The rugged Sanriku Coast of northeastern Japan is among the most
beautiful places in the country. The white stone islands outside the
port town of Miyako are magnificent. The Buddhist monk Reikyo could
think of nothing but paradise when he first saw them in the 17th
century. “It is the shore of the pure land,” he is said to have uttered
in wonder, citing the common name for nirvana.
Reikyo’s name for the place stuck. Jodogahama, or Pure Land Beach, is
the main gateway to the Rikuchu Kaigan National Park, a crenellated
seashore of spectacular rock pillars, sheer cliffs, deep inlets and
narrow river valleys that covers 100 miles of rural coastline. It is a
region much like Down East Maine, full of small, tight-knit communities
of hardworking people who earn their livelihoods from tourism and
fishing. Sushi chefs around the country prize Sanriku abalone,
cuttlefish and sea urchin.
Today that coast is at the center of one of the worst disasters in
Japanese history. Despite the investment of billions of yen in disaster
mitigation technology and the institution of robust building codes,
entire villages have been swept out to sea. In some places little
remains but piles of anonymous debris and concrete foundations.
I taught school in Miyako for more than two years in the 1990s, and it
was while hiking in the mountains above one of those picturesque fishing
villages that I came across my first material reminder of the intricate
relationship between the area’s breathtaking geography, its people —
generous and direct — and powerful seismic forces.
On a hot summer day a group of middle-school boys set out to introduce
me to their town, a hamlet just north of Pure Land Beach. While I
started up the steep mountainside the children bounced ahead of me,
teasing me that I moved slowly for someone so tall. “Are you as tall as
Michael Jordan, Miller-sensei?” yelled one boy as he shot past me up the
trail.
“Not quite,” I told him, pausing on a spot of level ground to look out
over the neat collection of tile roofs and gardens that filled the back
of a narrow, high-walled bay.
“What is this?” I asked, pointing to a mossy stone marker that occupied
the rest of the brief plateau. A chorus of young voices told me that it
was the high-water mark for the area’s biggest tsunami: more than 50
feet above the valley floor.
“When was that?” I asked, but the boys couldn’t say. They had learned
about it in school, they said, but like children everywhere they had
little sense of time. Everything seemed like ancient history to them,
but the thought of a wave reaching so high over the homes of my friends
sent a chill down my spine, and I began to investigate the region’s
history.
A major tsunami has hit the Sanriku Coast every few decades over the
last century and a half. Waves swept the area in 1896, 1933 and 1960.
The small monument was put there, high above the village, to mark the
crest of the 1896 tsunami. The wave killed more than 20,000 people. The
boys’ village, a place called Taro, was almost entirely destroyed.
Seventy-five percent of the population died.
The force of those waves was amplified by the area’s distinctive
geography. The same steep valley walls and deep inlets that make Sanriku
so beautiful also make its villages and towns especially hazardous. The
valleys channel a tsunami’s energy, pushing swells that are only a few
feet high in the open ocean up to stunning heights. Fast-moving water
topped 120 feet in one village in 1896.
In a landscape where earthquakes are a regular occurrence but major
tsunamis happen irregularly, people naturally forget. The small monument— one of several commissioned for towns up and down the coast — was a
mnemonic whose purpose was not commemoration but vigilance. “When there
is an earthquake, watch for tsunami,” reads the rather practical poem
engraved into one such slab.
Japan became a modern industrial state between the 1896 tsunami and the
next major one, in 1933. The country’s radio and newspapers brought the
story of rural fisher-folk swept out to sea to metropolitan audiences.
Three thousand people died in the disaster and the humanitarian crisis
elicited strong feelings of sympathy. The Sanriku region was portrayed
as the nation’s heartland, a place where tradition remained intact, and
the disaster threatened that preserve. Once again, Taro was particularly
hard hit: all but eight of its homes were destroyed and nearly half of
the village’s population of 1,800 souls went missing. The hamlet became
an embodiment of agrarian loss.
It is paradoxical that the response to this threat to traditional ways
was the application of cutting-edge engineering and technology. A huge
concrete seawall was planned for Taro. Completed in 1958, that wall, 30
feet high at points, stretches over 1.5 miles across the base of the
bay.
Faith in technology over nature appeared to be vindicated in 1960 with
the great Chilean earthquake, a 9.5-magnitude quake that remains the
largest ever recorded, which set off a Pacific-wide tsunami that killed
61 people in Hilo, Hawaii, before surging unannounced into the Sanriku
Coast seven hours later. More than 120 Japanese died, but Taro remained
largely unaffected, safe behind its sluice gates and concrete wall.
Based in part on this success, a new program of coastal defense was
initiated.
The Sanriku Coast is now one of the most engineered rural coastlines in
the world. Its towns, villages and ports take shelter behind
state-of-the-art seawalls and vast assemblages of concrete tetrapods
designed to dissipate a wave’s energy. The region is home to one of the
world’s best emergency broadcast systems and has been at the forefront
of so-called “vertical evacuation” plans, building tall, quake-resistant
structures in low-lying areas.
In 2003 Taro announced that it would become a “tsunami preparedness
town.” Working with teams from the University of Tokyo and Iwate
University, the town instituted a direct satellite link to accelerate
the arrival of tsunami warnings. Public education was expanded and
mayors from other towns visited to study this model village. Detailed
maps showing projected maximum tsunami heights — using 1896 as a
baseline — informed the selection of evacuation markers: a reassuring
thick line defined the projected maximum reach of a tsunami. Evacuation
sites were placed above that line on the maps. Similar calculations were
made up and down the coast.
The lines were drawn in the wrong place. Despite the substantial
infrastructure and technological investments in Sanriku, the wave on
March 11 overwhelmed large portions of Taro and Miyako. Some of the
evacuation points were not high enough. The walls were not tall enough.
And the costs are still being tallied.
Thousands of people are missing along this beautiful, injured coast,
hundreds in the town that I called home. I am still waiting to hear from
one of the groomsmen from my wedding, the owner of Miyako’s best coffee
shop and a sometime reader of this newspaper. Google’s people-finder
app tells me he is alive, but I have no idea where he is or how our
other friends fared. As for those rambunctious boys and all of my other
students, I can only hope for the best.
Technology allowed me to learn my friend’s fate. It has also helped to
inspire a worldwide humanitarian response. It may be, however, that a
greater application of technology in the same direction is not the
answer to the problems posed by the March 11 tsunami. As a historian, I
am forced to recognize that there is nothing purely natural about this
catastrophe. It is the result of a far longer negotiation between human
culture and physical forces. Disasters have the counterintuitive
tendency to reinforce the status quo. As the terrifying events at the
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant continue to underline, there are very
real costs to an uncritical application of technology.
I look forward to returning to my old Japanese home, but I also look
forward to finding something new and different when I make that journey.