Volunteer 3/1

Today we went to Rikuzentakata and made signs out of bamboo posts. First, you'd polish the bamboo post and then you'd write "WARNING: TSUNAMI COMES TO HERE" in Japanese, in sharpie. They're going to be set up in the area to mark how far a tsunami is supposed to come.

After we finished work for the day, one of the local older men brought us some newspaper articles and maps and a computer, and sat us down. He wanted to show us exactly what had happened during the tsunami and what it was like--how it was different from a regular flood. How they had had no electricity and water and couldn't communicate via telephone. How they lined up for satellite telephones and got three minutes each to make a call. How they had no food coming in, in the beginning, but they went to get food from the remaining houses and somehow got by. How they never expected a tsunami, or a tsunami this big. How the town had been washed away. He showed us videos as well.

I remember one other time this has happened in Rikuzentakata. After you volunteer, a person from the community sits you down and tells you exactly what happened to the city. They ask you to go home and tell your friends and your family. If you don't remember the city, you see a wasteland.

I'm sure some people wonder why people are bothering to try and rebuild Rikuzentakata at all, because it seems hopeless, or because of an aging population, or because the industries were never doing well there anyway, or some other reason.
The reason Rikuzentakata deserves to be rebuilt is because it is a city. It is a city that has residents who know and care about it and who live there even now. It's going to change a lot. Rikuzentakata in the future may be smaller, or in a different location, with a different feel, different goals, but it deserves to exist just as much as your hometown deserves to exist, or mine.

Rikuzentakata is blanketed in snow. As our car crept along through the sudden patch of mist, I could see shadowy groups of excavators working through mounds of rubble. On the right, pillars of a bridge stood alone, with no bridge to support. Further on, on the left, a building stood half-wrecked. The landscape is peppered with the occasional mound of rubble and nonsensical ex-buildings, ex-bridges, ex-structures. The rest is foundations, and mud.

As long as it's a city but with nothing there, as long as it only consists of nightmarish heavy machines crawling through piles like some sick post-apocalyptic world, it is unbearable to see and it is unacceptable to ignore. It has to become a city again. It has to become a place that people can live in again. That's what I feel every time I see this place.

We can't give up.