Tag Archives: Freelance

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.

 

 

 

See With Your Own Two Eyes

May 29, 2018 By in Japan, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
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First step: orient yourself.

My first full day in Kesennuma, my cousin Motō played enthusiastic guide to my dad and me. We first visited the family grave site, then the Kesennuma fish museum, which now dedicates half its real estate to the tsunami and reconstruction. A short video ran through seven-plus years of history, and it was a perfect way to begin my time in Kesennuma. In other words: gut-wrenching.

In the afternoon, tsunami walking tours in association with a public tsunami awareness event were offered. So, accompanied by Yu, the intrepid Japanese linguist I hired for this trip, we walked for two hours over a couple miles of  Kesennuma’s tsunami-affected area. I should note here that I couldn’t possibly have planned things so perfectly as to begin my Kesennuma stay with a period of initial familiarization aided by public events. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I had only a rough sketch for my thirteen days in Japan, and precious few sources to speak with. But a spate of coincidences have occurred that have in turn resulted in a cascade of doors that opened other doors, beginning with the public awareness event.

Our guide, a retired gentleman Hashimoto Shigeyoshi (family name first in Japan) who ran a Kesennuma evacuation center on 3.11.11, began with the photo pictured here, and it was a powerful way to begin the tour. The top image was taken from the top floor of the parking garage you can see in the background of my photo on 3.11. The enormous standing wave in the image is cresting near the height of the parking garage. It is one thing to see disaster electronically, maybe even feel it over long distances. But it is another entirely to stand on dry ground under a bluebird day as a band plays nearby and the scent of good food drifts with the wind, only to realize that in that spot, I’d have been some thirty feet underwater on that day in 2011.

For the next 120-plus minutes Hashimoto-san walked us around Kesennuma, and I’m not sure he stopped speaking with passion and conviction for less than a minute or two. It was only supposed to be a 90 minute tour, but I could not help but stop him every few steps to ask more questions. I’d like to say that I knew everything beforehand, that years spent staring at articles and papers and pictures and videos had told me everything I needed to know. But if that was true, I wouldn’t be here in the first place.

The old adage that seeing is believing is just true enough to make the saying last. I would amend it slightly: some things must be seen to be known more fully.

 

 

 

 

 

Return to the Tsunami

May 22, 2018 By in Japan, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Passport: check. Clip-on lenses for iPhone: check. Voice recorder: check. Weather forecast: checked. Hotel and rental car reservations: kinda check. Notebook, ready pen, and open eyes/ears: yep.

If you know me at all, then you know that in 2011, the tsunami in Japan killed my Japanese grandmother, and that I subsequently deployed in support of Operation Tomodachi (friend), the U.S. military relief effort. Since then, I’ve told a highly-condensed version of my tsunami story for Anchorage’s Arctic Entries public storytelling event. I also wrote a short piece about watching Des Linden’s remarkable 2011 Boston Marathon from my hotel room in Japan.

But whether or not you know me a little or a lot, you probably don’t know that in the intervening years, the tsunami has loomed large in my imagination. That every time I run along Anchorage’s Tony Knowles Coastal Trail, I find myself wondering what it would be like to watch the Cook Inlet of the Pacific Ocean rear, then swell with pitiless energy. That when a recent midnight tsunami warning sat me up in bed, despite what I knew about the elevation of my home and the slim likelihood of a tsunami ever affecting Anchorage, I was seconds from bundling my family into the car in order to drive to high ground. That I set “Japan Tsunami” as a Google Alert and every morning wonder if my email will notify me that another tsunami has struck Japan.

But it’s not just about me. In the intervening years, I have discovered remarkable stories of the 2011 tsunami that deserve telling. Of survival and sadness. Of resilience and memory. About a year ago, I decided it was time to tell them. I started the process of researching, then pitching story ideas to editors at a variety of outlets. And after I landed the pitches, I applied for a Pulitzer Center grant to help defray what I knew would be a costly trip, and to my surprise, I was approved.

So. Here I go. I’ll be blogging the experience during my trip, so I hope you’ll consider following along here. If you want condensed versions, you can check out my Twitter and Instagram profiles.

Last thing before I go: a recent Google Alert made me aware of something called an edge wave. An edge wave has to do with the way that waves refract and bounce along shorelines. In the case of a tsunami, depending on how a coastal shelf looks, edge waves can extend the period of time a tsunami can effect a coastline. It seems a fitting metaphor. Eight years after 11 March 2011, I’m still speeding to and from the northeast coast of Japan in my mind, riding the tsunami’s edge waves like a piece of flotsam. But now it’s time to not just imagine it, but do it for real.

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Sendai Airport, March 2011. Taken from an Air Force Pave Hawk helicopter about to drop me off for what was supposed to be an hour, but turned into two days.