Authors: Gretel Ehrlich
“The dogs I rescued remember me. I can’t have a dog where I live, but I’ve ‘adopted’ a little white dog that is at my friend’s shelter called SORA. She waits for me to come.”
North of Fukushima Prefecture, on the Tohoku coast, dogs ran during the earthquake or were washed away by the tsunami. A group of rescuers from a sanctuary called Dogwood outside of Sendai began looking for animals.
The founder said, “After March 11, the police weren’t letting us in. I was trying to get to the places covered with water—to Ishinomaki, Higashi-Matsushima, and Natori, but when we finally got to the coast, there weren’t any dogs around. Most of them had drowned in the Wave.
“A little further inland we found dogs inside cars, using them as a house. A call came from a woman whose dog had survived the Wave, but had heart problems. She wasn’t allowed to bring the dog into the evacuation center, so she was living with it outside in a tool shed. When we located her, she and the dog were shivering; it was snowing hard.
“So many owners have never had the experience of being separated from their dogs. We offered help: we said we’d keep the dogs safe and warm and well-cared for until they were more settled. But when these people went into temporary housing, they found the spaces so small it wasn’t possible to keep the dog, so we are keeping them even longer.
“There are 150 dogs here right now. Some are unstable and others don’t change despite all they’ve experienced. They can cope with it. We find that the unstable dogs are mirroring the owners’ fears. The strong dogs know to wait; they know someone will come for them again. If the dogs are happy and energetic, then when the owners come to visit—even if they are still unable to bring their dogs home—they feel better too. The dogs influence the humans and vice versa.
“The dogs we received from the twenty-kilometer zone around Fukushima have owners but have not been reunited. We’re not sure where the owners are. We’ve made a book of photographs of the dogs that get posted online to help owners and their animals meet up, just as they did with the human survivors.
“We didn’t enter the no–go zone, but some dog lovers have been sneaking in and bringing dogs out. Those animals are
checked for radiation and if they have high counts, we wash them very thoroughly and have the vets check them. They are all okay. We will keep them for as long as is necessary. They’re happy here. And so am I. Compared to those who lost houses and loved ones, I’m very lucky. There’s lots of work here but it’s good to be able to help.”
Past verdant pastures of dairy cows and hillside apple orchards, we follow a steep road so narrow, the blue hydrangeas on the road brush both sides of the van. Flowers and vegetables are planted in highway medians. Onions and cabbages reach the front steps of country houses. “We don’t have much land, but what we have is well used,” Abyss-san says. The intense heat is exhausting, and winding up the steep mountain with opened windows, the breeze grows cooler with each mile.
Abyss-san’s mountain house is spare and traditional—tatami rooms with sliding doors between, and a small kitchen down one step. No indoor plumbing except one faucet in the kitchen—just a “long drop” as Nikki calls it, an outhouse—no heated toilet, no bath, no air conditioner.
The night is cool. Mist spews out from between towering cedar trees. The house is a comfortable mess stacked with Abyss-san’s unsold drums and boxes of donated goods for refugees that he has not yet delivered. Quietly, he goes to work in the kitchen, making a hearty soup of lentils, cabbage, and carrots on the one-burner gas flame. We each drink a beer.
I go for a walk up the road. Beyond his house there are no neighbors. A line of trees meets small clearings. A hayfield is lit by the moon; the moon is erased by wafting mist. A V of trees, like a widow’s peak, divides the road and cuts a vertical slash in the clouds to reveal stars.
Japan has always had itinerant poets and painters, some in political exile, some just sauntering to “cut through attachment.”
Now the country is full of internal refugees. As I wander back to the house, low clouds brush treetops, and a line from one of Su Shi’s poems written in exile comes to mind: “Drifting clouds—so the world shifts.”
Abyss-san stirs soup to music—a Japanese-style country song based on Don McLean’s lines: “This will this be the day that I die.” Abyss-san muses: “We have to adapt back to a simpler way of living,” and pours coffee beans into a hand-cranked wooden grinder. Nikki cuts a large apple into three pieces to be shared.
“If food, housing, and job shortages last a long time, things will have to change,” Abyss-san says. “Maybe it will bring us back to the old ways, the traditional Japanese style of farming, eating, bathing, living on tatami. And if it weren’t for the nuclear radiation, we could all be growing our own food.”
In the morning Nikki and Abyss-san sleep, and I saunter again, this time going the other way, up a steep hill. Such a pleasure to be alone in the cool mountains. A Japanese bush warbler sings loudly. They are small and greenish brown but their voices are loud. I come on a huge stone
tori’i
—a gate that opens the way to a mountain path straight up the hill. I climb mossy stairs. Here and there are stone lanterns, gravestones, a piece of rock on a pedestal shaped like a penis.
Cedar trees, a hundred feet tall, crowd the path, their branches laying filigreed shadows on moss. Thick trunks strobe sunlight. Is the temple up top a place to pray for fertility and renewal? I think of the seventeen miles of mountain stairs I climbed on the sacred mountain of Omei-shan in western China. This is just a steep hill. Why is one mountain sacred and the other secular? Far below, at the coast, is a world of lost lives, illegible debris, and sorrow. Will this disaster show the way to more aware lives?
I stumble, then something takes me up and up, my legs turned by tree-spokes, my body pulled by shadow shafts, as if harnessed to something—maybe what I’ve seen below. Yet the freight is hollow-boned and light. I trot and grin. We think we have time to love, cook dinner, take walks, become enlightened, but one wave can take us, or it can spit us out. Bruised and drenched, we find we are still alive, and the great power of the thing, the megathrust or the Level 7 meltdown that alters time and shakes the planet on its axis, polluting it, feels true enough.
My mind keeps trotting. I turn thoughts loose like horses. Sun-sparks strike my cheek. Mist lolls between branches that huff green oxygen. Radioactive dew shines. My breath mixes with the gasp of trees.
At a convenience store where we’ve stopped for iced coffee, Nikki teaches me two
kanji
for the word
empty
. I’m looking for coffee with no sugar, and the Chinese character for “nothing,” or “not there,”
kara
, meaning, “without sugar” (and also “sky”), is marked on the can. Another word for “nothing” is
mu
, a Buddhist word that can imply “not one, not nothing, not no, not yes,” and also “the emptiness from which compassion arises.”
The character for
mu
“empty” is written as a square-ish grid with four “tassels” on the bottom. These refer anciently to a tasseled dancer performing in front of the gods, during which it is forbidden to show any ties with the human world, and is therefore pure
mu
. Egoless. Unbiased. Open.
I find the coffee, coffee without empty calories, coffee without the ornament of sugar. I do not want to put “things” or projections between myself and experience, though I often do. I sometimes sugar my perceptions or make them bitter, but what I aim for is something more straightforward.
It’s said that if we can drop the bothersome appendages of egos and sugar lumps, we will begin to feel an immense caring for others, for otherness, for all kinds of suffering, and in doing so, we will be able to exchange ourselves for others. If we try, strange sympathies will fill us and the power of empathy will fuel us forward.
Four children run out of a broken house and blow bubbles through a plastic hoop. They float for a moment, then burst. Is
that how children come to understand impermanence? Their mother picks through a box of scavenged goods, through whatever remains: water-stained papers, a single shoe, a lacquer rice paddle. Flies cover a photograph of two schoolchildren, and as the day heats up, insects increase in number.
When I arrived in early June we wore white face masks when visiting the coastal areas. Now we don’t bother, as if to say, we are not separate from what’s here. Drinking iced coffee in Abyss-san’s van, we roll past blue hydrangeas, a public bathhouse, a cattle pasture, an apple orchard, and an entire coast of ruins. Humid heat invades the van, dispelling the night’s cool mist. There’s the old shock of leaving the fully functioning part of town and descending into the dead zone. Flies, gnats, and mosquitoes swarm us. Our windshield smashes a blue butterfly.
Abyss-san watches Nikki reading emails on her smartphone and rolls his eyes. Better to pay attention to whatever is coming before us, he says. A Tweet comes through about people on the Oshika Peninsula who need food, so we decide that it’s our turn to be volunteers. We pool our money and find a grocery store. Four thirty-five-pound bags of rice and five bottles of cooking oil, five of soy sauce, handfuls of ginger, onions, carrots, and potatoes are purchased, and we head out for the isolated peninsula, the land closest to the earthquake’s epicenter.
From Ishinomaki, we travel east, taking the “Cobalt Highway” even though there are signs that tell us to turn back because of road damage. And soon enough, we do have to turn around and start again, taking the winding, quake-damaged coast road up into the mountains.
A Red Cross tent advertises free clothes; further on, there’s a shack with newly washed shirts hung out to dry on a tree. Ayukawa is a controversial whaling town that was totally demolished, except for a sign showing a map of the tip of the peninsula that says “
saru
” (monkeys). Now the monkeys are being collared and used to record radiation levels. A modern hotel high up on a cliff has been shaken into cubist disrepair, its metal fence at the edge all bent, as if every car had gone that way. The road narrows to a tight one-way track, an asphalt ruffle with a broken white line that looks like the sacred Shinto cutouts called
gohei
.
Niyamahama is a village of twenty-five houses built on a hill. A man comes out of his house and waves us down. They’re
expecting us. Two strapping fishermen help us heft the food boxes up steep steps to the
minshuku
, the town’s B&B. The middle-aged owner greets us. She shows us where to stack the donated food. After, we’re served green tea and raw octopus at a long table with a young woman who lost her house in another village. Her four-year-old daughter wears a pink dress and, rather compulsively, pulls a matching pink suitcase with wheels back and forth across the floor.
“We didn’t want to ask for help, but no one noticed us,” the owner says. “People who lost their houses walked here and are staying with me. I’ve lived here all my life. We’ve always shared what we have. Now we are sharing the donations—food and money and petrol.
“We are the closest village to the epicenter so we had less time than anyone else between the quake and the tsunami. Luckily, our town is built on a cliff. The Wave didn’t come all the way up here. But our harbor was destroyed and everyone lost their boats. Two fishermen got washed off the seawall but they swam back, so no one here died. But down the coast there were stories of fishing boats standing upright in the Wave as they tried to get out, and they drowned.
“After the
jishin
, we got the generator going and I fired up my gas cookers. We boiled water and cooked food until we ran out. The roads were so bad, we couldn’t drive to town for three months. One man was so desperate he walked all the way to Ishinomaki to get help.”
Nikki, Abyss-san, and I follow the steep road to the tiny harbor. “The only boats you’ll see belong to visitors,” we’re told by a man wiping his neck with a towel. It’s hot and muggy. Kelp flies crawl all over our arms, legs, and faces in black masses. An old man and a seagull walk the breakwater. The inlet is narrow and small in circumference, and when the Wave came, it slammed all the boats against the cliff wall, then took the broken bits out
to sea. The entire Oshika Peninsula shifted seventeen feet to the east and sank four feet. Seawater splashes over what remains of the wall.
A balding, middle-aged fisherman wearing a white tank top drives his black scooter up and stops near us. “There were forty or fifty boats here and they’re all gone now,” he says. “My scallop business is finished. I used to get eight hundred thousand scallops per season. I just put sixty tons of scallop seeds out in November. It takes about nine months for them to grow to full size. There’re all gone now. It might take ten years to get back to where we were. I spent 80 million yen on boats and equipment. If I could get just 13 million yen from the government, I could get back in business, but that will take a year. The national government has agreed to give us a third of our costs and the rest we pay with low-interest loans. It will take a while. If it doesn’t work, this town won’t exist anymore.”
He looks out at the ocean. “The worst thing is how the ground has sunk and the seawall lifted. We used to be able to drive along the seawall; now we can’t do it. Something like this happens once in a millennium. But the worst thing is the nuclear power plant. We have one too, just around the corner here. If the waves had been twenty centimeters higher, the same problem would have happened at the Onagawa plant.
“Our fate all depends on the shape of the coves. Some areas went so fast. Of the four houses on the road to Onagawa from here, only two are left. Right after the earthquake, trees fell across our road and it took a month or so to clear them. Electricity and water took two months. No one works now. The sea floor is covered with debris. Sea urchins are fattening on the dead bodies at the bottom. If you go trolling for flatfish, you might pull out a dead friend.”