Two Years Later

Blythe is the best doll ever - stylish as well as empathetic

Yesterday at 2.46, there were vigils, prayers facing the ocean, and moments of silence across Japan.  This was of course, in memory of the double punch of earthquake plus tsunami, which, as the world knows, then saw the triple knock-out kapow due to the almost nuclear meltdown at Fukushima.  A nation completely slammed.

This year, I decided to write about our experiences during the earthquake, and the aftermath.  I know a lot of my friends have already heard the story (some possibly several times), but I haven't blogged about it yet, and want to before the memories fade even more.

Friday, March 11th 2011

This morning, Mark and I woke up early in a tiny town in the mountains of Akita prefecture.  Tazawako.  Ourselves, and our 20 month old twin girls, had flown from the north island of Japan - (Hokkaido) into Sendai (located north of Tokyo on the east coast of Honshu - the large main island of Japan) the day before.  We were on a high because Mark had just proposed to me.  Well I was.  Mark was already calculating the estimated costs of the wedding.  I wanted to spend a couple of days in Sendai.  I had a friend who had lived there for a while, and I knew it to be a vibrant coastal city.  I always like checking out new places.

But Mark was anxious to get back on the snow, so we abandoned our Sendai plans and took a train directly from Sendai's airport train station to Tazawako.  We checked into a very Japanese style country hotel.  Nobody spoke English, but we didn't mind.  We had enough basic Japanese to understand and in turn be understood.  This hotel's claim to fame was that a famous love scene was filmed in a room there for a popular Korean Drama - "Iris".  It was set up like a shrine, and you could peer in from the doorway, but there was strictly no entry.

We were served a gourmet meal by a smiley lady in the dining room that night.  There were very few other guests staying there.  The next morning we took a shuttle bus to the local ski mountain.  We dropped the kids off at childcare and had ourselves one of the best skiing experiences of our lives.  The amount of snow was incredible.  After a an hour lunch break, the girls were back in childcare, and we were back out on the slopes loving life. It was snowing heavily so we were thrilled that yet more powder was being added to an already outstanding base.

As we rode an old fashioned two seater chair (with no front bar) to the summit, suddenly without warning the chairlift stopped.  "What is it?" asked Mark.  I recognised the familiar shaking.  "An earthquake".  At this stage I wasn't overly concerned.  I had experienced many earthquakes during my time in Japan.  While it's not the most comforting experience - you typically freeze expectantly and exchange glances with the people you happen to be with at the time.  But usually they are over quickly and life goes back to normal, just like it never happened.

This one was long.  The initial 9.0 earthquake lasted about 3-5 minutes. It's estimated that this massive quake shortened the day about 1.8 microseconds, shifted the Earth's axis about 6.5 inches, and moved the country as much as 12 feet closer to North America.  It also sent shockwaves into space.  It sure was a big one.  Because it kept going and going, I became really frightened.  The posts that held up the chair lift, were waving around like grass in a breeze.  I was sure we were going to fall out.  It was terrifying.  Finally it stopped.  But we weren't gong anywhere.  We were suspended high above, in minus fifteen degrees during a snow storm.  Not ideal really.  And what about our babies?

Half an hour went past before movement started.  We were so bloody freezing.  We didn't know at the time, but power had gone out across the region, not to return for days.  All other people trapped in chairlifts were being rescued by ski patrol who were using some kind of pulley system.  We were too high up for this, but luckily they had managed to get our chairlift started, and moving slowly with an old generator.  It was a relief to get off.  However, we were at the very top of the mountain and we had to get all the way to the bottom.  As we buckled up, another quake shook the mountain - an aftershock.  Only then did I remember the possible risk of avalanches.  We got the hell out of there as quick as we possibly could.

This whirlpool is really freaky

The ski centre was in darkness and people were in a kind of panicked shock.  The girls weren't in the child-care room.  Mark checked his phone just before the service was shut down.  We saw that a tsunami was reported  - actually, it hit northern Japan about eight minutes after the earthquake occurred.  However, at this stage we had no idea of the extent of it.  We found the girls outside.  The lady from the childcare had got help from the ski rental man, and they had carried the girls outside in fear that the building would collapse.  Shortly after, one of the men from the hotel turned up to take us back to the hotel.  It was a little surreal.  The power was out at the hotel - not to return for a few days.  It was cold and getting dark.  There was no running water, no phone service, no Internet, no electricity - so, of course no heating.  The night-time temperature dropped down to about minus 20 at night.

Plus, there were constant aftershocks the whole time.  I think we racked up about 100 during that weekend.  I had a small bag packed with our passports, some money, our shoes, a torch and some water at the end of my bed.  We all slept in our ski gear and spent the cold days wrapped up in blankets.  The hotel dug in deep to their supplies and kept us fed.  They used small gas cookers to prepare the most incredible things such as lobster and steaks (all the speciality items in the deep freeze were pulled out).   Candles lit the hotel, snow was turned to water on the couple of small gas heaters in the lobby, and meals were served in the sacred "Love Scene Room" because it was the only room that had a fireplace in it that could keep us all warm.  We also hung out here during the day.  How the Korean soap opera fan's blood would have turned cold, to see a couple of babies jumping on the treasured "Lovemaking Bed".

The hotel began to fill up with guests.  These people were stranded travellers, who had to be given accommodation when all the trains in the area suddenly stopped operating.  In our conversations with these people, we began to understand the true extent of the calamity.  On the third day, somebody managed to get hold of a newspaper, and this was when we saw the first pictures of the tsunami ravaged east coast.  It was shocking.  I felt sick.  I also felt very lucky, and relieved that we had decided not to visit Sendai, as the photo of the flooded airport was one of the first images I viewed.

Sendai airport

The power finally came back on three days later - there was a resounding cheer as it started up during dinner one evening.  However, this was when the real fear started.  My eyes could not believe the carnage, the fires, the bodies, the destruction.  We had been sheltered - in a kind of bubble.  We were fed and taken care of, with no real understanding of what hundreds of thousands of people were going through.  It was confronting.  I felt so strange that the tsunami had surrounded us on all sides, but we were in one of the only untouched areas in the region.  Then we saw the reports of the impending nuclear disaster.  We saw news reports telling Tokyo residents to stay in doors due to radiation.  We saw foreigners desperately scrambling to leave the country and the chaos taking place at Tokyo's Narita Airport.  Furthermore, we were aware that we would have to travel past Fukushima to get to Tokyo.

How the wave spread across the Pacific

Our family and friends were urging us to get the hell out of there.  There was panic in the air.  But we felt like we had to just sit tight for the time being.  To be honest, leaving was a scary thought.  Packing up our children and our things and going where????  But, the next day a decision was made for us.  The hotel had to close.  They had no food left, and due to power shortages they had to turn everything off and go into shut down mode.  They had found us another small hotel in the area who said they would take us.  But for how long?  They too would run out of food at some stage, seeing as the national transport system had ground to a halt.  Plus it was the nuclear situation that spurred us into activity.

Mark found a way.  He always does.  A small airport in the northwest had their one and only once a week international flight to Seoul, and it was leaving in 24 hours.  Somehow, he got us on that flight.  Now, we just had to get 200km across the north island to Akita town.  There was no transport, and no cars had any fuel.  Amazingly, the hotel staff found us an old man with a tiny taxi who was willing to take on the journey.  Even more amazingly, we managed to fit three suitcases, four people, a stroller, two snowboard bags, and various mini bags into a extremely small Toyota.  We were off.

The roads were deserted.  Whole highways with no cars to be seen.  All shops were shut and buildings deserted.  It was like an apocalypse had occurred - and in fact I guess it had. The only time we saw any signs of life the entire whole journey, was at two open petrol stations where there were cars lined up and stretching 100 vehicles back, all filling cans and containers with gasoline.  We got to our hotel in Akita which was appropriately named "Alive".  It was a small business hotel connected to a train station.  I was shocked to see the entire floor of the train station jammed full of people sleeping on flattened cardboard boxes, under grey donated blankets.  They were all stranded travellers with no where to go and no way of getting home.  Again, for the thousandth time, I felt so fortunate.

make-shift beds

The four of us were sharing a tiny bed in a tiny room that night, before our flight left the nearby airport at 9am the next morning.   We went walking into the town, to try and get milk for our little girls, and some food.  It was like a ghost town.  It was so quiet.  And even where there were other people, nobody was talking, and there was none of the usual bustle, and laughter coming out from the bars and restaurants that lined the city streets, and were now closed.  The convenience store shelves were empty.  Totally empty, except for some chocolate bars, other assorted junk food and a few cans of soft drink. All the vending machines were out of water.  We bought some various crappy food and fed it too our daughters that night.  As you would imagine it didn't go down well with a couple of children who had barely had processed food in their lives.  Cordelia vomited all over all of us that night.  And after I cleaned it all up, she did it again.  Poor little poppet.  Poor me too, vomit is not the choice of hair product I usually like to indulge in.

Ah Sea Shepherd - subtle as a sled hammer - The minkes love you though

It wasn't the greatest night sleep, but the next day we made it to the airport and were lined up for quite some time, with a whole lot of other fleeing foreigners including the crew from the Sea Shepherd, who were one of the first on scene in some of the most devastated regions.  And finally, we were on that plane.  It was with a heavy heart that I left Japan, and all it's suffering behind.  It was strange to desert a country that had taken such good care of me over the years.  But Japan needed to pool all its resources so as to take care of it's own people and their incredible heartache.


When the wheels hit the tarmac in Seoul, I began to cry.  It was the first time during the whole ordeal that I had done so.  And for the next couple of days I couldn't stop.  Life was going on in Korea like nothing had happened.  I hated it there. I wanted to leave.  And so we did.  Headed for Thailand, where we later flew out of Koh Samui one day before the floods closed down the airport and resulted in the mass scale evacuation of tourists across southern parts of the country........

No rest for the wicked, but hopefully peace for all those who suffered in 2011, and continue to do so.  With 300 000 people still displaced, that's a lot of people who continue to wait for their lives to start up again.  They estimate the full recovery will take a decade, with areas affected by the nuclear disaster to to take even longer to recover.  Those who lost people they loved to the wave have a lifetime of sadness to carry with them.

Pray for Japan.