It’s funny because trying to write about 3.11 in Japanese is harder than doing it in English. My first language is Japanese. The picture above is the road in front of Yuriage junior-high school in Miyagi prefecture. In this school many pupils died in the Tsunami. The school front puts a stone monument with names of kids killed. And this school still remains in the middle of nowhere, while all the buildings around it got washed away and only have the building foundations left. The sight is purely odd, because while the school is a bit dirty, there still remains the atmosphere of school life where junior-high school kids went to school here, ate lunch, studied and anticipated in club activities… while there is also the fact that those lives are now gone, in a fearful way that no one wants to imagine. The fact and the sight did not match. And it made me feel confused.

Throughout the days I walked around, saw, listened and talked about the incident, I felt odd and confused. I believe there are two reasons for that. One is because while the restoring of the area is not done, I had to imagine the past lives of the people there. The other one is because while the people there talk about faster restoring of the area and the appreciation to the mass of people who anticipate to help as a volunteer, I feel the social pressure to understand their pain and thus making it harder for people who do not have experience being in the area before to get involved. People who haven’t been in the incident nowadays actually kind of get freaked out about helping, asking, or even talking about the incident. I believe it’s because of this social pressure that derives from “know without asking” Japanese culture.

Everywhere we went (it was a tour), there were nothing but building foundations, small rocks, and brownish weeds. Maybe some buildings that remained with their bottom half almost gone; some buildings tilted 45 degrees down onto the earth; and what not. Nothing much, really. So I must wonder: it has been three years since the Tsunami came. Why aren’t lives here restoring?

The answer was given by a talker in Yuriage-area of Miyagi prefecture, right before we went to the junior-high school. She told us how resettlement have been difficult precisely because of the people who’s supposed to be living there. There is a clash between the law and the people. The law now officially considers the place unsafe for the people to live because the Tsunami may wash away the land again, plus the earthquake further drowned down the land and can’t legally build houses there anymore. Unless the earth is 5 meters higher than now, which means they have to literally move a mountain near and pile up the dirt there, restoring won’t proceed. The people, on the other hand, may have lost their loved ones and still can’t find their bodies. They actually still clings onto the possibility that the body is lost somewhere in the land. And they don’t compromise until all the dirt around there is dug up and examined. If one person of the whole population there consider to do this, the whole area cannot start piling up dirt onto the area and start to restore settlements (this takes up several years to finish.) And there are more than 1000 homes that got washed away, with possibilities that the bodies washed away together would get found out in the land.

The question about the law and the people is a difficult one to consider because this question can only be solved by the local people’s decisions. Maybe we can help finding them, and us volunteers of the nation have been doing so, but the number of people getting involved in volunteering has sharply dropped compared from 2~3 years ago. There aren’t enough of us to do the whole area in a short period. So now the choice to the future is split into two: for people to compromise and choose to live onto the land where there might remain their most loved ones’ bodies, or wait another several years until the few of us volunteers finish the investigation, while some older generation of the people may die from their age; if not, all of them must live in the temporally housing that really looks like the forced labor camp of the 1940s America where the asians lived in.

I imagine the past lives of the people there. I see houses and roads and lives now imaginary onto the sight of nowhere. While the situation of the devastated areas are clearly heading towards directions each of them is heading to, they are not always heading towards bright futures. At least, their future still had problems that simply cannot be said that it is somebody’s fault. And the imaginary sight of the past lives there seems to be not the case in the future. By the time they pass the problems they are facing, there clearly will be a difference. But what would be the difference? No one knows, and I hope I can make it brighter.

While listening to the speeches talkers gave us, I felt the pressure to understand the pain of the people. And after the tour everybody had the feeling that there are things you can understand only when you actually go to the place, talk to the people, see the devastated areas etc. This is a problem because while many people may want to help, they might not be able to because they don’t have enough knowledge about what to help and how. You cannot be talking, or even be discussing about the topic if you haven’t been there before. It just don’t make sense and you who haven’t been there before don’t have the right, or the capacity, to talk about it. That is being communicated within the devastated areas and the so-not areas. I believe I can write about this better but I must sleep now. Sorry. I look forward to writing more about it in the future.