On this day ten years ago at 2:46pm, a giant megathrust earthquake of magnitude 9 struck off the coast of Tohoku in Northern Japan triggering a triplefold catastrophe – not only the mass destruction caused by the earthquake itself, the biggest tsunami ever to hit the country in its history, but also the subsequent nuclear meltdown at the reactor in Fukushima that threatened not only people living in the immediate area of the radioactive leak, but the population the country at large ; over 19,000 people buried, crushed, or swept out to sea – or still missing : a national trauma of an unprecedented scale that caused an immeasurable suffering that continues to this day.
We live about 300km to the south of the epicentre, but even in the Tokyo area, the shaking was strong enough to make you feel that you were about to die. I therefore can’t even begin to imagine the sheer extent of the violent devastation those up north had to withstand; the fear; the resulting giant waves that were big enough to wash away entire swathes of towns and cities along the coastline, desperate drivers of cars trying to outpace the waters, and those trying to flee on foot at the mercy of the sea as they were caught up in the mud and debris; unstoppable floods of boats, floating warehouses and bicycles and trapped families in broken buildings.
As well as the immediate carnage caused by the earth tremors and the waves ( I could not bear to watch any of it on TV at the time for self-protection but it was inescapable in the air around you), it soon became apparent after the initial shock, that a possible nuclear disaster on the scale of Chernobyl was about to ensue, with a large percentage of the foreign population fleeing the country as a result. I hadn’t realized until reading an article in The Japan Times yesterday that up to 30 million people might have been ordered to be evacuated from the Tokyo area if the winds had blown the radiation in the wrong direction: fortunately they blew in the other. It was difficult to handle: you were unmoored – the ground continually like liquid under your feet, intermittently swaying; the air itself felt hazardous to inhale. We were living in sealed up quarters to keep out the ‘nuclear rain’: you kept up with the daily atmospheric readings and wondered if it was safe to go outside. . The US military was potentially to be taken out of the country, leaving it unprotected – there were continual power cuts across the country : it was upheaval on an unimaginable scale.
I have started writing again about my own memories of that time; the other night I wrote as if in a trance, for hours, re-seeing myself walking home for three and half hours in a slow, dreamlike daze during the blackout, in darkness walking up the hill, not knowing what had happened to D: I have previously – several times on the anniversary – also put up a piece I wrote during the immediate aftermath, in this post from 2013 in which I detail our fears, frustrations, and dilemmas about what to do : the sheer heartbreak of imagining the levels of misery the people were going through in the freezing Tohoku region, where family members had disappeared, could not be found beneath the mud and the rubble, but who would sometimes be discovered later in quite macabre situations – in the branches of a tree, washed up on the beach, entangled in fishing ropes. It never occurred to us at the time to go up to the region to volunteer, as almost a million people did, including a lot of foreigners here as well as thousands of American soldiers (I think we made the excuse to ourselves that our insufficient language skills would have been a hindrance), but in reality perhaps we are not just altruistic, self-sacrificing, nor strong stomached enough. I don’t know. This now gives me a feeling of guilt.
But we didn’t flee either. We considered it – and were being urged to do so. By friends and family, by the British government. Yet somehow, the pull to stay was far greater. We live here. It is our second home. Our life is here. It is not perfect, but we love Japan. It would have felt like a betrayal. And once the aftershocks had diminished, and the threat of the reactors to cause cataclysmic damage had been curtailed, it was relatively easy for those living in this area to get back to normal. Spring came, summer came – you went on with the future.
For the traumatized people up in Tohoku, though, the situation was and is entirely different. Many were homeless – and have been living in makeshift shelters ever since that are not warm enough in winter. Although the government has put a great deal of money into the reconstruction of the region, it is insufficient, and many places are still like ghost towns – often literally. Whether you believe in the supernatural or not, it is difficult to watch this documentary without coming away moved and profoundly disturbed by the pain and distress that is so visible in the faces and body language of those who survived: such was the immediacy and intensity of the deathly havoc wreaked on usually peaceful villages and towns that it seems, according to many locals, and usually implacable and sanguine taxi drivers who have chronicled passengers who disappear into thin air, that there are countless spirits still wandering around their old stomping grounds who just cannot find rest. A lot of young people, who weren’t ready to go and are confused about where they now are. I hope that they can, eventually, find some peace.
The tragedy of 2011 is indelibly carved into the souls of those who were here during that difficult time; it made you realize how precious life is and that it is always full of upheaval – you can be alive one minute and dead the next. It could happen at any time , to anyone – including another similar earthquake ( a couple of weekends ago there was a large tremor that shook Fukushima, announced by seismologists as aftershock from the earthquake in 2011). The plates below the earth are still rumbling, discontented. The danger has never gone away. And now of course the world is in the middle of a pandemic that soon will have killed almost 3,000,000 globally, which no one, besides epidemiologists, could ever have predicted: how quickly our lives were upended by a tiny, invisible lethal organism. It has been hard: internal, and insidiously different from the external physical jolting and violence of a major quake, the challenges of this new threat are nevertheless similarly psychologically exacting; the isolation of lockdown, the constant suppressed fear, the worry about loved ones; the terror of dying alone in an agonising manner; intubated, unable to breathe. It has been a new, and very different kind of challenge that has tested the resilience, and sanity of everyone. Hopefully though, once the tides have turned, as before, we will all get through it.
As, to some extent, presumably, will those that remain, or have returned, to the stricken areas in Tohoku they were born, from a sense of loyalty or simply because they still felt in some way that it is still home. Eventually. The grief and inconceivable spiritual impact that those terrible days in March had on each individual living there, though, must make this very difficult. Possibly insurmountable. In today’s newspaper, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the disaster, a survivor, whose daughter was among the missing and who spent five months searching for her body, notes sombrely, that ‘contrary to popular belief, time doesn’t heal – you just get used to living with sadness.’
The Black Narcissus 