Watching the Wind in Japan

It’s been one week since the earthquake and tsunami, three days since I returned to Japan, and 6 days of living with the threat of the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. Our community here has responded in a number of ways. There was a highly successful clothing drive organized to help those in need in the Northern Japan. Further relief initiatives continue to build momentum and are organized through facebook (click) or other local grassroots efforts like myjapanearthquake.net (click). Not only do these undertakings help those in the shelters and rubble of Sendai, but they also help give us purpose and agency.

photo by F. Curkovic

There are undoubtedly a lot of people in the foreign community leaving but as the above efforts indicate and as Canadian and long time resident of Japan, Wilf Wakely, remarked about the 1995 Kobe earthquake – he grew to appreciate the importance of working together (Hildebrandt, 2011).

those who stick around might learn something about how to handle a disaster. It was a great time to be alive, actually.

Having been traumatically apart during the first few days of the crisis I really just needed to reconnect with my wife, Asako, and our kids, Kai and Phebe. Building momentum again we went out yesterday to drop off three bags of children’s clothes at the clothing drive, and opted to use some of our of gasoline to go to Costco (20km round trip) which we learned at the clothing drive still had fully stocked shelves including such necessities as bread and eggs. Predictably, even Costco didn’t have milk, however, which is one of the major food items produced in the Tohoku region hit by both the tsunami and now the nuclear crisis.

Watching the Wind

The lines at the gasoline stations stretch for kilometers but people accept this as a matter of course given the extent of the damage to the north. With regard to Wakely’s point about handling the disaster, having to wait several hours for a limited ration of gasoline or milk is insignificant given the loss of life and property elsewhere. We celebrate that we are alive, that our house is still here, and that the workers in Fukushima have been able to dump a lot of water on the nuclear reactor and that power has been extended to the plant once again.

Reassured that the radiation levels are, for the time being, well within the norm for Yokohama, we met some friends in the park to take advantage of a beautiful afternoon. Kai and Phebe played, laughed, and ran around. There was even enough wind for me to launch my stunt kite for awhile, all of us playing, as we wait for the winds to change. – AC

References

Hildebrandt, A. (2011, March 18). Report from japan: not all foreigners heading home. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/03/18/f-rfa-hildebrandt-japan-fri.html

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