Watching the Destruction, When Japan is “Home”

Tonight I feel almost unbearably sad.  The post-tsunami photos I saw an hour ago on the internet from Western news sources showed bodies: Japanese children and adults,  small hands and feet emerging from the rubble.

I always thought that a horrific natural disaster would make me feel, after 20+ years in Japan, like a foreigner, and that I desperately would need to get back “home” to the US.  This disaster did not destroy my home or threaten my family here in Kobe, but it unexpectedly illuminated where “home” is in my heart.    

The cold facts are hard enough: we experienced the strongest earthquake on record for Japan, with a magnitude of 9.0, a tsunami which rose to heights of 10 meters (40 feet) at some points, washing away entire communities, and multiple explosions at nuclear reactors in danger of complete meltdown.  There are likely tens of thousands dead, and even after four days, many “survivors” are stranded without having food, water, or heat since the quake struck.  Tohoku is very, very cold in this season.

I am not saying that there hasn’t been an outpouring of kindness and concern from old friends and family in the US; there has been.  I’ve received so many Facebook messages, some from high school classmates I haven’t had contact with in decades, all wanting to make sure I was OK.  My parents and siblings have called, and all expressed concerned about my Japanese husband’s family, wondering if they were affected by the quake and tsunami.  I’ve had so many messages of thoughts and prayers going out for the people of Japan, all heartfelt and sincerely meant.

Yet, for all the kindness, there is a difference, a natural distance: most people knew little about Japan. This showed up in so many ways: early newscasts whose only point of Japanese reference was Tokyo, no matter how distant from the location in question, the misidentification of places shown in disaster scenes, the insistence on calling prefectures “states,” or frightening ignorance, like the CNN announcer who was certain that the meltdown in the nuclear reactor was influenced by the weather.   I’ve heard people comment that the video footage looked like a Hollywood movie, or people who compared the scenes to Monopoly boards.  They are not cold or uncaring, they are just looking at someone else’s tragedy, not their own.

In fact, the earthquake’s epicenter was far to the north of my home in Kobe, and physically, we are not suffering here.  In Osaka where I was when it struck, I felt the tremor only slightly, as if I had a short bout of vertigo.  No buildings here were destroyed, no people here dead, not even a bookshelf toppled.  Yet when I watched video of the tsunami rushing inland in Miyagi-ken a few hours later, I felt horror stronger than any I have ever felt before.  I saw the black wall of water rushing over the type of farms that surrounded me for many years, inundating homes like those of close friends, toppling the types of buildings I have lived and worked in.  I knew instantly that there were going to be many, many people dead.

I spent yesterday and today talking to my colleagues and Japanese trainees, many of whom survived the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake that killed more than 6,400 and destroyed 200,000 buildings, though it was much weaker (magnitude 7.2)  than this recent quake.  The train station I use every day was destroyed in that quake, the highway I once lived beside had been twisted and toppled, and so many people here had their homes destroyed. The people of Kobe understand what the people of Tohoku are going through.

(1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake--Kobe) 

Those places, the devastation, and the dead shown so graphically on t.v in the past days--these people are real to my heart, not just my head.  These are places I have visited.  Maybe they are people I have talked to, or family members of my students and colleagues.  When the earthquake happened, I was in a two-day company-wide meeting in Osaka.  Many of my colleagues were here in Osaka from Tokyo.  One of my colleagues had lived in Sendai (Miyagi Prefecture), and is married to a woman from there, and on that day he still did not have any word on his in-laws who still live there. 

 Another colleague who lives in Ibaraki Prefecture got a panicked call from his Japanese wife who said that a bridge near their house had collapsed with people who had been on it had died.  Another of my colleagues lived in Sendai for several years; he is stuck not knowing if old friends are dead or alive.  One of my closest friends in Japan lived in Iwaki City, Fukushima Prefecture (where the nuclear reactors in question and site of terrible devastation from the tsunami) for three years.  She has many friends there--she used to go running on the beaches where the tsunami hit.  The father the host family she had lived with worked in the nuclear power plant. 

For me, when I see the footage of the wreckage, for example, of the trains swept away in the tsunami, I know that I might have once ridden on that train line.  When I see the footage of the cars trying to escape the oncoming tsunami, I remember driving roads that looked the same, over rice fields that looked like those, in cars that looked like the ones that remind you of Monopoly pieces. I look at the wreckage of Sendai and think of the little restaurant I ate at in Sendai a year ago, or wonder if the hotels I stayed at still exist, or if the people I had met on my last business trip to Tohoku in December are still alive.   

People from the US, and from around the world, have shown so much support and kindness and compassion to Japan, and desire to help those who are in such desperate straits in Tohoku.  Yet part of me feels like it is the subtle difference between watching a neighbor’s house burn down, and watching your own go up in flames.  

One of my high school teachers wrote to me.  She said

Good to hear that you and yours are OK. Many prayers and kind thoughts are in the works for your country. Stay safe.

I realized, just then, that she had said what I never really understood:  this is my home, and this is my country now, and these are my people.  In this moment that I ache unbearably for the countless dead, I am thankful for this tiny, unexpected gift, of finally understanding that I really am at home. 

(2009 in the Tohoku Region--not far from the current disaster)