Matthew-san's Tokyo Adventure: After the Wave 5

To state the obvious this is not where you would expect to find a large boat.

I stepped off the overnight bus from Shinjuku to Ofunato in a bit of a daze at 6:30am on Friday. Grabbed a cup of coffee, signed up for ditch clearing work and found myself staring at this surreal scene by 8:30. It's difficult to appreciate the awesome destructive power the tsunami wrought. I mean chances are you've scene a Michael Bay movie, but really the idea of staring down a 40ft wall of water coming at you at ~~500~~ *50 miles an hour is difficult to wrap your head around. Scenes like this give you some visceral appreciation for how powerful the tsunami was.

Here's the boat from another angle, notice the bridge on the left.

And here is a shot taken from that bridge. I circled the boat in the lower left, which is seriously far away from the ocean.

A couple more from the area.

As I mentioned before I was on the ditch clearing team. Essentially the tsunami filled all of these drainage ditches with debris, which would need to be cleared away in order for water to flow back into the ocean and not flood the area.

The first step was to remove any remaining concrete caps covering the ditch. Some of these caps were washed away, some were smashed and in the ditches, but a few remained which we had to take off to clear the material below. The second step was to dig out the debris with a spade and shovel and cart the stuff away in wheel barrows. The final step was to brush out the remaining bits with a broom. Here's a look at a stretch we finished clearing.

And here's one near the end of step 2 beginning step 3.

The last unfinished bit there was the most challenging as it had been filled with dirt and paved over with asphalt so bulldozers could get in to the block and clear away rubble. We had to dig it out with spades and pick axes, it was a bit tedious.

Friday went well. We had beautiful weather, it was great to be outside, and made good progress.

After work at dinner I had the opportunity to meet the All Hands founder David Campbell and his wife who were up visiting the site, working on site, and meeting local officials.

I actually was sitting next to Mrs. Campbell at dinner, but since I had arrived that morning I had missed their introduction to the group the previous evening. This was pointed out to me when I asked her if she worked for All Hands....

Foot meet mouth, ah I see your already acquainted...

I topped this later when I pointed out it was a bit silly to allow alcohol at one of the two base sites in Ofunato and not the other. Turns out the other facility doubles as an alcoholic treatment center. Oops.

Saturday was round two of ditch clearing and was much less pleasant then Friday due to the persistent poring rain. As these were drainage ditches, and the the ditches weren't clear they quickly filled up with water, mixing with the debris to form a kind of mud and chemical sludge which was just great to work in. It only took a couple hours for all of our clothes to be completely soaked through even under our rain gear and totally covered in mud. Even my knee high water proof boots were quickly filled with muddy water.

Also for some reason on this side of the road the concrete caps covering the ditch were enormous six inch thick blocks that weighed over 100lbs and were a total pain in the ass to move.

In order to effectively clear the ditches we had to get the water level down, which meant clearing away obstructions to the water flow. We eventually traced the blockage to a point of the drainage system that was under metal grates going across the road at a nearby intersection. Unfortunately we didn't have authority to block of traffic and obstruct the intersection so we could clear out that bit of the drainage system.

Of course westerner's that we were we got together thought about it for a bit and decided we weren't going to let something as silly as "the rules" stop us. As we say in the US "It's better to apologize then ask permission," as you might imagine this is not a common saying in Japan.

We got a system going where we would run out into the intersection when the light turned red lift up the grate and dig furiously for like two minutes, clear out when the light was about to change, and bow from the side of the road to any cars we had obstructed.

After about an hour and a half of this we got the water flowing, although not perfectly since bits of the ditch were unacceptable due to grates that were bolted down.

At lunch our site leader was on the phone with one of the Japanese coordinators who asked if we needed anything. We told him extra rain gear, hot raman, messages, and maybe an onsen. He responded that he wasn't sure if he could find all these things. Sarcasm in Japan doesn't go very far.

Despite the rain we actually made fairly good progress, due in part to the extra man power we had that day from 11 US Military personal who were up from a base near Tokyo volunteering for the weekend.

A mixture of Army, Navy, Air Force, and Coastguard all of them were assigned to a joint command responsible for communicating with their counterparts in the Japanese Self Defense Forces. They were all heavily involved coordinating operation Tomodachi ("friend") the American military assistance after 3/11. The US sent about 20 ships, 140 aircraft, and 20,000 rescue personal to the area.

Back at the base at the evening meaning. One of the soldiers who was on ditches spoke to the group, thanking the volunteers and recognizing the difficulty of the job they were doing. She even said that the day in the ditches was about as hard a day of manual labor as they had done in their career. The resident wise ass Chris - formerly in the Navy himself - didn't miss a beat at that comment and called out "Oh you must be an officer!" in front of the whole group.

On Sunday, I was back working in the park, laying bricks which was much less strenuous then clearing the ditches.

Some group of Germans showed up that day with about 300 homemade cakes which they were giving away at the main train station in Ofunato. The cakes were delicious, I never got a chance to get the full story though - like Germans, Cakes, Ofunato, wtf? - as I had to head back to Tokyo for work on Monday.

The military folks very thoughtfully offered to give me a ride back to Tokyo in their convoy of vans. I love the shinkansen but it is expensive, so I took them up on their offer which saved me about 15,000yen (about $200) in bus and train tickets.

Leaving Ofunato we drove down the coast passing town after town that had been hit by tsunami. Many towns had been completely destroyed. While Ofunato suffered catastrophic damage, with about half of the down either destroyed or severely damaged, you can see why All Hands was there. In many places there simply wasn't anything to do except bulldoze away the rubble, there wasn't anyone left to help.