Tag Archives: earthquake

Remnants of the Tsunami

June 2, 2018 By in Writing Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment
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I’m not sure where I end and the picture begins.

A true professional would never say that he/she wanted to run away from his/her subject. But on my last day in Kesennuma, I visited a local museum that had a tsunami exhibit. It was one of the last things I did during my time in Tōhoku (the last was sit down for a re-interview that I thought would take fifteen minutes but ended up over an hour long.) The museum was, to say the least, difficult.

We’re supposed to be objective, unemotional, detached. Yet we’re are also supposed to remain human. I’m not sure how that’s possible.

One of the fundamental aspects of storytelling is the recognition of what makes us human. Loss, grief, love: these are just a few of the things that we connect with when we read a story, then pass it along. The best stories stay with us.

I suppose it helps to not have a personal connection if you want to remain objective. And in this case, the storyteller by necessity retreats. The story takes precedence. Nobody remembers the writer; everybody remembers the story.

I suppose that in my case — which is to say, the three stories I’m to write — I’m hoping for a happy medium; an even balance of story and teller. I want you to know that I’m invested. But I also want you to be able to look beyond the authenticity factor of my own experience and recognize something beyond the primacy of the narrator. I get it: it’s a tall order. But I am nothing if not aspirational, if not hopeful.

Here is where I say something smart. Where I reference my betters, or the type of story I aspire to write. But I have none of that for you this day, folks. All I’ve got is a personal story, researched to the extent possible given a working life, and a passion to get it done. I’m not sure that’s enough to go the distance. But in the next few months, you’ll be able to judge for yourselves. I hope you find that my words are equal to the task.

A Tsunami’s Stone

June 1, 2018 By in Japan, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
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Hanōkizawa-san (left) and myself at the Yoshihama Tsunami-ishi

It seems remarkably privileged to say, but it can be a bit much to immerse yourself in tragedy. Even Japanese tsunami survivors are shrouded in it, because everyone on the Sanriku coast of Tōhoku lost something, someone, or both. I don’t know how real journalists do it. I suppose it helps to have some distance — a lack of a personal connection surely helps. But if I’ve learned anything on this trip, it’s a healthy appreciation for people who spend weeks face-to-face with horrible things. After only a few days in Kesennuma, I’d reached a bit of a saturation point. But it just so happened that on Tuesday, we had an appointment in Yoshihama, about an hour north of Kesennuma.

In the years since the tsunami, I have looked for stories that connected me to the landscape from across the Pacific. Stories of loss and recovery abounded. But for the most part, they were all so temporal, so pegged with the timeliness we have come to expect from journalism. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it is what it is. Turns out, we want to read things laden with meaning in the here and now, and that’s what journalism provides. There’s a reason most articles are just a few hundred words: and it has to do with the desire to consume one moment before moving on to the next.

I discovered a handful of stories about “tsunami stones,” some of which date back millennia, and for the most part, served as warnings regarding past Sanriku tsunamis. The meaning within the frame of a news article is obvious; here’s this old thing that everyone forgot about that warned of exactly the type of event that necessitated the article in the first place. Timely, meaningful: exactly the type of thing we like to read about.

But I began to wonder if the stories written were only telling one side of the narrative, whether there wasn’t something deeper that would require a more in-depth telling, unconstrained by the moment itself.

Enter the Yoshihama tsunami stone.

I can’t give too much of the story I plan to write away just yet, but on 3.11.11, Yoshihama suffered only one fatality while its neighbors to the north and south were hit much harder. In other words, Tuesday was good.

This is Hanōkizawa-san, one of the discoverers of the Yoshihama stone, and myself at the the locals call tsunami-ishi. I’m looking forward to telling its story.

 

What Remains

May 31, 2018 By in Japan, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
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Obā-san two and a half years before she died

Everybody dies. But not everyone dies in a natural disaster. Still, this does not make that that life more valuable, or special; nor am I made unique by relation to it. I’ve told myself this, over and over since 3.11.11 in order to resist giving in to the worst kind of narcissistic writing instincts.

But unlike dying at home in bed, in a hospital, or even in war; in a natural disaster the conditions surrounding the death, or fate for that matter, are often unclear. 24-hour media overloads you, by design, floods your mind with information. But never the information you want. That’s what it was like on 3.11.11 for my family. Imagine being halfway across the world, turning on the television, and seeing only a glimpse of a tsunami hitting your home town before the footage switches to something else even more horrifying before it cuts to yet something else before swapping with a talking head in a cool, air-conditioned studio. Do this, and you are now empathizing with my father. There is no information; the phones are down and so is the power. No one is reporting from Tōhoku; rather, they are reporting from above it. It will be days before you learn whether your loved ones survived, before you learn the tsunami took your mother.

We always had a rough idea of what happened to Obā-san, but I felt the need to distill this idea into the fact. Why I felt the need to do so has been the question I’ve struggled to answer on this trip. Because it makes a better, more complete story? If so, then I become the worst kind of profiteer – the kind who makes good on the suffering of others.

You should know that I found what I was looking for. But I’m still trying to answer that question about why I needed to know in the first place.