Lesson 12 Extra Credit - 2011 Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

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Please read the following Chapter 11 - Island of Ill Fortune from the book Big Ones by Lucy Jones and answer the questions below. I have posted the text but just below I have posted a link to the .epub file that you can read on a phone or eReader  (such as Kindle etc.) If you download the .epub it is Chapter 11.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE ISLAND OF ILL FORTUNE

Tohoku, Japan, 2011

If paradise now arises in hell, it’s because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.
—Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell

Great catastrophes are never caused by one factor alone. We can cope with and respond to an isolated event. You might think of it like the elements involved in a car accident: If one driver hadn’t been distracted by his children, and if another hadn’t changed lanes at that precise moment, and if a third car hadn’t lost traction due to the rain, there might be no incident to speak of. Remove any one of the elements, and the moment can be withstood, corrected for.

We’ve seen the principle play out in societies facing natural disasters. The earthquakes in Lisbon and Tokyo became catastrophes not just due to their massive shaking, but because of the fires they triggered, compounded by an unfortunate time of day or day of the year. What if the Lisbon earthquake hadn’t struck during church services for All Saints’ Day, if Tokyo hadn’t hit at lunch hour? New Orleans wasn’t destroyed by Hurricane Katrina singly, but by the subsequent failure of man-made levees. What if those levees had been inspected by the U.S. Army rather than by a local commission?

It’s a familiar refrain now that natural disasters expose and apply pressure to weak points. They can result in profound systemic change. A forest in a climate that is getting hotter and drier can survive the stress for a while, until a wildfire burns it down so thoroughly that it simply cannot grow back. That ecosystem is gone, to be replaced by plants and animals better adapted to the new climate. The same holds for social systems, as these same disasters have demonstrated.

But alongside the devastation that an extreme natural event can bring, there are also opportunities. Disasters have contributed to the collapse of civilizations, but they’ve also been the catalyst for needed social change.
The Great East Japan earthquake of March 11, 2011, was just such an event—both an accumulation of physical and man-made forces that together led to catastrophe, and one that offered an opportunity—whose impact was so severe that long-standing tenets of the culture were, and still are, being reshaped. The women described in this chapter are emblematic of these changes; they contributed to their communities in ways they never could have imagined before disaster struck. The 2011 earthquake blew apart many of the constraints of their traditional culture and created opportunities for them, and others like them, to lead.

Because Japan is, at its core, a chain of volcanoes, flat space is a prized resource, forming only where rivers have, over millions of years, smoothed out ridges and valleys. On the main Japanese island of Honshu, a long valley runs north of Tokyo, creating a conduit for trade and a chain of cities that were historically the strongholds of various samurai clans. The city of Fukushima lies along this valley, two hundred miles north of Tokyo, close to the heart of Japan. Its name is translated as Island of Good Fortune, and indeed it was: until March 11, 2011, Fukushima was a thriving, prosperous community.

On that day, Maki Sahara was in her home in Fukushima City. Slender and tall with long bangs and shoulder-length hair, this  young housewife was looking forward to her daughter’s graduation from preschool the next day. In Japan, the school year ends in March, and preschools have a formal graduation to mark the children’s entrance to a new stage of life. Two days earlier, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake had rattled the home, but an earthquake of that size strikes once or twice a year somewhere in Japan, and so, accustomed to the disruption, Maki didn’t pay it too much mind.

Maki was going to be the representative of the Parents and Teachers Association at the ceremony, and she recalls laying out the kimono she would wear. A traditional kimono is a complicated ensemble, and she needed to get all the pieces in order. Maki remembers thinking not only of her six-year-old daughter at preschool, but also of her husband, who was at work at a nearby hotel. Her two nieces, staying at their grandparents’, were also on her mind. Their mother was in the hospital battling leukemia, and Maki helped look after them while their mother was in treatment.

At 2:46 p.m., as the kimono lay on Maki’s bed, the shaking began. A massive earthquake threw her to the floor. She braced herself, waiting for the shaking to stop. And waiting. Shaking so strong it was impossible to stand persisted for over a minute.

The earthquake was magnitude 9 and had occurred just offshore. The fault was about 250 miles long, centered due east of Fukushima. The earthquake was the fourth strongest ever recorded and had the largest slip ever seen. Until then, the world’s largest slip had been the 1960 Chilean earthquake. That fault was 800 miles long, and it showed a maximum slip of about 120 feet. That means two objects that were adjacent on opposite sides of the fault would, in an instant, have been more than 100 feet apart. (Compare this to the mere 26 feet of buildup along the San Andreas Fault today.) The Japanese earthquake, though on a fault only one-third the length of the 1960 Chilean earthquake, still saw a maximum slip of 240 feet, twice the largest ever seen before. It was an earthquake most seismologists would have said couldn’t happen—until it did.

It is a testament to the building codes that Japan had developed (and, just as important, rigorously enforced) that this earthquake, which would have leveled buildings in many other countries, created only a mess of broken dishes for Maki. Although her house was fine, the electricity was out and cell phone systems were too overloaded to use. First she ran to the preschool and brought her daughter home. Her husband came soon after, making sure his family was safe before returning to the hotel to take care of terrified guests. Maki and her daughter settled down, waiting for life to return to normal. But for Maki, life—as a mother, as a homemaker—would never be quite the same.

North of Fukushima, farther along the valley, lies the city of Sendai. While Maki was preparing for her daughter’s preschool graduation, a thirty-five-year-old Canadian researcher in political science, Jackie Steele, was participating in another Japanese tradition to mark the six-month birthday of her infant daughter, Sena. She and her partner had brought Sena to a photography studio in a big shopping mall for a series of portraits in kimono, dress clothes, and even a bumblebee costume. They had just gotten Sena back into her own clothes and were starting to pick out which pictures they wanted to keep when the trembling began. They crouched on the floor, and, as the shaking continued and grew in intensity, the mall’s power went out and darkness enveloped them. Jackie held her baby under her through the interminable moment, marveling at the calm of the employees around her. When the shaking finally stopped, the emergency lights produced a dull red glimmer and store employees led the customers, in the oft-drilled evacuation plan, to the roof of the building.

The roof was a parking area and Jackie’s car was nearby, but she didn’t leave. Once again the building sustained no significant damage, but now the people around her were in shock. Jackie recalls a man attempting to drive away who couldn’t seem to remember what to do. He alternately raced the accelerator and slammed the brakes. His car seemed to stand up on its front. She didn’t want to be on the road with people in this state, so she decided to wait it out on the roof, wrapped in blankets supplied by the employees of the mall.

Two hundred miles to the south, at the other end of the long valley, sits Tokyo, where thirty-eight million people fill the area that surrounds the Tokyo Bay. Megumi Ishimoto, a slight, energetic forty-year-old, worked in one of the city’s many high-rises as an executive assistant to the CEO of a financial services company. Dissatisfied with her career, eager to do more than make money for investors, she was considering going abroad to engage in humanitarian work.

When the earthquake began to shake her high-rise, she wasn’t thrown to the floor. Whereas Fukushima and Sendai both lay due west of the earthquake fault, close to the source of the waves, Tokyo lay south of the southern end of the earthquake rupture zone. The earthquake’s waves had to travel farther to reach the city, which meant that while the shaking was very strong and lasted for almost two minutes, the sharpest jolts—the fastest, high-frequency shaking—had been dampened along the way. On the thirty-eighth floor of a Tokyo high-rise, those slow waves felt to Megumi like she was in a large cruise ship being tossed about on rough seas.

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, power was lost, and the city’s vaunted train and subway systems were shut down. Millions and millions of commuters had to get home on foot. Megumi was lucky that she lived relatively nearby, and it took her only two hours to walk home; many of her coworkers walked for six or eight hours to get home and find out if their families were okay. All things considered, however, Tokyo did not suffer much damage.

At this point, Japan seemed to have withstood an impossibly large earthquake. Had this been the extent of it, it would have been a nation bruised but still sound—the driver momentarily distracted by his children, but who manages to avoid a collision; the forest diminished by a drought, but that ultimately continues to thrive. The catastrophe that followed was the result of more than just this one event, and it had unforeseeable consequences.

It was six years earlier that the Sumatran earthquake had struck. As was revealed to horrified onlookers, an offshore earthquake’s greatest damage is often inflicted not by the shaking, but by the resulting shift in the seafloor. The East Japan earthquake moved a 250-mile-long block of rock as much as 240 feet, displacing a great deal of water and leading, inevitably, to a tsunami.

Waves struck the northeasternmost part of Honshu, called Tohoku. The Tohoku region is a rugged coastline punctuated by small towns, most of which are fishing towns that harvest the seafood that Japanese cuisine is known for. Rural and isolated, this area is one of the more traditional parts of Japan. Eldest sons inherit farms, remaining in the family home with their parents. Wives live with their in-laws, and young mothers are expected to keep small children out of public view, creating a very limited life for women.

Tsunamis, like earthquakes, are part of life in Japan, and most towns had established defenses. In March 2011, at the time of this event, many had built seawalls up to twenty feet high to protect the flatland around the harbors where these towns had sprung up. The tsunami would take fifteen to thirty minutes to reach the shore, and residents had been trained to go to high ground after such a strong earthquake. They were aware of the danger and thought they were ready.

And they were ready for the tsunami that seismologists expected. But this earthquake exceeded all predictions for what the offshore fault could produce. The actual tsunami was several times larger than expected, at many places over forty-five feet high. One location saw waves one hundred feet high. It simply overwhelmed them. Alongside the northern half of the rupture, where the largest slip on the fault occurred, wave heights were all above thirty feet. Tide gauges in that section were destroyed by extreme waves—we can’t know how large they were, only that they were larger than the height at which the instruments broke.

In the Tohoku town of Otsuchi, Takuya Ueno lived with his parents in the home his family held for generations. A thirty-three-year old salaryman, Takuya was one of the few people in town with a university degree. Otsuchi was a small community of sixteen thousand people, many working as fishermen or in fish processing plants. As part of the management team for a manufacturing center, Takuya commuted each day to the largest city in the region, forty miles to the north. As soon as the shaking stopped, he and his coworkers headed uphill. They watched the tsunami sweep through the city below, surge after surge washing upon it for hours. He and his colleagues survived, but they were stranded. The roads Takuya needed to drive home were destroyed; he had no way of getting there. He worked his way to an uncle’s nearby house and waited.

Takuya’s mother, Hiro, had spent the day at a medical clinic back in Otsuchi, helping her diabetic brother get care. She didn’t drive, so her husband had dropped them off at the hospital. After the earthquake, knowing the tsunami risk, the patients and staff were all taken to the roof of the building, a practice called vertical evacuation. (It would have been impossible to get that many elderly and infirm people to safety in any other way.) The building was just tall enough to exceed the waves, and the patients survived, watching first the waves and then the fires destroy their homes.

Others in Otsuchi weren’t so lucky. The city council met in an emergency session at city hall immediately after the earthquake. Their protocol had required them to leave city hall and move to high ground, but they decided to stay in place. The magnitude 7.2 earthquake two days earlier had resulted in a tsunami warning, but nothing had happened. The warning for this earthquake said to expect sixteen-foot waves. City hall sat behind a twenty-foot-high seawall that seemed more than enough to ensure their safety.

Many citizens gathered outside to hear what was being decided. When a forty-five-foot tsunami came pouring over the seawall, they ran inside to try to get to the roof, but the only passage up was by a single ladder. A handful survived, while hundreds of others were swept to their deaths, including the mayor and most of the city council. Of the sixteen thousand residents of Otsuchi, thirteen hundred lost their lives. Hiro and her brother were taken to an evacuation center, where she could only wait for someone from her family to come for her. Their home was near the ocean, and the waves had swept through it and taken everything away. It was completely gone.

Three days after the tsunami, the roads still closed, Takuya heard that some people were fleeing Otsuchi using an old mountain path. Following it in reverse, Takuya made it back to Otsuchi and found the evacuation center and his mother, who screamed and collapsed when she saw him. His father hadn’t returned.

The community struggled to come back from the brink of destruction in the weeks that followed. Emergency responders from the national government set up evacuation centers. Debris from the tsunami was collected. Bodies were sent to government-funded morgues and sorted by gender, age, and size. Takuya’s close friend had lost his mother, and so, each day, the two went together to all the morgues, Takuya looking at the male bodies and his friend at the female, each trying to find their parent’s remains. Each day, along with hundreds of others, opening body bag after body bag, examining the dead, hoping against hope, searching for closure.

A month after the tsunami, Takuya’s father was finally found and brought to the morgue, where Takuya identified him. He had been found in his car, perhaps trying to evacuate or heading to the hospital to find his wife. After a month, in a mound of tsunami debris, he could be identified only by his distinctive watch. Four hundred of the dead in Otsuchi were never found.

Similar devastation played out in town after town on the Tohoku coast. In Minamisanriku, a young woman stayed at her post on the third floor of the emergency services building broadcasting tsunami warnings, giving instructions. The tsunami ripped through the building and carried her to her death. In an elementary school in Ichinoseki, the teachers, untrained in how to respond to a tsunami warning, kept the children in their schoolyard. More than two miles from the ocean, they thought they were safe. The tsunami swept through despite the distance, killing 74 of the school’s 102 students.

In the end, 150 deaths were caused by the magnitude 9 earthquake, and more than 18,000 people were killed by the tsunami. Each of these deaths is a tragedy, and if this were the extent of the damage, it would be a significant, terrible disaster. Still, for an earthquake and tsunami of this unprecedented scale, Japan had weathered it as well as a country might reasonably hope to. The earthquake collapsed few buildings, and no trains were derailed. The tsunami, so much larger than expected, killed in terrible numbers, but its physical effects were endured by a relatively small part of Japan’s population of more than 100 million, many fewer than the 140,000 who had died in Tokyo in 1923. What turned this event into a national catastrophe was not the earthquake alone, or even the pairing of earthquake and tsunami, but these two natural events in conjunction with one other significant man-made factor. Together they created a crisis on a scale that Japan hadn’t seen since World War II.

Nuclear power plants harness the huge amount of heat generated by the splitting of the nuclei of large atoms, like those that make up uranium. This heat is used to create steam, which in turn is used to drive electric turbines and create the energy many of us consume in our daily lives. But the heat created in these nuclear reactions needs to be managed, to be drawn away from the nuclear fuel, or else we risk it melting, which will cause the vessel that contains the fuel to explode. So nuclear fuel is kept in circulating water to dissipate its heat. As a consequence, nuclear power plants are always built near major water sources, often the ocean, to facilitate cooling. Additionally, they have redundant backup power systems to make sure the heat management systems don’t fail.

In Japan, because of the ongoing risk of earthquakes and tsunamis, ocean-side installations must consider the probable maximum tsunami they’re likely to face. When the Fukushima Daiichi plant was built in the 1960s, the “design basis tsunami height”—the maximum-height tsunami they might expect—was ten feet. The plant was built thirty-three feet above sea level, which seemed a very comfortable margin of safety, and the engines for seawater pumps—the pumps that bring in water to cool nuclear fuel—were put at thirteen feet above sea level. In 2002, the design height was revised to twenty feet, based on more detailed studies of past tsunamis, and the seawater pumps were sealed accordingly, to protect them from inundation. In the years that followed, ancient records were studied that revealed an earthquake that had struck in AD 869, and that may have led to an even larger tsunami. In 2011, that risk was still being discussed; the appropriate action had not yet been agreed to. The Earthquake Research Committee was planning to release a report on it in April.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant withstood the earthquake itself without significant damage. The nuclear reactors were automatically shut down, as they were designed to do. But even once active reaction is stopped, there are residual processes that generate heat, and cooling remains essential. The earthquake caused a failure of the electric power grid that ran the cooling pumps, so backup generators kicked in. They seemed to be working as they should.

The first surge of the tsunami hit Fukushima almost an hour after the earthquake, at 3:41 p.m., with a second, even larger surge eight minutes later. The seawater pumps, whose engines had been sealed a decade prior, could withstand the waves, even at the massive scale they were experiencing. It was in the backup generators that the vulnerability lay. They were at too low a level and were completely inundated by the forty-foot-plus waves. As a consequence, the cooling systems failed for three of the six reactors on the site. Without effective cooling, the reactors overheated. Pressure built and nuclear fuel melted. It was only a matter of time before reactors began to explode.

The earthquake and resulting tsunami occurred on a Friday afternoon. That evening, the Japanese government issued an emergency declaration, evacuating people living within two miles of the plant. On Saturday, the evacuation zone was extended to six miles. Then an explosion caused by the melting fuel in Unit 1 blew the roof off the reactor building, releasing more radiation, and the evacuation zone was extended to twelve miles. On Sunday, a water injection system failed in another reactor, and the water level began falling dramatically as well. Although it wasn’t clear at the time, damage to the nuclear core had begun early that morning, and much if not all of the fuel in at least one unit had melted. On Tuesday, another explosion led to an expansion of the evacuation zone to twenty miles.

The plant had largely withstood the earthquake and even the tsunami, but those emergency generators were its Achilles’ heel. The insufficient cooling led to nuclear meltdowns, hydrogen-air chemical explosions, and the release of radioactive material from three different reactors over the next four days. These incidents caused radioactive material to be released into the air and surrounding ocean. The chemicals emitted ionizing radiation—radiation with enough energy to change the atoms it comes into contact with. When that radiation hits human beings, it can alter our cells, leading to birth defects, cancers, and, in the highest doses, radiation poisoning and death.

Maki Sahara’s home in the city of Fukushima was a bit more than thirty miles from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. She and many of the almost three hundred thousand other residents of the city knew nothing about the problems at the power plant until four days after the tsunami. Without power, she had no television, and she and her neighbors were still busy dealing with the earthquake and its aftershocks. Her daughter’s preschool graduation had been postponed as they waited for electricity to be restored. Residents were cleaning up the mess left behind by the earthquake. Food thrown out of cupboards onto the floor, broken dishes, glassware and knickknacks—it all had to be dealt with. It was on Tuesday, when evacuees from the coast started to arrive in Fukushima, that Maki and her family discovered that this was more than just another large earthquake. These people, who had been forced out of their homes, some arriving with just the clothes on their backs, were measured for radiation exposure. Some of them carried such substantial radiation that even the clothes on their backs were taken from them.

The government had first described the severity of the nuclear incident as a “4” on the international 0–7 scale. For reference, the Three Mile Island incident in the United States in 1979 had been a 5; the Chernobyl incident in the Soviet Union in 1986 was the only 7 to have ever occurred. The government warned that there was the possibility of more reactor explosions, but that the radioactivity released into the environment did not pose a risk to human health at that time. Maki noted the phrase “at that time” and wondered what was coming next.
Over the next month, as the nuclear crisis unfolded, they discovered that the situation was much worse than they’d been told, especially for residents of Fukushima. The reactors and spent fuels continued to overheat, requiring them to be bathed in untreated seawater. Seawater is corrosive, and leaks developed. Fires broke out, carrying more radiation into the environment. Storms and wind currents carried the radiation to the northwest—toward Fukushima. Radiation levels in the vicinity grew. After two weeks, even the tap water in Tokyo, over 150 miles south, showed twice the safe level for infants. By the end of March, radiation levels in the seawater immediately adjacent to the plant had levels of radiation that were 4,385 times what was considered safe. It was only with this absolute proof of the severity, a full month after the incident began, that the Japanese government revised the rating of the incident to a 7—on par with Chernobyl.

As the circle of danger widened, many residents of smaller towns near the power plant moved to evacuation centers in Fukushima City. The city itself was a hot spot—it showed the highest levels of radiation outside the defined evacuation zone. But with three hundred thousand residents and now a wave of refugees, its evacuation would have been a herculean task. The residents were told it was safe to stay. Elementary school students were not allowed to play outside, but as the city regrouped, middle schoolers and high schoolers continued with their outdoor athletics.

But the radioactive materials were continuing to be released and dispersing into the environment. The heavier particles, like cesium and iodine, responsible for much of the radiation, settled into grassy areas and sandboxes. By the end of summer, the radiation levels in Fukushima City were so high that the government decided to remove the topsoil from every piece of exposed ground in the city. Schoolyards, parks, and backyards all had the top few inches of soil scraped up and put into large, sealed plastic mounds. It took five years to complete the removal.

The initial government assurances, followed by incidents that revealed those reassurances to be misplaced, sowed mistrust among the citizens. Maki Sahara was outraged at the lack of information and traveled to Tokyo to join protests. In those first few months after the tsunami, as many as two hundred thousand people took to the city’s streets in demonstrations protesting the continued reliance on nuclear energy and the lack of communication about the situation in Fukushima. The antinuclear movement has a long history in Japan, the only country to have ever lost a city to an atomic bomb. The Fukushima Daiichi failure brought new focus to the movement, and activists came to Fukushima to help in the recovery. The Fukushima 30-Year Project was initiated, to help residents get information about the radiation. With donations, the project bought portable radiation scanners to assess food for safety, as well as full-body scanners to measure absorbed radiation. Classes and training were provided so residents could learn how to protect themselves and their families. The project pressured the government to install public radiation monitors in parks, which finally happened two years after the earthquake.

Maki volunteered to help. She began as a receptionist, helping citizens access the services they needed. She didn’t have training, but she wanted to make a difference. She scheduled the scans, signed people up for classes. If a scan showed a person had high levels, he would be offered counseling on ways to minimize exposure. The project offered classes that, for example, instructed parents to have their children play on concrete, not on grass or in sand. As time went on, Maki took on a larger and larger role. A local mother trying to protect her child was a much more effective voice for change than those of activists from Tokyo. She also knew her community and what the people needed. For instance, she was able to get handheld Geiger counters and created a training class to show children how to measure radiation, teaching them to recognize safe places to play. She empowered children to understand and take control, much as she had done. She found her purpose.

Takuya Ueno, like most everyone else in Otsuchi, had lost almost everything of his former life. His childhood home, the home of generations of his family before him, was completely gone, swept away from its place near the ocean. The government decreed that the site was at too much risk from future tsunamis for rebuilding. His job had vanished; the factory had been destroyed. His father was gone too, and his mother consumed by grief.

The national government came in with aid, but there was no local government to work with them. It took until August before the town was organized enough to elect a new mayor and city council to replace those who had died in the tsunami. How do you restart when nothing is left? Takuya began meeting with others who wanted to aid in the reconstruction. They brainstormed ways to create job opportunities.

Outside rescue workers came to help. Among them was an emergency nurse, Mio Kamitani, who had worked at a hospital in Galveston, Texas, in 2008, as Hurricane Ike put most of that city underwater. There, she had attended to patients too ill to be moved in the evacuation. Mio came to Otsuchi to provide psychological care, and she stayed to help the community rebuild. Takuya and Mio fell in love and married, living in the temporary housing units that were the town’s only homes.

One of the most difficult tasks facing Otsuchi was grappling with the emotional impact of the disaster. Four hundred of the lives lost there were lost completely, their bodies never recovered. The trauma of the event, coupled with the sheer magnitude of the death toll, made the transition through grief particularly difficult. When everyone is suffering from PTSD, who is left to help? Several years after the tsunami, the town organized a trip to the sacred mountain of Osorezan. A desolate, volcanic landscape of sulfur-stained rock, the Osorezan site has, for more than a millennium, been venerated in the Buddhist tradition as a gateway to the afterlife. Many of the families who had lost husbands and wives, children and parents, went on this trip to pray for their dead and try to find closure. Takuya’s mother, Hiro, went to pray for her husband and to let go of the grief.

Otsuchi residents looking to find a way forward first self-organized, and their efforts led to the creation of a formal nonprofit called Oraga Otsuchi Yume Hiroba, which could be translated as “A Field of Dreams for Our Otsuchi.” The goal of the organization is to inspire reconstruction; provide support to supplement government functions that have been degraded or lost; and revitalize local industries and tourism. They offer workshops to other communities on how organizations can work together to bring a community back from the brink, using their own hard-won examples. Takuya and Mio still ponder how an event could be so horrible and yet also the event that brought them together, that created a new life for them.

Mio also derived from it a newfound sense of perspective. Asked what message she would share with others, in the wake of the catastrophe she witnessed, she said, “Love, thank, and cherish your loved ones every day of your life…. It sounds like a cliché, but that is what many cannot do anymore and miss the most…. My town and other disaster areas are talked about in the sense of disaster prevention/preparedness and reconstructions very frequently, but I think we can also be the ones to talk about ‘love’ because many of us have found our own definitions of what that is.”

She likewise urged others to “believe that you have power and ability to make your own decisions,” citing the dependence of many Japanese in 2011 on governments and agencies—groups that fell short in preserving their citizens’ safety. “I think it is very important for people to know that it is they who make decisions for their lives, not the warning systems.”

Megumi Ishimoto in Tokyo felt the effects of the nuclear meltdown more indirectly. All nuclear power plants were shut down, which meant that the entire country was running out of electricity. For many days, she went to work without power, without lights, without heat. She knew others were suffering more than she was, and she wanted to do something to help. But at that point there were few organized volunteer efforts. She and her friends went to Ishinomeki, one of the towns heavily damaged by the tsunami, to remove debris.

It was a turning point for Megumi. She came back to Tokyo, quit her job, and started looking for opportunities to do the humanitarian work that had been calling out to her even before the disaster. In early May, she went back to Tohoku, to another seaside town called Minamisanriku. From across Japan, tens of thousands like her were going to Tohoku to volunteer their efforts, and several different groups had formed centers to coordinate with local and national governments. Most volunteers wanted to do the physical work of clearing debris because it let them connect with the local people.

For her part, when Megumi arrived at the center in Minamisanriku, she offered to do whatever was needed. With her executive management background, they asked her to take on the less glamorous back-office work, organizing teams and managing support for volunteers. She had originally intended to stay for a week, but the others begged her to stay longer. She agreed to stay for one to three months. The local government had requested that volunteers create a support group for the women in the evacuation center, and with her longer time commitment, Megumi was tasked with heading it up.

Together with a city government official and a local woman, she visited evacuation centers. At first, much of their work was simply listening to what these women most needed. Many of the women they interviewed had been raised to remain quiet, to focus on their families’ concerns and not their own. In situations where the conditions in the evacuation center were rough, exacerbating the trauma of being forced from their homes, these women didn’t have a cultural framework that encouraged them to protest. And so Megumi’s first job was to provide an environment where these traditional women could feel free to speak up. She created knitting groups, offering them a reason to show up. The first few were very quiet. After some time, women began to speak up. They told of the difficulties of being in such close quarters, and of the older men angry that the women’s young children made so much noise. They talked about the male manager of supplies at the evacuation center who handed out menstrual pads one at a time, and their embarrassment at having to discuss such a private matter with a strange man several times a day. And a few, very tentatively, began to talk of the sexual aggression they faced in the centers.

Through these conversations, Megumi came to realize that if her organization was going to help the disaster’s most vulnerable—the babies and the elderly—they needed to ensure that the women were cared for, since they were the predominant caregivers. She also realized that as families were moved from evacuation centers to temporary housing, the city program, based in evacuation centers, was losing contact with them at a time when they still needed support.

Recognizing the gap, she decided to form a separate, farther-reaching women’s resource center. It began with no money, but Megumi was able to secure funding from foundations, and gradually from government programs as well. It began as a place of support for women in temporary housing and otherwise affected by the tsunami—to talk, to assist in the struggle with bureaucracy. Her organization has evolved over five years into Women’s Eye, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the women in Tohoku as they work to rebuild their homes and communities.

The members are women entrepreneurs, creating businesses and nonprofits to revitalize Tohoku. Maki Sahara and Mio Kamitani are both members, as are a midwife starting a chain of modern birth clinics, a photographer, and the owner of a seaweed processing plant. Women’s Eye connects them with one another to help them see they aren’t alone, and it provides business and leadership training.

It also allied itself with a larger national movement, the Japan Women’s Network for Disaster Risk Reduction. Akiko Domoto was the first woman governor of Chiba Province. As president of the organization, she tackles real problems in disaster response as it affects women, but also the underlying issues of gender inequity that disaster exposes.

For Jackie Steele, the Canadian researcher in Sendai with a six-month-old baby, the earthquake meant having to leave her home. Without heat and water, she didn’t know how else to keep her baby safe. Unlike Maki, she heard about the nuclear problems as they unfolded, and she knew that her home was downwind from the plant and babies were the most at risk. Her parents and friends begged her to come back to Canada, but that would feel like abandoning her community in Sendai, and the two years of postdoctoral research in political science that were nearly complete. Still, after two very cold nights, she had no choice but to go somewhere. She had a half tank of gas, luckily, so she was able to drive away. She stayed with friends in Nagano, safely removed from the crisis.

Jackie ultimately left Sendai, but not Japan. Before March 11, Jackie’s research had been on diversity and women’s political citizenship. With her experience of the earthquake and her observations of response and recovery, she became interested in the governance of natural disasters—how governments function in times of crisis. She was especially concerned with how women were treated in this process, which is how she became connected to Governor Domoto’s organization, as well as to Megumi and Women’s Eye.
Jackie is now an associate professor of political science at the University of Tokyo, and she comes back to the Tohoku region to study how residents are creating something new in Japan. They are learning that these women are more than “just” mothers doing what they must to support their families. They are critical pieces of their communities, bringing it back to life, and creating a new, more inclusive future for women.

In the spring of 2017, I spent a day with Maki Sahara, learning about her efforts to bring radiation data, awareness, and training to Fukushima. She had by then taken over operation of the Fukushima 30-Year Project—a long way removed from her life as a housewife six years prior. She has the determination to keep the project going, to maintain focus. She knows one of the most difficult parts of recovery is the failure of our attention spans. The world inevitably moves on to other disasters, other crises, other needs. But for the people of Tohoku, the recovery was ongoing. Years later, many still lived in temporary housing. The area immediately around the Daiichi plant was still uninhabitable. The town of Otsuchi was still trying to decide whether their devastated city hall should be kept as a memorial or torn down so the community could move on. Recovery can be an agonizingly long process.

At the end of our day together, I asked Maki if there was one thing she could share with the world, what it would be. She told me she wanted to be able, in twenty years’ time, to look back and be relieved that she and her fellow organizers did more than what was required to keep children safe. Because it would be too awful to contemplate looking back and seeing that they had done too little.