Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
the sun rises in the Onagawa
I’ve just returned from another expedition to the disaster-stricken Tōhoku coast and wanted to fill you in on this latest trip. (GR has published earlier reports for anyone interested!) This is the seventh time I’ve made the Tōhoku run since the March 11th quake and, as with previous excursions, I return to Tokyo depleted but also moved and humbled by the experience.
My mission this time was to load up my brother-in-law Kazu’s kebab-mobile in Onagawa and rendezvous in Kesennuma with Eiko Mizuno Gray and the Rainbow Cinema team, a motley crew of volunteers screening films (generously provided by Warners, Fox, Toho, Asmik, and other distributors) for quake survivors in the various shelters up north. The idea was for Kazu and me to provide free fresh kebab and ice cream to viewers during the breaks, while Eiko and her crew would keep the audience stoked during the screenings with their two popcorn machines (salt and caramel, respectively).
Onagawa, my in-laws’ home town was also hit hard by the quake and tsunami, with well over a thousand residents confirmed dead, several hundred still missing, and, according to a recent tally, about 1,200 living in shelters or temporary housing. So the morning before our deployment I had a walk around Onagawa, to see what progress had been made since my last visit a month ago. The whole port area is enveloped in a haze of fishy-smelling dust, but, to be honest, I couldn’t see much clear evidence of improvement. Yes, cranes are demolishing and clearing non-stop, and convoys of trucks haul debris to sorted piles (mountains, really); paths have been cut into the wreckage around the port, and many of the lightweight items (cars, refrigerators, bicycles, propane tanks) seem to have been gathered up. Nonetheless, the clean-up still appears quite superficial, just peeling away at the skin of an onion. A big-ass onion. Enough said.
flag waving in Onagawa
This current trip comes on the heels of a very belated two-weeks of chilling out at my parents’ home in Hermosa Beach (my first visit to the U.S. in well over a year). And what a strange contrast: The coastal villages I drove through on my way up to the far north of Miyagi Prefecture were once not so different from some SoCal beach towns; and yet to look at them now, you’d never know it.
Shizugawa 3/14/2011
I was meaning to take the inland route all the way up to Kesennuma, but a wrong turn off the Sanriku Expressway took us straight into downtown hell, ground zero of the tsunami. Shizugawa, Minami Sanrikucho, Koganezawa, and many other little towns that line this particular stretch of Route 45, grew up around river deltas and estuaries, their common geographical feature being a mountain-fed river spilling into the ocean at the mouth of a valley. Seeing the now-familiar pattern of destruction repeated in each of these depopulated port villages, one imagines a wall of black water roaring up the mouth of the valley, erasing everything in it’s path. Imagine turning a corner to see that coming at you! You actually can’t even see the ocean from many of the spots the tsunami hit.
I’d been to Shizugawa and Minami Sanrikucho in the first days following the quake, had stood at the back of the valley looking down on the tsunami’s aftermath, still steaming fresh; impossible to forget the sight of a classroom full of children pried from the wreckage and placed in boxes (boxes for heads, boxes for torsos, hands, etc.). Even now, over a hundred days since the tsunami, the record of what happened is unmistakable. Debris in every possible configuration fills low-lying spots, and the tsunami waterline is in plain sight everywhere one looks. The transition between Unharmed and Obliterated is absurdly drastic. (It was, in fact, quite maddening to contemplate what a difference just a couple meters of elevation might have made at many locations.)
still searching for bodies in Shizugawa