Quakebook

On Friday afternoon, I was checking Facebook updates when one of my FB friends in Osaka posted that he’d just experienced a big earthquake. I felt nothing here, in Tokushima, on the island of Shikoku. Some others in Tokyo and farther north posted about the tremors as well – the biggest earthquake they’d ever experienced!

An hour or so later, when I went to pick up my daughter from school, the principal came out to my car. I thought he was just coming over to say “hello,” but there was a look of urgency about him. “Hurry home,” he told me. “There’s a tsunami warning!”

“Really?” I raised my eyebrows. “I heard about the earthquake, but…”
“Houses have been washed away,” my daughter’s teacher told me.

I know that tsunamis travel far. Even after the recent earthquake in Chile, a tsunami warning was issued here, but at that time the wave was only a foot or two high. Still I was a litte bit concerned because we live near the river, and to get home, I usually drive along a riverside road that tends to flood during typhoons. So even if the wave was only a meter high, we might get stuck in water.

I picked up my son and took him to baseball practice as usual. Meanwhile, sirens sounded along the river, warning people away from the water. It was sunny here. The sky was blue. It seemed like a day where nothing bad could happen anywhere, yet when I turned on the television I saw what had occurred in Tokyo and its environs. Buildings swayed. In a tony department store, a chandelier swung precariously, while workers huddled against the wall, and a foreign couple embraced, perhaps expecting the worst. Fissures snaked through Yokohama. The famous tourist attraction Tokyo Tower bent at the top. Everywhere, books fell from shelves, dishes crashed to the floor, smoke from fires bloomed across the city.
Amazingly, although the earthquake was the largest ever recorded in Japan, Tokyo and Yokohama appear to be largely intact. Fewer than 30 people died from the earthquakes Friday afternoon.

However, shortly after the earth shook, waves swallowed towns all across the northwest coast. The images have been breathtaking. Heart-breaking. Speech-stealing. Houses carried away like paper boats. Real boats smashed into houses. A ferry on top of a two-story building. Rescue workers carrying the corpses of some of the hundreds who drowned. Lives and livelihoods wiped out with one great lick of a wave. Now, entire towns are nothing but piles of debris. Thousands of people are camped out in school gymnasiums. Some people are still waiting on roofs, while the snow swirls around then.

Here in Tokushima, the tsunami could be measured in inches. It was nothing. It’s over. We’re safe.

But for others, the loss is immeasurable. I grieve for them.

This post originally appeared on Suzanne’s personal blog

Contributed by: Suzanne Kamata

Author of Losing Kei (Leapfrog Press, 2008)
Editor of Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Beacon Press, May 2008)
and Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2009)

On March 11, when I went to pick my eleven-year-old daughter and her wheelchair up from school – the school for the deaf, which is housed in an aging four-story building with no elevator – her principal rushed out to my car to tell me to hurry home. He told me that a tsunami warning had been issued for Tokushima Prefecture. Although we live around 500 miles from Miyagi Prefecture, the scene of the greatest devastation, the deaf school is right next to an estuary of the Yoshino River, not far from the inland sea, and our home is just on the other side of the levee. It seemed like a good idea to get away from water.

As I listened to the sirens coming from across the road, warning people to leave the riverside, my daughter and I watched footage of people scrambling up hills as their houses, cars, and livelihoods were washed away. I couldn’t help thinking about how hard it would be to get a wheelchair up that hill – and later, seeing photos of the aftermath, of how hard it would be to push through that debris.

It’s not especially easy to get around with a wheelchair at the best of times. There are many restaurants near our house that we can no longer visit as a family because they are accessible only by steps. At the local McDonald’s, the Happy Meal display blocks the wheelchair ramp, and the toilet stall is too narrow for my daughter and her wheelchair. Last summer, she and I went by train to a small town an hour west of here for the funeral of one of her teachers. In order to board a “barrier-free” train car in Tokushima City (pop. 264,764), I had to carry her wheelchair up steps to the platform. There was no ramp. And of course there were no wheelchair ramps in the little towns we traveled through, nor at our final destination. I found out later that I could have called for assistance in advance, but it seemed like a lot of trouble. Why not just pour a little concrete?

After living in Japan for 23 years, I’ve come to understand that along with the capacity for endurance, much vaunted by the foreign press these past several days, and a sense of fatalism encompassed by the oft-repeated phrase “shikata ga nai” (it can’t be helped), the Japanese can be characterized by an aversion to meiwaku (being a burden) In other words, no one wants to make trouble. This, I believe, more than a sense of shame, is why people with disabilities are sometimes reluctant to venture out, and why people don’t like to complain.

Last week, I discussed these issues with a nurse that I’ve been teaching privately for the past couple of years who is writing a dissertation on accessibility. This week, we talked about the earthquake. She told me that she had grown up in Miyagi, where over a thousand bodies were found in the sea, and that her grandmother’s house in Fukushima has been irreparably damaged. She told me that as a nurse, training in Chiba, one of the shakier cities in Japan, she learned to wrap patients in a sling made of sheets for easy transport. (It takes too much time to get patients to wheelchairs and gurneys.) She said that she could do this in three minutes flat.

Japan is arguably the most disaster-ready nation on earth. Earthquake drills are held regularly at my children’s schools. Outside my daughter’s classroom – and every other classroom – there is a backpack with emergency supplies. My kids – and every other kid in Japan – have padded, fireproof hoods near their desks. This past week, my daughter has been practicing for earthquakes every day. Her teacher tells me that although at first she dawdled, she is getting faster at crawling under her desk. But her classroom is on the first floor of an old building that still bears cracks from the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995.

I am relieved when I see people in wheelchairs among the evacuees on TV. They made it out alive, in spite of their disabilities. Meanwhile, I am reminded of that great law of nature – sometimes only the fittest survive. One woman who escaped the flood confessed that she couldn’t save her elderly parents. In order to live, she had to let them go.

This post originally appeared on The Beacon Press blog

Contributed by: Suzanne Kamata

Author of Losing Kei (Leapfrog Press, 2008)
Editor of Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Beacon Press, May 2008)
and Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2009)

Submitted by: Miwa Nakamura. Photos by her colleague in Sendai.

Submitted by Kevin Kato, a Fukushima resident.

Quarter to three in the afternoon; my son is sitting at a kid-sized table with his friends at the Shinryo pre-school, chomping on cookies and drinking cold tea. The other kids are there with their moms. Both teachers in the room are women. I’m the only adult male, and though they all say it’s great that my son could be there today with his ‘O-to-san’ I’m feeling a bit out of place. I stir my paper cup of coffee and watch my son interact with the other kids in effortless Japanese.

All along the coast, from Fukushima up through Miyagi and into Iwate, fishermen in slickers and rubber boots and weathered skin tie off their nets and head to bed. Their wives sit on the floor on straw mats pouring tea, alone or with friends, glancing outside at the slowly warming March weather. Young children play and shriek and eat cookies at schools just like Shinryo.

The previous evening my student Eriko and I had (quite amazingly) gotten onto the subject of earthquakes. ‘The Big One’ was coming, we agreed, in the next ten or twenty years. Could be Tokyo, or maybe the Kansai area which includes Osaka, Japan’s second largest city, and Kobe, center of the devastation of 1996. ‘It won’t be in Fukushima,’ I added as the prefecture lies on relatively solid ground. ‘We’re lucky we live here.’

Eriko nodded in agreement.

A bang, a bolt of sound so fast and fierce it pierces not your ears but your chest. A bang like a truck slamming into the building. But this explosion came at us from all sides; the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all suddenly, violently alive…three seconds…six seconds…ten…. The sway and creak usually rises and falls, God reaching down with one hand to shake us out of our complacence and then leaving us to our own again to ponder the continuance of the day. Today, in this moment that felt like it would last the rest of our lifetimes, there was no build-up, no gentility, only the earth erupting in what we would personify as rage as if there were even a word for what was happening.

I held my son. I thought of my wife and my baby boy and a conversation with Eriko.

This was Fukushima, this didn’t happen here.

We sat in our car that evening, the safest place – the only safe place – for now and who knew how long. My wife was in the passenger seat holding our ten-month-old. My older boy was in his seat in the back. He had himself all buckled in, ready to go. How to explain to a kid of three why we’re sitting in the car if we aren’t going anywhere?

Sometimes fifteen minutes would pass without another tremor. Sometimes it was only five. ‘Are we gonna get another reeeeally big earthquake?’ my son asked.

I stared out the windshield, the last of the sun disappearing behind the mountains. There were no lights, anywhere, save for the faint pinpoints of the stars. Behind my son the world was black. Up ahead, on all sides, it would soon be the same.

‘I don’t know, buddy,’ I said to my son. ‘I don’t know.’

Submitted by: Kevin Kato
http://www.kevinkato.com
http://kevinkatoendeavors.blogspot.com

Our Man in Abiko (center) … seen in living color for the first time.

At left, #quakebook advisor Kevin Carroll. At right, Time magazine correspondent (and Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan event moderator) Lucy Birmingham.

The technology wizard behind this morning’s livestream of the Quakebook press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan was Joseph Tame (foreground), who not only set up the stream, but also livetweeted the action. What does Joseph get up to in his spare time? Check it out.

The 3D appearance of @ourmani took backstage to the news….I’m still struggling to take everything on board. Where shall I start?

Yoko Ono has contributed to Quakebook.

From everyone involved, I can only say an enormous thank you.

Amazon and Sony are going to make the book available in a digital format with every penny going to the Japanese Red Cross. We’re now in talks with Apple too.

Wow!

The live broadcast of the Quakebook press conference, where we finally saw who our man was, delivered all and more that the global team could have hoped for to help those still suffering in Japan.

Quakebook is HUGE.

Because the problems are.

There will be a second edition in some form – details to be confirmed.

Everyone, but everyone who has contributed to Quakebook will make a difference to real people in Japan.

And that, my friends, is why we started. To all of you in Japan, this is for you.

At 10am JST on Friday 1st April 2011, OurManinAkibo took to the stage at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.

For those of you who were unable to attend in person, we have a recording of it here.