers. Aptly named “Fukou no yu” (“Recovery Hotspring”), with a crude sign and powered by a generator, the bath is a simple yet essential comfort. It was a cold night, but a spirit of camaraderie pervaded amongst the 20 or so workers and evacuees gathered there for a bath or simply to keep warm around the wood heater burning under open light bulbs and blue tarpaulins. A troupe of performers from Tokyo including two “Minyo” folk singers and a Taiko drummer put on a simple yet charged performance. It might have been the sake, but some of us gathered there felt like we had witnessed the exact moment where the deep spirit of Japanese emerged to help people through yet another shocking upheaval that seem to define Japanese history.