The Great Eastern Earthquake 11/3/11

From Akita, Kazuki Saito, Jun Maeda and I travelled north east across the mountains to Morioka.  Morioka is the centre of the Red Cross for the effort for the Great Eastern Earthquake relief.  Both Jun and Kazuki work with the Red Cross as well as doing their other work lecturing in their respective universities and running workshops  On our way we stopped for water in a highway shop and here I saw many self defense force people having lunch (in Australia they would be called the army).  They are still working in this area 18 months after the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan.  They are the real heroes because they saved so many people and continued day after day finding bodies and working in unimaginable conditions.

We continued on to Rikuzentakata, which was the most worst hit place in Tohoku.  The first photo shows the land on the way to Rikuzentakata, which is rich with rice crops and other agriculture.

Then we arrived in Rikuzentakata.

The tsunami travelled four kilometres inland through the river in half an hour.  

The next photo shows the township from the hill where the Junior High School resides and where people were evacuated.  This whole area was full of houses and shops and businesses.  On the shoreline were 70,000 pine trees.  Only one was left standing and then a few weeks later it died.

This next photo is a shrine for a house which once was there.  You can see the boundaries.

The next photos are of the city hall. Please be prepared.  There is a car still in this building among the rubble and you can see straight through the building to the other side.

This next photograph shows the shrine which people created and attend to daily.  The paper sculptures you see hanging to the right are made up of of hundreds of origami.  When people are ill they spend time making these.  There are also hundreds of these to the left of this picture (not shown).  The inscription is very poignant:  "We carry it out with smile."

From the city hall, the view is of what remains of a department store and a hospital.  The cost to demolish the hospital alone is in the millions.

After driving around the empty terrain, we returned to the hillside and here looked at the temporary housing for several hundred of the township's refugees.  A man was sitting on a small wooden seat between the pine trees, his back to the housing and the township.  He was facing up the hillside and his view was a line of cherry trees, not blossoming now because it is Autumn but I thought of the hope of such a view.  I penned a haiku, but really it turned out to be a tanka which is another form of Japanese poetry.  I shared this poem with my new friends at dinner in Morioka that night.

Holding no promise

But deep within

A new Spring

The cherry trees

Of Rikuzentakata.

Sue Daniel