Crate & Barrel, Japan Division: Onagawa, Part 1

I had wanted to go volunteer in the tsunami disaster area twice before and been foiled twice. My last chance was to use some of my days off and a three day weekend in July to spend 5 days volunteering in Onagawa, Miyagi Prefecture.

My friend Stephen was already there, researching a book he wants to write. A freelance journalist, he wrote this magnificent article about Onagawa in April, soon after the quake. Because he would want me to tell you, he didn't write the headline and hates it. I really encourage you to take some time now and read the article before continuing with this post if you can.

Since most of the trains in the area are still down, I took a nightbus to Sendai, then a bus to Ishinomaki, then one to Onagawa. The route from Ishinomaki to Onagawa is newly in place and not very frequent, but it did a great job getting me where I needed to go, as all the roads are clear (if sometimes jammed with the extra volume of trucks).

Ishinomaki, a much larger city, was heavily damaged but much of the infrastructure survived intact. I took a few pictures from the bus.

Then we went through the mountains, and I dozed off a bit. When I woke up, we were descending a hill into Onagawa and I bolted awake because Onagawa is just gone.

Onagawa was a town of about 10,000 and it lost around 1,000 to the tsunami, the highest percentage of any affected town (incidentally, there appear to have been 0 fatalities from the actual earthquake, as powerful as it was). Initially there were more buildings standing but at this point many of them have been torn down because they were essentially standing wreckage. In fact, every single building in the main area of Onagawa is marked for destruction as soon as the crews and equipment can get to them.

I was headed for the Sogo Taikan, a sports center on the hill above the remains of Onagawa. It's now home to refugees still living in the gym, the military, the volunteer center and volunteers in tents, and new temporary container homes built to last for 2 years.

I went to the volunteer center and was immediately welcomed and put to work that first afternoon. In my next post I'll talk more about the work I did, but first I'll try to set the scene a little better.

The military's main presence at the center is on the tennis courts, running the public bath and storing barrels of oil.

The front of the sports center and gym.

The Onagawa Volunteer Center

The tsunami brought in a lot of fish and sea life that died everywhere on land. That has propagated unbelievable numbers of flies. One semi-daily volunteer job is making sugar water traps in old plastic bottles to hang around the camp and sports center. That black stuff is flies, mostly from one day.

My tent is the one on the left.

Volunteer and refugee laundry hung out to dry on the tennis court bleachers.

Another shot of the tennis courts. All the military men and women were very friendly and responsible, and were often talking to locals or playing with kids.

Container homes.

It was very touching to see the ways the refugees had already begun to make the container homes more unique and livable.

The whole place from up on the hill, container homes on the far right.

The road down the hill to the wasteland that was (and will be) Onagawa. The water came up past that diamond symbol.

The rest of the pictures are from a walk I took around Onagawa one afternoon to try and see more of the damage up close. I felt and feel a little strange about this, as it can be like ghetto tourism, but I also think it's important to get as close to things like this as possible, to understand what the progression of destruction is like and just how powerful nature can be.

The wave in Onagawa was 20 meters high, though there is some discussion about that number. If you look at the building with the green roof, the water came up to that vent/window poking out of the roof. More than 4 stories. The building next to it is the city hall, where the mayor and the town government had to stand on top of the roof to survive the tsunami.

Where the train tracks used to run. There was a train at the station when the wave came, and it was thrown several hundred meters inland and crashed against a graveyard on a hill.

This next part is pretty mindblowing so I'll put it in bigger text. The earthquake moved the whole eastern part of Japan 2 meters closer to America. That means that the tide now comes into where the town center used to be.

The Onagawa hospital is on a hill, and above that is a shrine. The wave washed through the first floor of the hospital and the stairs were crowded with people on the day of the earthquake.

It's a bit disorienting to look at initially, but this is a building on its side, toppled by the combination of poor foundations and something in its way on the other side.

At this point there is still no rebuilding going on in Onagawa, just cleanup. Massive amounts of rubble has to be sorted and carried to a makeshift landfill almost a mile long along in one neighborhood of the town.