10 Years On: 3/11 in Miyako, Iwate, Day 3
The first two days of the disaster described in brutal detail a new world for those of us on the coast. Our slow life had been perverted into an environment of forced vigilance and caution. Our pristine vistas were now harrowing landscapes of death. Our very relation to the natural world had been simultaneously severed and reinforced: it was not the friend we thought it once was, but we also now understood it to a far greater extent than previously imaginable.
Then there was the loss, not just of life, but of attachments. Where we once had trust in the physical environment to inscribe meaning onto our lives, that belief was now abandoned and we knew that all we had was each other.
I woke that third day in much the same manner as before, yet something had changed as I had slept. I went to bed the previous night with a knot of anxiety in my stomach, having glimpsed the extent of damage, which already seemed insurmountable, and understood that I was possessionless. I was also rudderless, without the means to plot my life’s course, and I don’t think that I was treading water.
But as I got up the morning of March 13th, almost without thought I ambled over to the altar where rites were once again being conducted, settled into seiza, and felt relief.
There was a very particular kind of lightness I noticed which I hadn’t felt before, though I knew exactly where it came from. The realization of the loss of my physical markers on the world the day before had filled me with anxiety and I had had a very difficult time keeping myself from shutting down. Now, though, I found it conspicuously absent as I sat there. This was no conscious decision, I did not somehow force myself to forget my woes, but sure enough, that part of my subconscious had gone.
With that anxiety out of the way, I also noticed a new clarity about myself. A newly realized determination. To live, but not in the world, letting it do as it sees fit with us. No, I now sought to take control of it, to declare agency in a world that had made it very clear that I, and by extension humanity, was not its concern.
That morning, as the sun shone through the shoji once more but this time onto our shoulders, warming us, illuminating us, as if the heavenly photons had found a new, earthly home. I was beginning to explore a new-found freedom of ability, to the determination to do what needs be done. I meditated on this, leaning on it for an energy and hope that I hadn’t felt since the disaster struck.
Reinvigorated, I concluded my meditation, bowed in deference, and made my way to the living quarters, where my mission soon became apparent.
Just as the day before, the Kandos and the rest of the troupe sat in their seats around the table. Just as the day before, a meagre spread of the only food we had was laid across it. And just as the day before, all present were reservedly picking at it. And it dawned on me: we needed food.
I don’t much remember the conversations that accompanied our breakfast. I had discovered the problem, and quickly grew obsessed with determining how I might provide for the group. The day before, Mr. Kando and I had discovered that the wreckage encircled our encampment, making it next to impossible to get out via the normal routes. I could try to scale the mountains of trash, but that seemed like an unnecessary testing of fate, and without medical equipment I was keen to keep myself as healthy as I could for at least as long as it took me to secure rations. There had to be another way.
Zenrinji sits at the top of the road on the hill it stands on, but is not actually at the peak — the hill goes up a bit more, and there’s a cemetery nearer the top. If I could get up there, and then go through the woods and scale down onto Route 45 directly to the West, I could connect to the main road — Odori — at the Atago intersection and take that into town . Of course, I had no idea what condition Odori was in, but this plan seemed like the best available, and so I made a mental commitment to follow through.
I finished breakfast, and told the house about my plan. They didn’t like it. It was a fresh disaster zone, we didn’t know what was out there, was one argument against. Maybe someone will come and find us soon, let’s just stay put, was another. Who knows if another quake and tsunami will come while you’re out, a third. These were all valid points, but then we all came together for a very hard admission: we knew nothing, and the best way to secure our futures was to change that. As much as we hated to say it, leaving the premises in search of aid was the only real option available to us that might positively affect our chances of survival, and I was the strongest and healthiest among us so it made sense for me to volunteer.
We all nodded in recognition of the reality in front of us if not in approval, and I went to get my messenger bag while the Kandos and the priest went to get what tools they had — if I were to pull this off, we had no idea what to expect out there and so I should take whatever we had available just in case trouble arose.
There was not much, though it was certainly better than nothing: a bottle of green tea, a nokogiri hand saw, and a collapsable pick/shovel. I put these into my bag, put on my puffy coat, pulled on my knee-high longboots, and the rest of the house escorted me out back to the hill to see me off. I told them I’d be back by dusk, though I had no way to reasonably estimate when my return would be. I started climbing the steep wooded path of frozen dirt into the hill without the faintest clue of what I might encounter, but knowing that if we didn’t do this we may very well die.
The path itself was similar to the one we had used to rescue the man searching for his mother — rough shod, narrow, overgrown, steep, and not something that immediately stands out, but it was there nonetheless. I followed it, climbing higher past some boulders and with the late morning sun flittering through the naked branches of the trees. The undergrowth kept catching on my bag, pulling at me as if the forest didn’t want me to proceed, but this just increased my resolve and pushed me forward, cursing at the spindly fingers of the brush.
I was more skirting the edge of the hill than I was climbing, and eventually I came to what I had sought: the top of the concrete barrier constructed on the side of Route 45 to prevent landslides. Originally, my idea was to use the climb down the wall, an admittedly half-formed plan that couldn’t take into account the minutia of the concrete barrier, but nevertheless a plan. Fortunately, I noticed that there was more or less a direct route down from the top to the road if you just followed the wall, and so I opted for that, ultimately coming down onto Route 45 and out into the wide world for the first time in 3 days.
I came out onto the road high enough up or far enough away from the coast that it was relatively clear, but soon enough the rubble began. So far as my eye could see, the entire town was destroyed. All the way down Odori there was nothing but wreckage, which is, I think, a word that maybe doesn’t immediately communicate the reality.
Tsunami’s aren’t like, say, explosions; they’re transitory, migrant, not to mention a product of The Deep — when they roll over a human environment, they transform it in ways that you can’t imagine, bringing with it strange objects and taking away the markers of normalcy. There was muck, a mixture of silt and who knows what else, everywhere, in some places knee deep. The top halves of houses had been ripped from their bases far away and deposited in the middle of the street like a road block straight out of The Wizard of Oz. There were boats — large ones — sticking out of houses like massive harpoons. The whole scene was completely unrecognizable and the path towards the station, what was usually a 40 or so minute walk, extremely perilous.
Again, “wreckage” isn’t something that you can avoid. It is a barrier, something that must be overcome unless you wish to admit defeat. I did not walk past this scene, observing, slack jawed, the extent of the damage. No, I was in it, crawling over buildings, wading through swamps of filth, smashing through walls of debris and cutting through various impediments with my nokogiri. We did very well to think of that prior to me leaving — I doubt I would’ve made it without them.
You’re also moving past or over or through places of importance to you. Friends houses. Barber shops. Bars and restaurants. I had been at an Izakaya called Dai-chan the night before, and that was now totally wrecked. The building of my friend’s bar, Mecca, had been split wide open. My hair dresser, Kami no Shitateya, was up the way a bit but despite that the line where the water had reached was clearly visible about halfway up the building. The destruction really did seem endless, but finally, after 4 or so hours of wading through it all, I came to Miyako station, just on the edge of the wave’s influence.
This is also when I started noticing other people. I guess that in the disaster zone, many other survivors were staying put just as we were at Zenrinji, so that there were very few people out in it. The disorientating element of the wrecked environment also obfuscated sight lines, so even if there had been people out, they were harder to see. So after 3 days of being trapped in a confined area with a set number of people, entering an open square that had people coming in and out of it was a weird experience.
Uncertainty is the feeling I remember upon entering the area. I was unsure of how to speak, of what questions to ask, which answers I should provide. I didn’t want to deal with this, and so I just put on a stern face and marched on in search of food.
A curiosity: the main grocery store, Kyatoru, is located very close to Miyako Station, where I now was, and yet I do not recall even dropping by to check on its supplies. Even in my somewhat shellshocked state, I can’t imagine a good reason for avoiding Kyatoru, so this lack of memory is quite the mystery to me.
Instead of Kyatoru, I made my way up North, towards the Nishi district, where my good friend Seiji lived, and to where I knew there were a few convenience stores. The first one I passed, near my first apartment in the Hokuda district, was dark, and I kept walking passed empty storefronts and people shuffling here and there.
Once past the local fish market, the road takes a sharp left turn. A few blocks after that turn, there is a Lawson on the right, and this is the establishment I was headed for. From the market, I could see a line out Lawson’s door, which could be read in a few ways, one of which being “there’s still food there.” As I made my way closer, I started to be able to pick out faces from the crowd. At first it was just faces I was familiar with but no one I knew, but then I saw them: two of my students from Miyako Kita at the back of the line.
I rushed over to them and hurriedly asked about the others. Apparently there were a few unaccounted for, but of those who were there all were safe. I didn’t think to ask how they had gotten to be where they currently were, which is a legitimate question I would like to have answered — considering the location of Miyako Kita at the back of Taro up route 177, my best guess is that they took the backroads past the Yorochi, Kodashiro, and Tashiro rivers and approached Miyako from the north on Route 40.
I then asked about Taro in general, to which they responded with pinnacle brevity: “mo, nai,” or “its gone.” This didn’t compute, and though I asked for clarification, they simply reiterated their original statement. How can a city disappear? To what extent was it “gone”? I would simply have to wait to understand.
The line had been moving slowly forward in an orderly fashion the entire time I had been speaking with my students, and now we were admitted. By this point, the shelves were basically empty though there was some chocolate left. The cashier — a young woman in civilian clothes, a headscarf, and apron — was stoically collecting cash payments from customers by hand as the register had broken.
I milled around a bit in the store, but really didn’t see all that much of use, and so eventually I left, empty handed. This was very disappointing, but by this time the sun had started to set and I had a long journey back to Zenrinji, so I decided to cut my losses and start home.
Seiji’s house was near Lawson, so I decided to take the road past his place on my way back to the temple just in case they were around. As I strolled up to the building, which is also the office of his family’s interior design business Shimoyama Hyogudo, I saw no indication that they were around. I slowed down as I passed, taking a good look into the window of their first floor, but didn’t see anyone.
By this point I was pretty used to disappointment, so I just accepted the fact and moved on. There is a park, Nishi Koen, next to their house, and I walked past this, too, noting the contrast that a playground has with its surroundings in a disaster zone. I had almost passed it when a siren blared across the sunset horizon, startling me and bringing me somewhat back into the mindset I had been in on 3/11. It warned of the possibility of another tsunami, which didn’t make sense because I hadn’t felt an earthquake. But then I did. A large, vertical thump again challenged my ability to stand, rectifying what seemed like a strangely prophetic announcement, though in retrospect I guess that their sensors picked up the p-waves a good deal ahead of the aftershock.
This is a weird place to be — sunset in a disaster zone, homeless, living out of a temple, empty handed despite expectations… The whole tsunami experience was a rollercoaster of lows and lower lows, but this moment sticks out for some reason. This was failure. I had tried, risked my life, to find sustenance for those close to me, but I was unable to deliver. My resolve at that point was merely that I better get a move on if I were to make it back before it got really cold, really dark, and then try again tomorrow.
Once the aftershocks had subsided and it appeared that there would be no additional tsunami, I was about to start again on my journey back to Zenrinji when I heard someone calling my name from behind me. I turned around, and there, in all of his splendor, was Seiji, his mother and father, Taka, Emi, Ken, and a few others in front of the Shimoyama Hyogudo, piling out of a van that was not there just minutes ago.
They called me over, amazed and relieved that I was alive, and asked where I was staying. I told them Zenrinji and that I needed to get back, but the Shimoyama’s flatly rejected that notion and told me that I would be staying with them. Again, I did not argue, though in the back of my mind the flame of guilt had been rekindled. But then I thought that maybe this would be for the better: I now had access to human resources, which might ultimately turn up supplies to take back to Zenrinji. After all, without anything to show for the day’s effort, what was I but yet another mouth to feed on a dangerously low food budget.
We all piled into the first floor office space, brimming with tools, gas heaters, raw materials, and so many other things that were unheard of at the temple. There was some sort of discussion, deliberation amongst the group, some sort of planning, but once again I was too caught up in my own thoughts to pay much attention. After a bit, though, the conversation subsided and we all headed upstairs for dinner. I can’t describe how novel a concept this seemed to me, and I’m sure I had an explosively pavlovian reaction to the mere mention of it.
It was now dark, and the power and water were still off, but we had candles, gas burners, canned food, and beer. To me, this seemed the mightiest of all feasts, and while this was certainly no party, as we quietly ate by the flickering candle light, with not much conversation as exhaustion set in, I began to remember what normalcy was, comfort, and this, as strange as it may sound, was what I would fight for.
