Katsuju Ogata was a 66-year-old ramen noodle restauranteur when the East Japan earthquake struck four years ago this week. In the lull after the lunchtime rush he popped out for a haircut, just getting back to the restaurant before the cataclysm began.
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"That's when it suddenly happened - the crash and the explosive wham!" Ogata said later. "It felt as if the entire building was falling down on my head. Water came flooding around my feet. The backyard door swung open, its hook lock unhinged, and I could see an electronics store being washed away. An elderly lady in the neighbourhood was running away screaming, 'The tsunami's here!'
"I could hear my wife's voice calling, Dear, watch out! It's a tsunami!' even though I could not see where she was. I think that those were her last words."
Ogata himself was then engulfed. "I was being churned and was gradually losing consciousness," he recalled. 'Ah, I'm going to die', I thought. I don't know how long I had been in the water - it could have been minutes or seconds - when I sensed light, which allowed me to know which way was up."
He struggled to the surface, caught hold of a passing wooden post and crawled on to a tin roof floating by. "When I looked around me, what I saw was flames: the houses around me were on fire."
This is part of one survivor's account from an incredible collection of 100 accounts reported by the Ishinomaki Kahoku, the daily newspaper servicing the Greater Ishinomaki Region. The interview series was published in the paper under the title "My March 11". Many survivors knocked back requests for interviews which formed the basis of each column, produced in direct speech. But the paper's reporters, who were themselves affected by the disaster, pressed on in the belief that in the long run it could help salve the emotional pain of survivors. As the 100 accounts show, many agreed.
We can read these moving accounts in English too because of the enterprise of University of Canberra assistant professor of urban and regional planning, Dr Hitomi Nakanishi. She read the accounts, which had been republished in book form, when visiting the head office of Ishinomaki Kahoku's parent company as part of an inspection tour of the disaster zone. Galvanised, she put out a call for volunteers to translate and edit the accounts for an English edition: 26 Japanese in Australia and Japan, and 16 Australian friends of Nakanishi, pitched in and did the job. One of them was Manuka massage therapist Satomi Trevaskis. Junposha, publisher of the original edition, published the English edition as well - Surviving the 2011 Tsunami: 100 Testimonies of Ishinomaki Survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake. It includes an extraordinary photographic record of the disaster.
It is worth recalling exactly what happened. The earthquake was followed by a series of devastating tsunamis, the biggest 39 metres high. In Sendai, waves swept as far as 10 kilometres inland before exhausting themselves. The Fukushima nuclear power plant went into meltdown after the tsunami caused a cooling system failure, an ongoing environmental disaster to this day. If you survived the earthquake, the tsunamis and the fires, you then had to survive extreme cold in the aftermath when, incredibly, it began to snow. Nearly 18,000 people died, most by drowning.
Then there are the homeless. The Japan Times reports this week that in Iwate 22,300 people are still living in temporary accommodation, in Miyagi another 35,332 people are doing the same, and in Fukushima 24,098 people remain in temporary housing. The death, destruction, dislocation and trauma suffered by Japanese as a result of the disaster is profound, as is their stoic and determined response to it.
Donations from outsiders to help with recovery and reconstruction have, as one would expect, waned as the disaster fades into memory beyond the affected areas. The desire to keep outsiders engaged in recovery efforts is strong. The mayor of Rikuzentakata in Iwate Prefecture, for example, has hired an English speaker to be the town's "global public relations director", to encourage not just volunteers to come to town to help but others, too, simply to witness the reconstruction and forge bonds with the wounded town.
For his part, Katsuju Ogata's post-disaster plan was to get a food truck and take Ishinomaki yakisoba (fried noodles) around Japan to thank people for their help. Even though his wife's body was never found, he held a funeral for her: "I believe [it] was the point at which I started to rebuild my life."
