[Japan] March Finale
Wednesday the 23rd
If I didn’t say before, pretty much every school (from elementary to college level) had their graduation ceremonies cancelled because of the apocalypse. A couple did makeshift things later on, mostly for the younger kids, because it means a hell of a lot to them...and for a sense of normalcy and whatnot. My school’s English department decided to throw a tea party for everyone, and as an honorary member, I was enlisted to help out.
Professor Hall (American expat) asked me to help bake brownies. Contrary to his expectations of my Americanity, I had never eaten brownies before, much less baked them. (I don’t like chocolate in things, don’t judge me.) Both of those clearly unnatural situations were amended. I spent two hours in one of the cooking rooms, making what turned out to be spectacular brownies (from a mix, the credit I can actually take here is minimal).
But I also spent those two hours talking to Inoue-sensei, one of the school’s cooking teachers. The first thing that stress killed in me after the apocalypse was my Japanese speaking ability, already feeble at best. So in the beginning I sounded really pathetic, but by the end I’d had a legitimate 2-hour conversation about a million different things and it was awesome. And getting to bake was also really, really fun. I may possibly take a cooking class next term (if next term ever starts. Sigh.)
Then there were the actual graduation ceremonies for the graduate students and the seniors, which were exclusive. I spent another two hours hanging out in the workroom with three of the juniors, who had also been recruited to help. Most of this was me sitting around awkwardly, but eventually they talked to me, and later a freshman showed up and I ended up having the best conversation of my life in Japan. Not only did he manage to figure out that my reading ability is wayyyy better than my speaking one, but when I talked about how I was a Latin major so academic Japanese comes really easy to me, he asked me about the similarities between the two languages. On the inside, I was making the most ridiculously happy face of my life. IT WAS AMAZING.
(And then, later, the juniors apologized to me for how annoying the freshman had been. Okay. Okay, I guess I have some unintentional Don’t-Talk-To-Me Barrier that is completely invisible to me. Whatever.)
The second best part about waiting around was Sakaino-sensei. I had told the juniors about how I wanted to be a translator someday, but I hadn’t read much Japanese literature yet, so they were all rearing to get me hooked on Murakami. Sakaino-sensei walks in, one of the students asks him about me reading it, and he laughs, looks at me, and says, “Ah, Murakami...Gratuitous sex scenes 多過ぎる。” Oh my god. Oh my god this was the best thing that ever happened ever. Why don’t I have more classes with that man. Why doesn’t everyone speak ちゃんぽん so gloriously?!
The actual party afterward was quite lovely, too, if painful at times. The food was awesome (my brownies, pizza and lemon bars from Professor Unher (other American expat!), a hilarious drink bar). However, I discovered that Professor Unher’s wife has cancer, so on top of an apocalypse, they’re also dealing with that. The grad student who had been in charge of my internship, Rika, was also there - she had quit the graduate program early because she passed her teaching exam and got a placement at a school. On March 10th, she went and visited that school and its principal, then returned home. On March 11th, the town and school were gone.
Everyone gave little speeches, thanks for the last four years and whatnot, but also thanks for everyone just showing up. And that was the first time I really saw how much everyone else was hurting, too. I knew everyone was, but I don’t have many Japanese friends, so I never talked with anyone about it. I don’t know. I was just so happy to have been able to make it a great day for everyone.
Thursday the 24th
I ended up as a backup translator for the NHK emergency broadcasts, but I thankfully haven’t been called in for that, though I did go shadow it. Professor Hall took me with him that morning, and then treated me to lunch. Afterwards I had my other emergency translation job.
This was the day I finally got hit by a radiation update translation, and learned the word for radioactive iodine. Wonderful.
Just before I was supposed to leave, someone called and needed a translator, so they handed the call to me, and I had a big inner freakout.
1. I hate phones.
2. This was not part of my job description.
3. I hate phones.
4. Oh god oh god what.
It was some Indian woman who just moved to the prefecture (two weeks after an apocalypse? what are you doing?) with her husband and child, and was looking to get him into a kindergarten. There was much flailing as I translated everything she told me into Japanese for the office, and they looked up all the info, which was of course entirely in Japanese, which the woman on the phone couldn’t read a word of. We eventually just directed her to ask for help at her city’s international office, as they claimed to have an English interpreter.
This is where I proved to myself that I would make the best/worst phone girl ever, because I was completely ready to offer to not only translate the entire list of schools and their descriptions for her, but also to take a train to Kitakami and help personally. I did get to wish her all my very best wishes for her and her family’s new life here in Iwate, but. I wish I could’ve done more. She laughed at me so kindly on the phone, when I said “thank you” more than she did, and I was supposed to be the authority one.
Friday the 25th
On Friday I didn’t have work, so I grabbed lunch with Andree, and then we went to a game store, where I spent too much money on used copies of Tales of Graces, Tales of Hearts, and Fire Emblem 11. The urge to engage in retail therapy had been building up inside me forever, and it was finally just too strong, okay.
And then, that evening, Yamazaki-sensei called and asked if I wanted to go with her to Taro, one of the towns in the disaster zone where she had many connections. I said yes.
Because how could you say no, to that? I knew it would kill me. I knew damn well it wouldn’t be good for me in any way. But I can’t just say, no I’d like to stay in my sheltered little bubble, thanks. I could have lied, but that’s like saying the same thing to myself anyway. So I said yes. And then barely slept that night. And thought about what a horrible person I am for spending my money on video games right now.
Saturday the 26th
Please don’t feel any obligation to read this day. Not like you’re ever obligated for anything, but. I hate talking about all of this. But I need to write it down. Even if it’s painful as hell.
When I left in the morning, Dorm Dad asked where I was going. I told him. He looked horrified, like he wanted to stop me. Even then I sorta wished he really was my dad, just for a moment, and that he really could’ve stopped me, because it would’ve been so much easier if it was out of my hands.
I haven’t travelled in Iwate very much. It’s been winter most of the time I’ve been here, after all. I know lots of the geography now, from volunteering and stalking earthquake maps, but the only other city I’d been to was Hanamaki for its hot springs. I always knew we had mountains, but now we drove through them, drove for four hours, and first they were beautiful because they look just like the ones back in Pennsylvania, which is so strange, that they would. And then they were beautiful because we were up so high and it was cold and snowing, so the whole world was white. And if we never reached the coast, I was okay with that, half-asleep in the back seat trying not to be car sick.
Taro used to be its own little town, but now it’s technically part of Miyako, a larger city on the coast. Miyako was fine, mostly. We passed their McDonalds, which was opening on the 28th, and I was happy about that - because if fast food places can keep a constant stock, it’s a damn good sign of how well supplies are able to get in. A minute later I saw a ship, a mile inland, smashed up against the foundations of a raised highway. And then it was all like the pictures you see online, dreary and gray, lots of mud and wood everywhere, nothing that looks like a building. Just big lots of muddy wood piles. If you never knew there used to be houses there, it wouldn’t be very shocking.
I didn’t want to take any pictures, ever. Yamazaki-sensei’s camera wasn’t working, though, so I lent her mine. When I get it back, I will have pictures. I don’t know if I can delete them. I don’t want to see them. I can remember just fine.
Another five minutes or so through the mountains, and there is Taro. I could say, there’s what used to be Taro, but it will be Taro again. It was hit by a massive tsunami back in 1933, and since then became one of the places most prepared for a tsunami in the entire world. They had all sorts of plans and defenses in place. But nothing really stops a wave that high.
You have to drive much slower, here. There aren’t real roads, just trenches dug back to ground level in between the debris. So you see everything, all the little flashes of color from clothes, your reflection in a window that didn’t break while the whole house is gone, all the soggy stuffed animals, the poetic stuff like that, the things photographers take pictures of because it’s so meaningful. It’s always the children’s toys, or a boat on a roof somewhere.
There aren’t very many things that look like houses. Sometimes there’s the husk of a two-story building that somehow kept standing without any walls, or the peak of a roof here and there. In Miyako, the muddy wood lots reach up to your waist. Here in Taro, they’re well above your head. If there’s a wall left standing, then it has red spray paint on it. A date and a circle. That’s when they finished checking it for bodies. I think the circle means they finished taking them away. Or maybe it was clear. But I almost don’t want it to be clear, because better a discovery and a land burial than being lost in the sea forever. There are still so many missing.
I hate the schools. Those are the evacuation centers they always show on TV, a thousand people shivering in a gym, because the schools are always built in the safest places. And then the kids end up running them, doing the dishes, taking care of the elderly, everything. I just want them to be schools again. I really, really just want them to be schools. We stood in the playground of one high school, where the debris was piled so high, mixed in with the wreckage of baseball bases and the mangled frame of a soccer goal. That one wasn’t safe enough, the water reached just up to the bottom of the windows. I walked along one of the walls outside, and on the ground was muddy thread and yarn and all the workings of a home ec. class after my own heart.
We went around to find my teacher’s friends, but they were never there, so we ended up talking to their family and friends. Survivor stories. There was one old woman, who didn’t cry when she talked to us, though her face was wrecked. She was a little girl when the 1933 tsunami washed her whole family away. When this quake hit, she stood to go evacuate, because the old people always would, no matter how strong or weak the quake was. But the quake didn’t stop, and then she knew, and she remembered being five, and she knew and they all knew but no one else listened to them. They had about twenty minutes. A lot of people made it.
A lot of people didn’t. Taro slopes down from the mountains to the sea, so the houses on the much higher levels were okay - but more importantly, the people in them could see the wave coming. The people farther down couldn’t. The old woman saw people on the shore, or on rooftops lower down, trying to catch it all on their cameras. That was the end of them. And she watched the wave, the whole time, how it came in black, and the crest of it churned, like children clasping hands all in a line and swinging their arms back and forth. That’s all she could think of, arms joined in a children’s game, and she watched it wash away her town all over again.
Her daughter told her, “Poor mother, your life begins and ends with tsunami.” The old woman said, “My life’s not over yet.”
There were soggy baseball cards sitting on the front porch of one of the houses that survived. I don’t know where the kids got them from.
One of Yamazaki-sensei's former students came and visited her at the school recently. He works down in Tokyo, but his whole family lived in Taro. They're all gone, now. His parents ran a convenience store, and when the power went out, everyone rushed there asking for candles. They were still trying to pack some up to carry along for everyone when the wave hit. We saw the gutted Lawson, where they found their bodies.
We went to the town hall, which was supposed to be high enough up that a tsunami could never reach it. It came all the way up to the parking lot and swept all the cars away. The man we talked to said how he and the other officials pulled people from the waters. Out front, there was a sign in English, telling reporters that they shouldn’t block a certain area. I wonder who was there.
My dad asked me, later, if they had started rebuilding yet. You probably don’t hear anything much about the real disaster zones on the news anymore, just the nuclear stuff down south, where no one’s even died. And no, they haven’t started rebuilding. They were just moving all the muddy wood lots from one place to another, painstakingly. I think they were doing a final sweep for bodies. You can’t let volunteers come in and start sorting through the debris until you know they won’t be finding anything worse, after all.
I stood up near one of the surviving houses for a long time, looking out at the ocean. I can’t trust it. I know that’s rather irrational, and as the 4th largest earthquake ever its sort of a special case, and that hating the ocean makes me a terrible pagan besides, but I can’t. I just can’t. I can’t ever do a beach vacation again. I can maybe go back to Baltimore and look at the Atlantic and not have my stomach turn, but the Pacific and I are not on good terms, indefinitely.
And in the end, it was the rice bowls that got me. It was like an archeological dig, where it’s exciting to find a something whole and unharmed, something people used to use a long time ago. Three weeks ago. Most of them were fine, unharmed, just buried in the mud. I wanted to go around and collect them all, clean them up. Like saving rice bowls would mean anything after all the people they couldn’t save. But I still wanted to. If I got washed away and my bowl were sitting somewhere, I’d want someone to save it and take it home and use it again. I love all of my things, they serve me well, and I’m thankful for them.
When we were leaving, I saw a rice bowl sitting on a plank jutting out of the debris, washed and unbroken. Someone must’ve put it there.
March 27th~31st
I have not been okay since then. I am very good at taking care of myself; I declared a mental health self-isolation vacation, and have been sitting around embroidering and watching all of Psych from the very beginning this entire week. In the beginning it was really easy to just be a vegetable. Except now I don’t really embroider because I don’t feel like it. And then I’m too lazy to even watch TV, too, but I force myself to do it, because I have to do something.
I don’t want to do anything, honestly, but I know that’s the worst idea ever. I spend enough time lying around in bed not sleeping anyway. I eat a hell of a lot, because food makes me happy and I’ve been wasting away since even before the apocalypse. Supermarkets are stocked enough to make my normal diet viable, anyway, and I go out pretty often. But I sit there and look out the windows and watch the highway, watch the Self-Defense Force trucks go by, watch the families and friends who at least have each other to fall back on. I would really give a hell of a lot for a hug, just one, right now. But there’s no one close enough that I can ask for that.
I also, uh, possibly cannot allow myself to buy alcohol anymore, because while it puts me straight out, that is not an effective trauma-induced insomnia treatment. But I damn well needed it Sunday, and it was nice to throw a Fuck You And Farewell March party by myself yesterday. Worst month of my life. And even if this ends up the worst April of my life, things can only go up.
So that’s where I stand. I’m not okay. I want to punch walls, or go to one of those places down in Tokyo where stressed businessmen go and smash plates. I’m currently not getting any better, but I’m getting used to it. And it’s not like any of what I saw actually happened to me, so it would be really awesome if I could just suck it up and be a productive member of society again.
It would also be awesome if we could stop having a 6.0+ earthquake here every single day. The one time we didn’t, there were four 5.0+’s instead. It’s been three weeks. I don’t want this to be normal, please, please stop.