THE ISLAND OF ILL FORTUNE
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.