Remembering 3.11 – Kesennuma Harbor

So it’s been one full year since the earthquake and still not a day goes by without us thinking about it. Even being safe and sound here in Tokyo during the earthquake and seeing none of the carnage first hand, like most people in the capital I was glued to the news for the first days of the unfolding disaster. I remember walking home from work, helmet in hand in case of after shocks, while watching the news on my cell phone. As darkness fell truly shocking images came in from the port city of Kesennuma on fire from burning ships drifting in over the city drowned in the massive tsunami, and those images were massively more shocking than the earthquake itself for me personally. The days following the earthquake me and many other foreign bloggers fought hard to fight back the ridiculous news coming out of foreign news media. The bank of Japan pumped money into the market to stabilize a completely unrealistic stock market situation, the government of Japan had to route precious resources to calm citizens of Tokyo all the while leaving the people actually stuck in the disaster zone in a worse situation than what would have been necessary if foreign media hadn’t been busy milking the story for every penny it was worth. At the end of March I and a good friend decided enough was enough and we piled as much food and supplies as we could find into a small car and just went up there to see how bad it really was. We did it again in the first days of April, this time with a third friend and a much bigger van, raising a budget of about 8000 USD just by asking friends, friends of friends, and coworkers for donations. A few stores around Tokyo was asked to prepare our orders and we spent a whole evening gathering supplies as not one store had enough of what we needed (at this point there wasn’t any sort of rationing in Tokyo itself, as stores had had plenty of time to restock after the initial buying). From the places we had already visited we knew exactly what supplies they needed. Although we had planned a route of cities to visit we ran out of supplies early on. The farthest north we got on that second trip was to Kesennuma City, the place were those first shocking images were coming from less than three weeks earlier. I took these photos of burnt and damaged ships in the harbor, but up to a certain point the city was in essence destroyed.

Since the day I took these photos I haven’t been able to go back up north and see for myself how much has changed but several of my friends have made it a monthly ritual to spend a weekend work volunteering in the worst hit areas. It is a little surprising to me personally that it felt better to walk in the rubble and see it first hand than to see it on the news or in photos. The scariest part of going there was the journey home and the feeling that you aren’t actually doing enough to help. I still daydream of quitting my job and moving up there permanently, but I doubt that will ever happen. I know things have stabilized a lot in this year, but having seen the area both before and after the earthquake, I still think there are few places in any country as dynamic, as challenging and as interesting as the north of Japan right now. I hope I can visit soon again.

If you want to read my other posts on the earthquake, just go back to March 11, 2011, March 13 2011, and so on, through to April 2011. But much more than the blog posts themselves, the comments are what is interesting as dozens of people wrote words of support, commentary on what was going on, pitching questions, helping out and making sure me and everyone else in what almost felt like a little community (a Tokyobling community?!) for a couple of weeks. Seeing my posts twittered and mentioned on other blogs also really helped lift my spirits. Non mentioned and non forgotten, those comments helped a lot.