Student gives insight to the Japan earthquakes one year later

When the earthquake shook the northeastern coast of Japan in March 2011, I was competing in a swim meet near Seattle.

For more than a year, I watched helplessly from my safe, comfortable home on this side of the Pacific Ocean as the tsunami flattened towns, aftershocks shook for months, and the nuclear meltdown frightened the world.

There are as many different stories about what happened that day as there are people who were affected.

All my relatives live in Japan and I had the opportunity to visit Japan over spring break. During my short stay, my mother and I were able to visit a coastal town affected by the tsunami, and took a day to participate on a volunteer bus that left from Sendai to where we cleaned a strawberry field in Yamamoto that was cluttered with debris left by the tsunami.

On the bullet train to and from Sendai, I noticed that we passed through Fukushima but did not stop there. Fukushima is the location of the nuclear meltdown. There is no way that the bullet train passes by a large city like Fukushima by coincidence. Every time I watched the news, they included something about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and radioactivity.

Visiting Kamaishi

An old family friend showed us around Kamaishi, a small coastal city flattened by the tsunami. She grew up in Kamaishi and her in-laws lived there until the earthquake hit.

She lives in Hanamaki now, which is more inland and out of the reach of the tsunami. However, she still recounts clutching to her mother and three dogs in her home while the 9.0 earthquake shook violently for about five minutes. Luckily, everyone in her family was all right.

Her in-laws now live in temporary housing but really have nowhere to go. They would like to rebuild their house, but people in many of the affected coastal towns are not permitted to build houses until the government decides the area is relatively safe from another earthquake or tsunami.

We also paid a brief visit to the temporary housing to see how her in-laws were doing. My mother —who on a recent trip in the United States visited the Manzanar Japanese internment camp in California — said that the houses seemed eerily similar.

Despite that, the old couple seemed cheerful and chatted away, although the local dialect kept me from understanding most of what they were saying. One thing I understood clearly was that the grandpa said, “We ran while being yelled at by our grandson.”

He explained that a lot of the older neighbors shrugged off the tsunami warning and he never saw them again.

The grandson was visiting on the day of the earthquake during a break from college. He had planned to leave earlier that day but decided to stay a little longer. Then the earthquake hit. Immediately after, he urged his grandparents to evacuate to higher grounds with him, which may have been the difference between life and death for the old couple.

What happened later seemed almost apocalyptic to me. Destroyed towns were left with no running water or electricity and severe supply shortages. Despite praise from around the world about the lack of looting, there was still petty discrimination and bullying between people who lost their homes and people who didn’t. Some people and organizers refused to share supplies with people whose houses were not destroyed, despite the fact they were almost as equally deprived of food and supplies as the others.

Volunteering in Yamamoto

There were about 35 people on the bus who signed up to volunteer that day. Since it was also spring break in Japan, there were a few students despite it being a weekday. People gathered from all over Japan, from a man who actually grew up in Yamamoto, where the volunteer bus was going, to people traveling from Kyushu and us from overseas.

The task was not glorious by any means. Although the soil was soft to dig, hours upon hours of just putting our heads down to dig and remove rubble turned out to be a physically strenuous job. Even with a whole busload of volunteers, we were only able to comb through about half of one field, out of many more, in a day.

Most of the rubble we found were parts of greenhouses, like the plastic covering and metal beams. Once in a while we would come across more personal items like socks, toys and pictures. It was hard not to wonder what happened to the boy in the picture or the owner of the socks. At the end of the day, the owner of the strawberry field came to thank us in person.

He had been working on building new greenhouses at a different part of his farm that day and looked battered. It was clear he was very grateful for the work and explained that he had only recently started recovering his fields recently due to restrictions. Because it has been more than a year, people who are evacuated from the area are starting to forget about the problems resulting in insufficient and inefficient recovery.

But who is to blame? I admit that I do not worry nearly as much about the people who were affected by the Haiti earthquake in 2010, or in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, or Hurricane Katrina in 2005 right here in the United States. It is easy to become consumed in the day-to-day routine of one’s own life and forget about the struggles of entire communities, especially if they are far away.