PAUL O'SHEA, a student in the Japanese city of Sendai, 100km from Fukushima, looks back on five weeks of shock, guilt and uncertainty
I WAS HALFWAY up the hill when the ground started to shake. March 11th was a fine spring morning in Sendai. I had pulled myself out of bed and was on my way to university.
At first I didn’t pay much notice. On Tuesday and Wednesday that week we had experienced earthquakes with magnitudes of at least 6 and 7, and I was getting used to them. But this time the ground shook more and more, and the noise, coming from the city centre, a kilometre down the hill, grew louder and louder.
It was almost impossible to walk, and branches from the trees around me started falling. I hunkered down in the middle of the road. When I looked down at the city centre the skyscrapers were swaying wildly.
The noise became intense, like a thousand shop shutters smashing down. It went on for maybe four or five minutes. The ground cracked; the old castle walls opposite me collapsed.
Afterwards, in shock, I made my way to the university and found staff and students outside. Some had radios, and there were warnings about tsunamis, aftershocks and gas leaks. The day had started with spring sunshine, but it suddenly began to snow heavily. I needed to contact my family and started walking through the snow-blanketed city in search of a working phone. After two or three hours I finally managed to tell them I was fine.
The next few days were spent trying to get food and water, and trying to contact people I knew to make sure they were okay. Getting water was practically impossible, and food was scarce.
Few shelters had water or electricity, so I stayed with friends in the city. A good Japanese friend lost some of her family and her house in the tsunami. She couldn’t get back to the disaster area, so she stayed with us in the city.
I admit I felt a rush of adrenalin during the quake, but her experience put everything into perspective.
After a couple of days eating crisps with salad dressing and whatever else we could get our hands on, food was shipped to the city. You could queue for a couple of hours, and come back with loads of fruit and vegetables, but without electricity or water you couldn’t cook it. We had so much fruit we would squeeze it into the sho-chu, a strong Japanese alcohol that a French friend had brought with him. It helped pass the long, cold and completely dark nights.
WITH ALMOST no communication we spent the first day or two in ignorance of the scope of the disaster. We gradually learned it had been the tsunami, not the earthquake, that devastated northeastern Japan. Then came the news of nuclear meltdown, or the threat of it.
It was this that caused most panic among the foreigners in Sendai. We had felt the earthquake; we knew where we needed to be to avoid the tsunami; but the nuclear threat was unknown.
The first Monday after the quake a friend received an e-mail from her employer saying that if it rained the next day she wouldn’t have to go to work. This was a subtle way of telling her that radioactive rain would fall the next day. The government’s and media’s tone shifted that night too, suddenly becoming much more serious.
Three of us decided to get out of the city, leaving behind our Japanese friend, who had still not seen her family and could not leave them, and another friend who was in hospital with injuries sustained in the earthquake.
It was not a proud moment when on the Tuesday morning, after a couple of hours queuing in the (supposedly radioactive) rain, we finally got on a bus. It took us on the only passable road out of Sendai, and we reached the Sea of Japan coast about 10 hours later.
After a few days, racked with guilt, I went back to Sendai with bags of supplies for those I had left behind. The city had emptied of foreigners. My Japanese friend didn’t blame me for leaving. Instead she asked me to join her to visit her old neighbourhood and look for something – anything – from her family home.
The zone devastated by the tsunami was an unreal world. Most of the corpses had been removed from the dry areas, but near the sea the houses had been replaced by oceans of debris. Inland, buildings remained but with gaping holes in which lay cars, trees and entire floors of other houses.
Believing they were safe on the second floor, people had lost their lives in these buildings. Family albums, diaries, wallets and handbags were strewn across the streets. Each picture, each smiling face, made you wonder what had happened to their owners, but you had to stop; it became too much.
My Japanese friend said she didn’t believe it was her neighbourhood.
Although she followed the same road to get there, it must have been moved, and eventually it would turn up untouched and intact. We didn’t find anything belonging to her family home.
I am not a journalist; I am just a student. Trying to make sense of it all required a context, so I thought about home, about Malahide, the coastal Dublin town of about 15,000 people where I grew up. If I took the Dart into town one morning, and came back that night to find . . . No. It didn’t work.
Sendai has improved now. There are aftershocks each day, but no one bats an eyelid. The city centre is more or less intact, and several parts of the city show no signs that the earthquake ever happened. Yet the spectre of Fukushima still looms over the city, as the summer winds begin to blow from the south, carrying discharged radioactivitiy north and over Sendai.
Water and electricity are back, but gas – like most of the foreign community – has yet to return. As the crisis has now been upgraded to the level of Chernobyl, one wonders if they ever will.
