[Japan 2015] Rebuilding Japan: 5 years after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake & Tsunami

Looking out from the shrine in Yuriage, Japan

I’ve experienced three earthquakes (that I’m aware of) in my life, two of them happen to be during my short stay in Sendai City, Japan. They weren’t a big deal. The first one happened while I was taking a cat nap, at first I actually thought that my leg was twitching, but then it grew a little stronger and my clothes hanging on their hangers swayed side to side. The second one happened during a lab seminar. Someone said “地震でしょう”, “It’s probably an earthquake”, and we sat around the conference table in silence until the trembling stopped. So by now I’m pretty convinced that earthquakes are a common phenomenon here, but I’m going to focus this post primarily on the big one that happened a few years ago.

So it’s coming close to 5 years since the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake & Tsunami has happened. It was a magnitude 9 Earthquake that happened in the sea that primarily affected North Eastern Japan in the Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima prefectures. If you guys rewind your brains a little further back you’ll probably remember that this was the disaster that caused a nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, but mainly I’m going to talk about the event in the context of the places I’ve visited which is primarily in Miyagi.

A map of Miyagi prefectures and the places I’m going to go into more detail later

The Tohoku Earthquake & Tsunami was one of the most devastating tragedies in modern Japanese history with about ~16000 deaths, costing trillions of yens in damages. The earthquake wasn’t too terrible by itself, but the tsunami it triggered was the primary cause of all the lives and properties lost.

At its highest the tsunami was recorded to be around 40 meters tall, which is kind of like if you had a 13 story building rush in towards you from the sea. The tsunami enveloped these coastal cities, sweeping away entire houses and the people inside them. Those houses then traveled, crashing into other houses, sweeping away more people, and when the tsunami finally traveled far enough inland, it receded, bringing the debri back into the sea, barraging the already beat up landscape from the other side. Since waves naturally ebb and flow, the “tsunami” isn’t a singular event but a cycle of destruction that happened several times before damping out.

If you live near the sea, one of the first steps people tell you to take after a major earthquake is to evacuate to higher ground. Lulled into a false sense of security by inundation maps created from past tsunami data marking their houses in the “safe zones” some people didn’t evacuate; some people found out that the second floor of their house was not high enough much too late; some houses were not strong enough to withstand the tidal wave. In the coastal areas of Tohoku there were entire communities that were wiped out.

Where I live in central Sendai there aren’t many remnants of the 2011 earthquake. Perhaps it’s more obvious to the locals who have seen the before and after but for me the only thing I’ve been here for is the repaving of the road leading up to the engineering campus.

That excavator there was rolling that ball of twigs around, and I thought it was funny

Other than that, on the 5th floor of the architecture building there are a bunch of tiny strips of masking tapes pointing to small cracks on the floor. Not sure how the cracks formed and not sure exactly why they're marked, maybe part of someone’s research project.

They’re seriously all over the place!

Temporary housing units in Sendai, most of them seemed vacant when we visited

Since the disaster destroyed so many houses, displacing so many people, the Japanese government erected many temporary houses in various parts of the Tohoku region. People could live in these houses for free while they picked their lives off the ground and saved money to either buy or build a new house. Temporary houses are kind of what they sound like, they were made to last for two years and then be torn down, but now as we’re approaching the 5th year since the disaster there are still people living in them who just can’t afford to move out. Most of these people are retired senior citizens.

Paintings on the side of some of the housing units. They brightened up the otherwise drab beige.

So I’ve had the opportunity to see some of the reconstruction in the Miyagi Area, specifically Yuriage, Ishinomaki, Onagawa, and very soon Kawaishi.

Yuriage

Yuriage sits along the shoreline and is 30 minutes south of Sendai in Natori. When we got there the place was pretty much overgrown with these straw colored reeds. Hidden within the grass, my lab mates would point to concrete foundations that were once homes as we drove down the empty road. In Yuriage we saw lines of trucks carrying dirt to reconstruction areas where they were trying to raise the level of the land so that people could rebuild their lives there. Other than the people on the reconstruction site and the people visiting the shrine there was pretty much no one.  

Looking over all the empty lots (空き地) in Yuriage

A sign I found in Yuriage, which kind of shows you their plan to raise the entire town

Ishinomaki

Standing in an area near the harbor, watching construction, it was a rainy day

Ishinomaki city was one of the cities that was hit the hardest, reporting the most number of deaths from the disaster (3000~). The first area we visited was the southern port of Ishinomaki near it’s downtown area. That place used to be a residential area, and if it was like any Japanese community I’ve seen, every square kilometer was probably packed with as many houses as they could fit.

Ganbarou Ishinomaki!

When we got there though it was completely leveled. While walking around we visited memorial area called “Ganbarou Ishinomaki” which translates to “do your best Ishinomaki” where people had planted a few flowers. There was also a tall pole that had a sign on it that said “tsunami inundation line,” you could probably stack me four times up and I would have still drowned. This place has plans to be turned into a memorial park sometime in the near future.

A still standing but vacant building

We then went further downtown and while it was much more lively than the previous area, you could still see ghost buildings that had been abandoned after the disaster. While we were there we visited the Central Ishinomaki Tohoku Earthquake & Tsunami information center where you could find pamphlets, pictures, guides, to help you understand the magnitude of the effect of  the disaster on Ishinomaki and its reconstruction plans. Since then Ishinomaki's population has been steadily sinking starting from approximately 160,000 people at the time to approximately 140,000 people now. Ishinomaki has been migrating entire communities further inland in its coastal areas. This is happening all over Japan where younger people are moving out of these smaller cities leaving the older population behind and the fear is that these cities would eventually die, not only that but Japan’s population growth is actually decreasing with a birthrate (1.4babies/woman/lifetime) that isn’t enough to equilibrate the population.

Onagawa

You can kinda see in the map all the construction going on in the area

Onagawa town is strangely situated, surrounded by Ishinomaki City bordered by the sea. The reason for that is a while back, Japan encouraged smaller cities to join together to form bigger mega cities, but Onagawa town did not want to conglomerate with its fellow cities since it had a nuclear reactor which meant that they reaped special government benefits that they didn’t want to share with a larger swatch of land.

Looking at the harbor from the Onagawa municipal hospital

We stopped in Onagawa very briefly to stop by the municipal hospital where a lot of people fled to. The hospital was situated on a 20 meter high hill, but even so the tsunami ended up flooding the first floor almost up to the second floor. The view from the hill was pretty incredible. You just see a huge swatch of reconstruction, dirt everywhere, bulldozers, flatness, of what used to be buildings, families, livelihoods.

So that’s just a brief tour of the places I’ve been to with regards to the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami. If you want to kind of see for yourself the reconstruction Google street view is pretty great. Not only can you stroll through these towns to get a sense of what I’m talking about but street view also has this feature where you can change the times the street view was taken, and for most of these places I’m talking about they have a timestamp at 2011 right after the disaster and 2014, three years after, so you can compare and contrast.

Natori 2011 Street View

Onagawa 2011 Street View

Ishinomaki 2011 Street View

12/14/2015

Going to continue writing this post. This time we’re in Kamaishi which is further north in the Iwate prefecture. I was in Kamaishi with my lab conducting a survey of the city’s current reconstruction process. Mainly we went around to every building in the main downtown area and took notes and pictures on things like if it was a vacant lot, old building, new construction, and other details regarding the architecture. It was pretty amazing, I think about ⅓ of the buildings were newly constructed since 2011. We would look at the pre-disaster map with an entire block of residential houses, and then look up to see that entire block turned into a massive parking lot.

A port in Kamaishi, the concrete thing in the front is a tsunami breakwater.

This is a temporary elementary and middle school that the kids are using until a newer one is built

Construction of the new elementary school and middle school behind the old one

So remember the part up there where I talked about temporary homes? The Japanese government is trying to move people out of these temporary homes, but some people just can’t afford it, so in order to transition people out, the government is paying for public housing to be constructed.

A completed public housing unit in Kamaishi

It’s kind of funny, all the public housing I’ve seen so far is super modern looking, but then you see the front doors open and it’s these old grandmas and grandpas living in these future abodes. This particular house in the picture above is in the countryside of Kamaishi. As Japan’s population continues to decrease, as more and more young people move away from smaller towns into larger cities, it makes me wonder, after the current residents pass away will it just leave a bunch of vacant modern looking houses in the Japanese countryside.

A comparison of what the other houses in this particular area of Kamaishi looks like

[Japan 2015] Why should I continue learning Japanese after I leave?

So the reason why I started learning Japanese a year ago was probably cause I knew I wanted to study abroad in Japan. The reason that I’m learning Japanese now is because I’m treading water, trying to keep myself from drowning in what I don’t understand. I’m now approaching the midway point of my semester abroad and it’s made me think about what my purpose would be for continuing to learn Japanese when I get home

I can’t say that I planned for that at all before I came here. If I open the excel spreadsheet containing all the classes I need to take during my four years of college, Japanese is completely missing from junior fall and the entirety of senior year. What what I’ve come to realise though is that learning a language is hard and right now I’m still on the uphill.

There’s a ton of vocabulary left to learn; I suck at understanding Japanese people when they talk; I can’t express things that are more abstract. But once I get over that hump: when I can guess a word I don’t know based on the context; when I can ask and receive explanations of things I don’t know in Japanese; then I’ll have stopped treading water and started swimming.

If I decide to not to continue Japanese after these two months are over, it’ll be an unsatisfactory end. Since I’m still running uphill, all that's left for me when I stop is to slide all the way back down. What a huge fucking waste of all the hard work I’ve put in. So I’ve decided, when I go back, I’ll continue, and one day I’ll get get over that hump and from there I can only go forward.

When I first got to Sendai, I felt pretty guilty. I’d spent some time before that in China visiting my relatives when I came to the grand realization that my Chinese sucked. When I spoke Chinese at home, it was always a mishmash of Chinglish, any word I didn’t know was smoothly substituted in by English. There was no huge disconnect between what I wanted to say and what the other person heard.

But in China it was so hard communicating all that I wanted to say, to fill my relatives in on how much I’ve changed in the years since I’ve last been there. I beat myself up a bit wondering why didn’t choose to spend a semester in China instead; why I was spending my time learning a foreign language instead of my own mother tongue.

I think we get stuck in this belief that learning languages is something that you can only do when you’re young. Kids that get taught multiple languages when they’re young do seem fare much better than their adult language learning counterpart. Increasingly we’re seeing language classes being taught in school at a younger and younger age. And somewhere along the line I’ve convinced myself that it’s already too late. That the only thing left to do is to hate my younger self for not taking Chinese school seriously enough for the rest of my life.

But being here in Japan this semester has really just motivated me to not only continue learning Japanese, but to also pick up from where I left off in Chinese. There really isn’t an expiration date on your ability to pick up new languages, and yeah it’s a long journey and you’ll constantly be wrong,  but the only thing really stopping you is yourself.

Anyway, since the longer spiel is over here’s just a few things that I’m doing right now/will continue to do in the coming future.

1. Right now I’m watching Nodame Cantabile the live action on netflix in Japanese with Japanese subtitles. For a little background, it’s a romcom about this serious dude who wants to be a world class orchestra conductor and his weird neighbor next door who’s a pianist. I’ve read the manga before in english a few years ago and it’s actually immensely entertaining as a live action. The live action doesn’t span the entire series so I’m considering trying to read the manga in Japanese. I normally speed read manga in english (16 volumes a day?), so I’m a little worried about how snailer pace would make me feel.

2. I’m doing this kanji program called wanikani. For those who don’t know kanji are the Chinese characters that Japan has over years integrated into it’s own language. It’s a  specially formulated SRS based kanji program that sells the hope of learning 2000+ kanji in a time of about two years. Which honestly sounds way too good to be true seeing that Japanese kids spend at least 6 years in school doing that. But I’m kinda hopeful, it is a subscription based program though so it’s not free, but I mean it’s promising something I would consider on par with the elixir of youth.

3. I’m going to keep playing go. Which I had the intention of anyway, but Olin’s go club hasn’t been very beginner friendly and learning oriented, so I’m going to try to change that. But I also think I want to keep playing go after college too. And when I’m an old lady I’ll be like pokémaster strong.

4. At some point when I get comfortable enough with my level of Japanese I’m going to try to connect Japanese kanji to Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations. Granted they aren’t really one to one but all I’m really going for is to be able to read Chinese and to learn new vocabulary words.

[Japan 2015] Japanese Roller Coaster Ride (Lilo & Stitch anyone?)

So, excuse me for not posting as much. Between going to classes, watching Polar Bear cafe, making little trips to places here and there, I’ve found that I haven’t made time to blog as much (that and sometimes the urge hits me and the blog turns out shitty so I scrap it). Since there’s no real cohesive topic I wanna talk about I’ll just tell a few stories.

So actually the blog posts I’ve scrapped are usually centered around me learning Japanese, and the reason for that is that the experience changes from day to day. One day I’ll successfully complete an exchange at the supermarket and feel like on top of the world, the next day I’ll be talking to a friend in Japanese be so overwhelmed by the gap between what I want to say and what I can. Some days I’m just really confident and ready to talk to people. Some days I skip lunch because I don’t want to deal with ordering food in Japanese. It’s always a mixed bag of emotions and a good comparison would probably be Brownian noise, there are always ups and downs and I’m just hoping that the bigger picture is that my Japanese is improving.

I think this is the most multilingual community I’ve ever been around. All the foreign exchange students come from different countries (duh) so they speak their mother tongue, the exchange program is conducted in English, so most people can also speak English, on top of that, everyone’s doing their best to learn Japanese. It’s pretty incredible and it makes me feel lucky that I haven’t had to put much effort into learning English.

Another thing I’ve realized is that my Chinese is honestly not up to snuff, until recently I could get away with substituting words I didn’t know with their English equivalent, but being here makes me feel kinda lacking. It’s not a bad thing, for the first time I feel motivated to learn more Chinese. My mom always said that I would one day regret not paying attention in Chinese school, and yup, she’s right.

So the Japanese language has three main tiers of politeness: casual language (which I can’t for the life of me find the Japanese translation of), polite language (teineigo 丁寧語), and super polite language (keigo 敬語). Casual language is what you would typically use with your friends, family, or people who are younger than you. Teineigo is what you would normally use with acquaintances, people who are older, or in a higher position than you. I actually have a pretty hard time switching between casual and polite forms when I’m talking. Usually it ends up with me sounding emotionally distant with friends and unusually friendly with people in power.

The third tier, keigo, is something that you’d use with really really important people, or customers. So the thing with keigo is that when people speak keigo not only is it very beat around the bush (so it ends up making sentences really long), but also they’ll use politer versions of the words that you would typically hear. Since a foreigner would probably not have to use it in daily life (unless you’re in the service industry in Japan), it’s not really taught early on, I’ve had Japanese friends tell me that even they find it difficult to learn to speak.

So anyway, I went to the bank the other day to try to pay some bills, and since I’m the customer the lady taking care of me used keigo. She was trying to explain something about how I couldn’t set up automatic transfer through the branch bank and I could not understand a single thing. Since keigo makes everything longer it was just a slur of words that was spoken very fast with words I didn’t know mixed it. They must of thought I was an idiot or something, and honestly it did not occur to me until after the fact that I should of asked them to not use keigo.

Recently I’ve found myself developing a taste for matcha (抹茶). It’s a Japanese green tea that I personally find very different from the green tea that I’m use to. I was told (but not entirely sure if I’m correct) that matcha is a higher quality of green tea leaves. Usually it comes in a powder form that you would then mix with water, but I also think it comes in a teabag form. It’s also a very popular flavor here, it’s in things like Starbucks matcha lattes, matcha kitkats, matcha ice cream, and it’s a very interesting taste which I think goes really well with sweet things (which makes sense since drinking tea and eating sweets is a very Japanese tradition). I think the best part of matcha is the smell, I can’t really put it in words but it has a very distinct sweet smell. Anyway, I would recommend that you guys try it.

[Japan 2015] Conversations, Natto, and Cats 会話とか、納豆とか、猫とか

10/27/15

下でにほんごのもうあります。

Today was an exceptionally good day. This morning when I went to my research lab I ended up talking to another lab member for a good hour. Maybe it’s a little silly to be happy because of such a simple thing but It was nice because normally the lab is really quiet. Everyone usually looks so serious that I usually sneak in and out without saying a word.

Since my Japanese isn’t very good yet and his English isn’t that great either, we communicated via a hodge podge of Japanglish. But today in particular the words left my mouth easier. Like when you don’t have to think as hard, translating, and forming grammar patterns in your head before you spit them out.

Right now the trees are changing colors in Japan. It’s really pretty and they have a special word for it: こうよう(kouyou)

After that I went to a Japanese conversation class called Nihongo no Mori (日本語のもり) that I’ve been frequenting since I’ve came here. How it works is you get paired up with a volunteer who you’ll talk to for a good two hours. I think this may be my favorite class, it’s kind of hard to find people who are not only willing to talk to you but also keep in mind that you’re not a native speaker. Things like speaking slowly, using not slang, saying things in different ways, throwing in some English here and there, waiting patiently as I look up a word on my phone, things like that.

Today however, was their 13th year anniversary and instead of the usual 2 hours, the conversation was 1 hour long and then we had a party. The senseis put together a bunch of gifts and we did amidakuji (あみだくじ) which is a ladder lottery game to decide who gets what fit.

I  was pretty lucky and got one of the larger bags. Inside was a peanuts Halloween diorama, soybean waffle snack, dish cloths, natto snacks, and natto. For those of you who don’t know, natto (納豆) is a fermented soybean type food that people usually eat with rice. Most foreigners dislike the taste, but I’ve grown up with it since my parents have occasionally kept some in the fridge since we left Japan 16 years ago. Anyway, the senseis are just some of the nicest people I’ve met and I’m so lucky to have found this class.

My big win.

Then on my way to the bus stop home, I found a cat. I’m not sure if it was someone’s pet but I went closer because… it’s so cute. It’s probably dangerous to touch random cats in the streets but when I got closer it started rubbing its body and walking around me in circles and I couldn’t help it… I ended up spending a few minutes petting it, and boy does it have the loudest purr I’ve ever heard a cat have. I honestly thought that it might of swallowed a bull frog.

Two cats, one bag.

After a while another cat appeared. It didn’t look like it wanted to be petted so I left it alone. I ended up naming the cats Kokononeko-chan and Sokononeko-chan. Which approximately translates to “the cat over here” and “the cat over there.”

今日はいい日だ。今朝、けんきゅうしつに行ってとなりの人を一時間しゃべった。けんきゅしつにはたいてい静かだ。みんなまじめだ。よく入って出て何も話さない。それでほかの人としゃべりして、うれしくなった。

私の日本語まだ上手じゃないで、彼の英語もあまりはなせない。そして英語と日本語どちも使った

、ちょうとおかしかった。でも今日話しやすい、どしてもわかんない。

あとで「日本語のもり」の会話教室に行った。日本語で二時間ぐらい色々な会話をして、とても楽しい。私が大好きい。先生たちはゆっくり話すし、スラングを使わないし、時々英語でせつめいするし、とてもやさしい。

でも今日は記念日だ。そして一時間だけ会話してしまって、パーティをさんかした。先生たちはプレゼントをじゅんびしておいた。学生たちはあみだくじでプレゼントをえらんでもらった。私のプレセントがすごく大きい。ピーナッツのハローワークのクラフトとか、枝豆のおかしとか、なっとうとか、色々な物がはいていた。

納豆が食べられる？そう。食べられる。子供の時日本で住んでいた。そしていつも母父なっとうが書いてくる。

うちにかえっていたとき、猫が二つ見た。しばらく猫と遊んだ。「ここの猫ちゃん」と「そこの猫ちゃん」名前をつけた。

日本人じゃありませんので、もしかしてまちがえました。正しいの教えて下さい。

Bonus cat pictures （ボナス猫の写真）：

[Japan 2015] YOSAKOI 祭り

So this week’s felt like forever, but it’s only been my first week with classes. If time keeps passing like this I’ll be in Japan for a lifetime! There’s not much that’s terribly interesting to share on my classes…

So this weekend I went to YOSAKOI Matsuri（よさこい祭り）which was a festival with organized groups of dancers from all over Japan performing their routines to remixed Tohoku folk music with or without the following:

1. Naruko（なるこ）: I’m pretty sure that a majority of all the teams all had these, and the performers would keep them in their hands and as they’re dancing it would usually clap in time to the music.

Image from here

2. Giant Flags: A lot of the groups had flag wavers that waved giant flags advertising their group name. The flag wavers were incorporated into the routine and had their own fancy moves for manipulating the flags (there was one group that juggled giant flags!). The analogy is a little bit like color guards for marching bands, only these flags were truly gigantic. The largest ones I think were about 5 meters tall. You would see flag wavers put their flags down in the middle of the routine when they have a slight pause and they’d be huffing and puffing. You could almost preemptively guess which groups were going to be good based on the size and number of flags they brought.

Now imagine something twice that size. Image from here.

3. Kakegoe （掛け声）: Kakegoe (which I just looked up) are shouts and calls used in traditional Japanese performances. It’s really awesome, and these people will like shout certain phrases at certain parts of the song, and after awhile you kinda know what’s coming too so you can shout along too (それそれそれそれ!)

4. Singers/speakers: Some groups had people who stood on the side who would either sing, or perform poetry to the music. Groups without these people would just

5. Multiple outfit changes: These people had some pretty fancy outfits already, but some of these groups took it to the next level by having multiple outfit changes. They’d rip open the velcroed part of their outfits and underneath would be a completely new outfit. The most outfit changes a team had that I counted was 3.

This group had a total of 1 outfit change?

6. Musical Instruments: One group bought an entire jazz band with them. We had no idea until at the end when we saw a bunch of trumpet players exiting stage left. Another group had a bunch of people playing Taiko drums wrapped entirely in saran wrap (to protect them from the rain).

It actually rained the day we went, starting from a light drizzle to an “boy am I glad I brought my umbrella” (which I then forgot later in the day on the campus bus). The nice thing about the rain was that it soaked the floor in the free sitting zone near the stage so nobody wanted to venture in closer. But my friend and I decided to go in and a nice old man (in the corner of the image above) gave me a towel to wipe the floor with.

Initially we grabbed paid seats that were further from the stage but it was definitely more exciting closer to the stage. You notices things like, “wow everyone looks so happy to be here”, and you can actually hear the Naruko clap, and the performers shouting. Sometimes the flags get waved over your heads. It was super cool.

There was a variety of fair food (both Japanese and not) like lots of skewered things (beef, fish, dango, spiral potatoes), lots of curry, some ramen places here and there, shaved ice, I wish I knew the Japanese names but mostly I just pointed to indicate interest. I also just ate everything instead of taking pictures.

Bonus Video!