The Whole Erk Catalogue Tales of a Geek Abroad

Six days ago, Tohoku was blasted by one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history. A few minutes later, the quake was followed by a tsunami that, in some areas, crested 15 meters. The footage is stunning, and a lot of it is of Natori. From the air, the wave looks like a ripple in a pond. It washes up on the shore over Yuriage, crashing through the pines along the beach, swelling over the Cycling Center where I stayed for a Gasshuku once, washing up the Asaichi morning market, and spilling into the village. It plucks houses and shops like fruit. Sasaki Isou's little sake store, where I bought bottles and bottles of Natori Monogatari Nihonshuu for friends at home, is among the buildings. So is the grandparents' home of the Yamada family. Tiny cars so far below drive frantically away and are overtaken. I can't help but wonder who is driving, and if I know them.

The wave - now a wall of of water and debris, perversely burning despite being a piece of the sea, rolls towards the outer edge of Yuriage. It breaks on Yuriage Elementary (which has, at this point, 800 refugees inside including all the students) and Yuriage Junior High (1200 refugees, and here the students were not in school when the quake struck). These mighty buildings somehow hold against an incomparable force, sheltering those within. The walls are mostly made of glass, and the lower levels are flooded, but people make it upstairs somehow. I don't see this firsthand but I see it in my mind. The gymnasium must have held most of them... those sweltering hot buildings with only tiny slit windows tortured me so many hours during long assemblies in the summertime. Now, the same features that baffled and annoyed me save the lives of everyone within.

The wave, not slowed by its inability to digest the schools, crushes a beautiful temple Jen and I visited with her father. It halts for a moment at the Joban highway. For one hopeful second it seems like the highway, which was engineered as a breakwater, might stop the wave from reaching further inland, but the water comes and keeps coming, soon spilling over the mounded earth and into the rice paddies beyond. I watch as my friend Aizawa's livelihood is buried in silt, debris, and seawater, and realise it's almost planting season.

At this point I stop watching, and it's only later that I learn that the second breakwater, the Tobu highway, did its job. The wave was stopped in the paddies and barely reached Eastern Masuda. Most of the people we know are alive as a result. All of them have lost something, most have lost someone. It will never leave my mind that for all the fear Jen and I have, we only lived there two years... yet we have someone to worry about in every portion of the city and most of its surrounding regions. What of the people that were born in Natori?

Things like this have happened before, and recently. In Indonesia and Haiti, in Xichuan, the casualties were higher and the aftermath more severe. Every day, I regret not having felt those tragedies more; I don't think that part of me is going to be the way it was again. Maybe that's for the best, but it was a painful lesson.

Gonna need a break. I'll post more after.

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