Midday and Miyako harbor is lively. The fish market, a huge structure where fish of all kinds are unloaded, washed, sorted, iced, and stored, has a new roof and three walls. Seventy-five-foot trawlers with purple bows are lined up at the dock, and deckhands are unloading debris they’ve disentangled from the nets. Their catch of saury is already being readied for sale. Since the ice factory began working again, there is no limit to the number of fish brought in.
Today Hirayama-san and his father are working on the far side of the bay. They’ve already rebuilt their tool and storage shed and are making buoys for clam season. They work together in silent, choreographic unison—braiding back rope ends, securing nets, tying knots.
“When we saw you last time we were living in a shelter,” Hirayama-san, the thirty-six-year-old son, begins. His name means “flat mountain,” but he’s anything but flat. Tall and lithe, he’s pencil-thin with a youthful face, and like his father, has a calm, straightforward demeanor. “Now we’re in temporary housing up on the hill. It’s tough—it’s very cramped, especially with small children, but it’s better than the shelter. We have a different pattern than other people: we go to bed at 5:00 p.m. and get up at midnight to go fishing. When we were going to bed, everyone else was just relaxing, having dinner. It was hard to sleep in a room full of people.
“Once we moved to temp housing, we had to begin to pay for everything ourselves. The government gave us three payments per household: an initial 500,000 yen, then 800,000, then 100,000 for living costs. Now that’s finished and we’re on our own. In two years, we’re supposed to move on, but how and where, I don’t know.”
Father: We used to live in a big house. At least our electric use and bills are smaller now! We want to get out of the temporary housing, but there’s nowhere to go. It may be five or six years before we can move …
Things are hard for office workers and those who have no job at all. Recently, in Morioka, a pile of donated clothes and food was incinerated because they were no longer needed in that city (which was unaffected by the tsunami). But there are many needs here. They didn’t consider others. The official who ordered the burning was punished.
The government is now giving aid to construction companies so they can stay in business, but our payments have ended. If we work hard and make money we’ll be able to rebuild.
Hirayama-san: I started writing a blog as a hobby. I’ve been doing it for three or four years as a way to talk to friends. But it got more intense after the tsunami. In the first few days I got one hundred thousand visitors, then two hundred thousand. People wanted to know what had happened here. We had no cell phone service, but I could upload from my phone. We only had power a few hours during the day so I used it to send text and photos.
Hirayama’s father smiles. He’s almost sixty-nine, but his face is unlined and he’s still handsome. His talk is by turns untroubled, cheerful, and earnest. He’s matter-of-fact but never bitter.
Father: I don’t get anything about the Internet. Or blogs. I can’t even use a cell phone. Anything Western or electronic—I’m lost! The tracking devices on our trawlers used to be in Japanese. Now they’re all in English, Katakana, borrow-words. Why? When I was young people lived more closely. We’d go down to the port and talk all together, exchange information about fish and the weather. No one does that much anymore. But the scale of this disaster was huge. It didn’t matter if you had a cell phone or not. No one knew where anyone was, or if they were alive.
I’ve been here all my life. There have been no large-scale tsunamis. In 1963, when the urchin cages started popping up on the surface of the water after a jishin, I knew there would be a tsunami, but the wave was small. But before I was born, there were tsunami two times, and twice, the family houses were washed away. My grandmother was caught by the wave and swam to safety in 1933. Her house was fifty meters from where our house was … both have been swept away by a wave. We have this kind of loss in our family memory, and yet, we continue to live close to the ocean! Many people swam and survived in this tsunami too.
About twenty fishing trawlers went out when the Wave was coming in. It was a giant wall of water, but it’s what we know how to do. The motorway was closed, so many fishermen couldn’t get to their boats in time. We were lucky. But once out there, when we borrowed some binoculars and looked, we could see everything was gone—our houses, our shed—and we were afraid to go back in. We stayed out for two days.
There will be another tsunami. We always have an escape plan in mind. There’s a lot of tectonic plate pressure in the Sanriku area up here in the north. So in the next thirty years, another 9.0 quake could result from seismic movement. Our peninsula faces north, so we’ll get hit by it. Those of us who lost houses must move from the neighborhood where our family has lived for many generations. It’s hard to think of it, but we will.
Hirayama-san: The disaster has been hard on young children. My five-year-old gets scared every time there’s a shake. She won’t stay in a room by herself. There always has to be a parent or grandparent with her. It’s hard to believe, but the Wave that came into our town was more than 124 feet high! It crashed over the seawall, smashed the water gates, inundated the fish market roof and the four-story building next to it. I instruct my children in tendenko—it means don’t go back for anything, don’t spend time trying to save others’ lives. Just run to high ground. That’s what I drill into them.
Some people didn’t see the water coming. There were houses in the way, and they couldn’t see it. They thought they were okay. But a woman high up in a building was yelling down to them to run. Some heard her and ran. My grandmother didn’t want to leave the house. She said she didn’t care if she died. But we cared. They had to slap her face and drag her to safety.
Tsunamis are cruel. Some are victimized, others are not. I keep my important papers with me at all times. If the fishery here dies out, the whole town dies. All the fishermen are working hard to keep it going.
Father: We lost everything except our boat, but we still have our lives. We can’t do anything about possessions. We knew a tsunami would come sometime. When we were coming in on our boat and couldn’t see any houses here, we knew it was all gone.
It’s better to look into the future. We’re grateful to strangers and distant relatives who gave kindness and aid, to you for coming from so far away to see us again. Our family has everything we need. Others need more help than we do. Some kids lost their parents. Wives lost husbands. Grandparents are raising their children’s kids. One man lost his two children, his wife, and his parents. Now he wonders how he can keep living.
A bank of clouds lies on the horizon in the west where the sun begins to sink. Father and son finish the last buoy, working seamlessly and in unison, never having to speak about what they’ve been doing with their hands. I take out my camera and snap a picture. Hirayama-san is tall. The father is shorter and strong. Both men look younger than they are, fit in body and mind.
Dark comes at a little past four in the afternoon. The air is crisp. They close up their shed to go home for dinner. His hands finally at rest, the father turns to me:
“In the end, it’s important to have the mental will and physical strength to keep going. There’s still so much to clean up, so much debris in the ocean that gets caught in our nets. One fisherman trolled up a bag with 10 million yen inside. He donated it to aid relief.”
I ask him if he still believes in hope. “Hope?” he says, then grins. There’s a long silence. He straightens up and looks at the sky as if making a wish. “My one hope is to build a house on a hill, on high ground.”