By Eryk Bagshaw
The schools that were saved were built on higher ground. When the 39-metre-high wave came, the students were spared. Many of their parents and siblings were not.
Orphaned in a wall of debris that swept Japan’s coast on March 11, 2011, the scores of students who lost their family members that day are now young adults rebuilding both their lives and their communities.
Waves from the March 11, 2011 tsunami hit residences in Natori, in Japan’s Miyagi prefecture.Credit: AP
“It was a normal winter’s day. Everybody was doing what they normally did until the clock hit 2.46pm,” said Takuya Tokairin, a student living near Sendai, the capital of Japan’s Miyagi prefecture.
“My father was at work when the earthquake hit. He told all of his staff to go home. He could not drive because there was a traffic jam. The tsunami was too strong. My mother found him three days later.”
Other survivors have been waiting years. Natsuko Okuyama’s remains were found on a beach on February 17 this year, long after the giant waves swept through Higashimatsushima at the northern end of Sendai Bay. Her son had been searching for her for a decade. There are 2500 others still missing from a death toll of almost 16,000.
Australians and the world watched in horror the live footage of the wall of water that consumed the Tohoku region’s coastal towns. But some Australians have forged enduring bonds with people from Miyagi prefecture since the tsunami.
Takuya Tokairin, a survivor of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, speaks to students in Canberra. Credit: Radford College
Tokairin told his story in 2015 to the students of Canberra’s Radford College, where he and dozens of Tohoku orphans have been welcomed on exchange since 2014.
“A lot of them regained their dream for their own future,” said Dianne Fitzpatrick, a Japanese teacher at Radford and president of the Australia-Japan Society ACT. “They felt that the world cared about what had happened.”
Tokairin told the students he was just like them — he wore a uniform, chatted with his friends over lunch and played football after school — except for the half-hour it took for the earthquake to become a tsunami that wiped out Sendai.
“It would take only 35 minutes to reach Sendai’s old people who were still in shock after the earthquake,” Tokairin said. “That day changed my life and the lives of thousands of other people.”
Then prime minister Julia Gillard and mayor Jin Sato in Minamisanriku in 2011. Credit: Reuters
“It was like time stood still for everybody,” Fitzpatrick said after listening to Tokairin’s speech to her students.
Jin Sato, the mayor of the Tohoku town of Minamisanriku and a tsunami survivor, has forged his own links with Australia.
It was Sato who ushered then prime minister Julia Gillard around the shattered remains of his town - she was the first foreign leader to visit and he never forgets it.
Heavy rains stopped her from being able to take a helicopter into the disaster zone, where up to 90 per cent of the town was destroyed. She insisted on taking a minibus through the rubble.
Australian emergency crews and fire services would follow. When bushfires swept through Australia in 2019, Minamisanriku donated what it could to help towns and wildlife down the east coast recover.
“It is not too much to say that the town itself was lost,” says Sato. “We were grateful from the bottom of our hearts.”
Sato was one of the men seen in photos clinging to a stairwell on the roof of the disaster prevention centre as the waves crushed his town. One of few remaining when the waters subsided, he climbed down and stayed to oversee the reconstruction of the community higher up the plains.
Minamisanriku mayor Jin Sato holds a treasured reminder of the immediate help Australia gave his town after the tsunami hit in 2011.
“When we started rebuilding, our very first premise was to create a town where we would never lose our lives because of a tsunami,” he says.
“Before the great disaster, already our area was prone to tsunamis. It was often the case, no matter what time of the day or the middle of the night, for us to pack everything up and head to a higher area. Now we no longer have to do such things. As long as we stay in our homes that is the safest place for us. We scraped off the earth from the mountains and brought soil to the plain.”
Japan has committed a massive ¥31 trillion ($368 billion) to the reconstruction program for the devastated areas.
Minamisanriku now has its own winery, after Australian vineyards sent in their products to stock three of the town’s recovery markets. But just as the tourism and fishing centre felt like it was getting back on its feet, it was struck by another blow outside of its control: COVID-19.
“When the coronavirus started in February, we were saying at least we have water, we have houses, we have electricity,” Sato says.
“But as it became more drawn out, the situation changed. Coronavirus made it impossible to have human-to-human exchanges at all. That had a big impact on our economy. One of our main industries is tourism and our other one is fisheries. Fishermen could not provide food to closed restaurants and there are no tourists.
“We are having an uphill battle at the moment,” he says.
So is the rest of Japan. It now faces a twin reckoning: hosting an expensive Olympics in the middle of a pandemic while Fukushima prefecture remains hobbled by the Tohoku disaster.
Fukushima’s exclusion zone remains in place a decade after the tsunami triggered a meltdown in its No.1 nuclear plant. The Japanese government extended the remit of the agency responsible for rebuilding Fukushima by another 10 years in June. More than 45,000 residents remain displaced.
Kyodo news agency reported on Wednesday that the Olympics would go ahead without international spectators, limiting any economic benefit of the Games when the majority of broadcast revenue goes to the International Olympic Committee, not the host city.
About one-third of the population say they want the Olympics held, another third say they want a postponement and the rest say it should be cancelled.
“At the moment I think that this reflects the honest opinions of the population,” says Sato.
Dr Makoto Iokibe, the chairman of Japan’s reconstruction design council, says he also had doubts about the sustainability of Japan’s Olympic and reconstruction spending.
“At one point, I myself felt that way,” he says. “I felt that we needed a big budget, and we needed a lot of human resources, including our carpenters for the construction of our work. Because of the Tokyo Olympics, there was a scramble for human resources.”
But as time wore on, he says, the pressure eased and the projects found an equilibrium, easing capacity constraints and stimulating the economy. “The Japanese economy is big enough to keep three major construction projects going. But what is serious is the coronavirus situation,” he says.
“The [national] government is not in a very strong position. If the Olympics are cancelled I think that will inflict damage on our nation. But even worse than that would be carelessly holding the Olympic Games and activating coronavirus. The people would hold the government responsible for that.”
The last time the Games were held in Japan they were also promoted as the reconstruction Olympics. Japan had emerged from World War II in humiliation and surrender. In 1964 it used the Olympics to announce it was re-engaging with the global economy. They were the first to be broadcast live by satellite to millions of spectators around the world.
Sato, now mayor of Minamisanriku, was in his first year of high school when Yoshinori Sakai lit the Olympic flame in 1964.
Sakai was born in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the day the atomic bomb wiped out his city.
Within two decades, Japan’s GDP had surged tenfold, from $US91 billion in 1964 to more than $US1 trillion in 1980.
“There is a part of me that hopes the Olympics and Paralympics will be held in order to boost the mood among the Japanese people,” says Sato. “I do hope to see a replay of that one day.”
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