Malka Older's blog

Shelter for tsunami-displaced families in a local school gymnasium. Photo: Christopher Cabatbat/Mercy Corps

If you were a resident of Ofunato City on March 11 when the tsunami hit, and if you were one of the almost 20 percent of the inhabitants who lost your home, you probably moved into an evacuation centre. You lived in a high school gymnasium or community centre with a couple of hundred of other people.

At first it was very disorganized, and very cold. Then families started to delimit their living spaces with unfolded cardboard boxes or folding chairs. The donations started to come in, hot meals made and distributed every day, piles of clothes to pick through. A routine formed; folding up your futon every morning, spreading it again every night.

During the day, maybe you went back to look at the ruins where your house used to be.

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Mercy Corps' Malka Older (second from left) stands with the Peace Winds team, local officials and Ofunato fish market staff as they commemorate the market's re-opening. Photo: Mao Sato/Peace Winds

The tsunami poured through the Ofunato fish market, leaving the open-plan structure mostly intact but washing away almost everything within it. The narrow corridor of offices overlooking the selling space of the market shows plenty of evidence that the wave flooded up to the top of that high second floor: panels fallen or straggling off of the ceiling, empty shelves where wooden shrines used to be, an extremely grimy and unsalvageable photocopy machine.

On the floor below, though, the market is full of activity and trade. Mercy Corps and Peace Winds Japan helped revive the fish market by replacing the basic equipment needed to off-load and sell fish – plastic tanks, weighing scales, small forklifts, an electricity generator – as well as some of the basics for running a business, like the photocopy machine. Now one of the highest-volume ports in northeast Japan is again able to receive the catch from trawlers and fishing boats, and local fish sellers are able to get back into business as well.

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Every day that I was away from Japan — while I was eating dinner, watching TV, dancing, laughing with friends, or sleeping on the other side of the world — a small army of police, army, municipal employees and volunteers was at work in tsunami-affected areas.

Every day, they dug through the debris: sorting out the reusable and the sentimental; separating the waste into piles of wood, scrap metal, crumbled concrete. They worked with their hands, with small tools, with heavy machinery. Every day they were here, dozens of them in each of the devastated cities along the coast, digging, lifting, sorting, towing, piling.

Now, six weeks later, I come back and see the difference. I can see the ground, for one thing; the layer of debris has been in many places completely removed and bulldozers are smoothing the salt-soaked dirt. The foundations of buildings are visible now, flat squares of concrete or tile marking where a whole three-dimensional city used to be.

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A 500 yen — about US$6 — voucher to Sunlia, a store that sells household goods, clothes and food. Mercy Corps and Peace Winds are passing out packets of vouchers like this to Japanese families as they move into temporary housing. Photo: Christopher Cabatbat/Mercy Corps

After weeks of planning and hours of stuffing vouchers into envelopes, actually handing something to someone who needs it should be the best part of this job. In a way it is, but it can also be one of the hardest. After focusing on problems and solutions in the abstract, actually seeing the people who have lost so much makes the disaster real again.

We did the voucher distribution at the orientation meetings held by the local government for people moving into temporary housing. I watched the faces of the people lining up at the registration table: old women hunched from years of tending rice paddies, old men with hearing aids, young women holding toddlers, a few couples.

The city government, struggling to deal with the enormous demands of the past few months and with many of its staff displaced themselves, had only sent a few people to manage the meeting. Even with assistance sent from other municipalities, plus me and my Peace Winds colleagues, Yohei, Handa, and Takeshi, the line was moving very slowly, but nobody seemed impatient. All of them had done a lot of waiting in lines recently. As I handed over the envelope holding the keys to their new apartment, trying to give each person a smile, I had to wonder what they had lost besides their houses.

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It was my first time in Kamaishi, a three-hour drive north from the city of Ichinoseki where the Peace Winds Japan team is based. After seeing a familiar landscape of destruction every day in Rikuzentakata and Ofunato, it was a fresh shock to see the same wreckage in a slightly different topography. Somehow I had been able to focus only on the cities I was seeing, but Kamaishi reminded me that the utter desolation extends up and down the coast, far beyond the places I’ve been, repeating the pattern of loss and courage.

Kamaishi is overlooked by a giant statue of Kannon, shining chalk-white on a rocky point above the bay. There was a strong smell of rotting fish, from the processing plants and factories that stopped work, abruptly, two months ago.

We were in Kamaishi to help out with a distribution of basic goods into temporary houses. At the site of the houses — rows of identical prefab rectangles with corrugated roofs — we met up with the trucks carrying the goods and with five or six volunteers who had come to help out. The truck drivers opened up the back and started unloading boxes. I pulled on the white cotton gloves I’d been given and we started sorting.

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Mercy Corps and Peace Winds are sponsoring a free bus that takes people from the evacuation centers there to Ofunato for shopping, hospital visits, or just to get out for a day. Photo: Malka Older/Mercy Corps

In the three weeks since I left Japan, the demolished town of Rikuzentakata has changed very little. Where before the wreckage was spread more or less evenly over the broad space that used to be the town centre, it has now been pushed, by dint of heavy machinery and thousands of man-hours, into hills, some of them 30 feet high.

In some places the debris have been sorted: wall paneling, twisted metal railings, car after crushed car. In some places the muddy ground is visible. Some of the detritus has probably already been carted away in some of the dump trucks that we pass on the road, but it’s hard to see a noticeable difference. Rikuzentakata remains destroyed, and the violence of its end remains very much in evidence.

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One of the most moving things for me on this job has been the number of people — almost all of them men of a certain age — we’ve spoken to who have seemed continuously on the point of tears, and yet instead of breaking down continued to do the unthanked, essential work they are doing.

There was the man running the volunteer centre in the devastated town of Minamisanriku who told us about how his wife had been washed away along with most of the town office as he in polite, oblique terms thanked us for suggesting we might bring a psychosocial programme to the town.

There was the garrulous, septuagenarian shop owner and proactive community member in Oshima, who called out “I — rab — yu” (the Japanesification of "I love you") the first time he saw me in the community centre that had become headquarters for the relief effort. When we saw him later at the makeshift ferry dock, he told us he greets and sees off all the boats now because immediately after the tsunami and the isolation, people would line up for hours before the boat left and, desperate to board, would push and shove, even pushing women, “and that is not acceptable,” he told us. “It’s better now, but I come for every boat to make sure.”

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One room of the new bathhouse, built by Peace Winds and Mercy Corps with help from local evacuees, which was constructed using materials salvaged from last month's earthquake and tsunami. Photo: Malka Older/Mercy Corps

The Takonoura Community Centre in Ofunato, northeast Japan, has become home for around 80 people whose houses were destroyed in the massive tsunami on March 11. They don’t know how long they will be there or when piped water will be reconnected in that neighborhood, but Peace Winds Japan — with support from Mercy Corps — has helped to make their difficult situation a little more comfortable and hygienic by helping them build a temporary bathhouse.

For most of us, a hot shower can make all the difference between a good day and a terrible one. In Japan bathhouses not only help people keep clean and psychologically refreshed, they are also an important community space where people (usually segregated by gender) relax together.

Among the happy memories of my years living in Japan are the times when unknown old women, sitting next to me in the bathhouse, offered to scrub my back for me, as well as special excursions to particularly nice hot springs with groups of friends. On this visit, I’ve found stepping into a hot bath the best way to relieve the stress of aftershocks and extensive destruction.

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I was writing my blog Thursday night when the floor started to hammer.

It was after eleven and I’d been thinking about going down to the bath house on the ground floor of the hotel, open late because there was still no hot water in the rooms. In the meantime I wrote a little, checked my email, looked at the news.

And then the room was rattling. Then pounding.

There had been many aftershocks since I arrived in Japan, long resonating vibrations or gentle bumps felt through my mattress. But this one was entirely different. The room was shaking violently from side to side.

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The town of Rikuzentakata has been wiped off the earth.

We started seeing the muddy debris more than five kilometers from the coast, where the tsunami had swept up a river and spilled over the banks, destroying everything it crossed. As we entered the town itself, the piles of wreckage on either side of us reached to the height of the roof of the car. In front of us was a wide flat area that had once been a town.

There were a few high buildings left, the sky showing through empty windows where the glass and everything else had been ripped away. In a few places that had been cleaned of debris, we could make out flat concrete foundations among the sand and mud. Thick concrete buttresses attested to the existence of a large bridge, once. Otherwise there was very little to tell us what the town had looked like. The whole area smelled of having been very quickly and very thoroughly soaked in brackish water.

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