Japan has lived with natural disasters forever, but the 2011 earthquake and tsunami was truly horrific – nature delivering death and destruction on a vast scale, along with nightmare images of nuclear disaster. Those images lodged in my head, boiling up a brew of scenarios, characters and story ideas – the stuff of sleepless nights. So when Lyn White asked if I’d like to write for her new Through My Eyes series about natural disasters, I grabbed the opportunity.
Initially I had real difficulty deciding on the essence of my story. There were so many issues that could be dealt with. Feeling overwhelmed, I eventually decided that I had to visit ‘the scene of the crime’, so to speak. I spent a month in the Tōhoku region, seeing and feeling the effects of the disaster, talking to people who had lived through the horror, hearing stories of fear, terror, pain, grief, courage, determination and the power of togetherness. My visit to Shizugawa High School in Minamisanriku and my conversations with the teachers and students gave me a much deeper grasp of the personal and social impacts of the disaster, and eventually revealed the basic hooks for Hotaka.
Travelling hundreds of kilometres through the disaster zone, I soon realised that the region was one vast construction site – endless infrastructure being built, machines growling day and night. In this frantic drive to rebuild the physical world, people were being forgotten. More than three years after the tsunami whole communities were still in basic temporary accommodation while the construction Godzilla surged onwards.
It was as if Tōhoku humans were irrelevant to the forces of government and big business behind the reconstruction drive. And because the Japanese have such respect for authority, plus a strong reluctance to protest politically, that Godzilla was becoming unstoppable. As a result, an underclass of forgotten people was growing in the Tōhoku region, creating a man-made socio-economic crisis that threatened to dwarf the original natural disaster.
But that was only half the story, the negative side. I also realised that there was a powerful positive force to counter this negative story. The Japanese have an age-old tradition of combating the havoc from natural disasters through local festivals. These festivals are believed to bring communities together in such troubled times by replacing the chaos and damage with peace and tranquility. They are bright, happy events that fill people with hope and the strength to move forward. I attended the Minamisanriku Memorial Ceremony on 11 March 2015, and was deeply moved.
Immediately I knew that my story had to involve the interplay between these forces of dark and light. It would be about identity, friendship, togetherness and community, our need to care for others, as well as our need to live with nature and not against it. In essence, Hotaka had to be a real people story, the kind of story I love to write.