Horror Movie - Onagawa - Thursday 4/21.

Woke around 5:30 (getting approx. 30 min later each day), and had some coffee and tried to do email, etc.  Shere and Rich fixed a big scrambled eggs and toast breakfast - yummy!!  We left about 8 AM to meet the CRASH folks out in Ishinomaki.  (The JDRC web site has a photo of Ishinomaki on the home page.)  Should have taken about an hour, but didn't get there until 10 AM due to jammed traffic on the expressway and some slow going on local roads.  Steve Kotlarczyk and some folks with him had come up from Okutama Bible Camp the night before, so we met up with them at the Ishinomaki Christ Church just on the north side of the main station.  

Pastor Ito there asked us to change plans from helping with a soup kitchen to going with him out to a town called Onagawa to help clean out houses of a church member and their friends.  We tossed brooms and shovels, etc into the vans (Steve's, ours, and another Japanese group) and followed the pastor further east. Followed a river, then a bay seeing some relatively slight damage, then arrived at the town where the main road was blocked by the Japanese army, so we drove up a little further on a side road and parked off the road to walk down a steep narrow road to the neighborhood.  Turns out the building just across from the parking spot was a crematorium.  The pastor explained that so many people had died in Onagawa that the bodies are being temporarily buried, then exhumed for cremation and memorial services.  Saw a funeral procession of hearse and cars leaving that site as we started walking to the church member's house.  

The rest of this visit could have been a horror movie, where the story line just gets worse and worse.  We had no idea of what had happened in Onagawa but the full extent of the devastation incrementally presented itself to us as we worked and then later drove into and around the town.  We split into 3 groups, and Jeff and Shere and I were helping some other volunteers haul one woman's no longer needed stuff 30 yards down the hill to an intersection with the main road where the army had a big backhoe loading the neighborhood debris into a dump truck.  She was working in her mono-oki shed deciding what to keep or not.  Big plastic bags of very nice looking clothing, blankets, shawls, were coming out, and I wondered if she really knew all this was not going into storage somewhere else, but being thrown away. After several trips I was able to get closer to the shed and watched her work.  She had zero expression on her face, zero light in her eyes.  

We were told this house had been flooded, and were shown a water line about chest high.  That was when the first "thud" of inclination of what happened hit.  If the tsunami came this high, what about all the houses down the hill to the intersection?  They would have been all underwater.  On my next trip down to the garbage collection site, I took a moment to look around, and Thud!  again.  The main road to the left went up the hill where we were blocked from coming into town, but to the right it sloped further downhill through a narrow, winding valley of utter devastation. No houses or buildings standing and debris everywhere.  Couldn't see the end because the road curved a bit, but you knew the main part of the town was further down the hill that way.  Easy imagination told you the water at this intersection would have been 2 or 3 stories high.  If the disaster was this bad here, how much worse did it get?  Thud. Thud. 

With Grandma Sumiko and the Kouno family

Back at the lady's house we worked until noon.  Jeff had gone to take photos, so Shere and I were invited to the house of the church member for a bite of lunch.  It was just a couple doors up the side street, and the young mom gave us some version of cup-ramen, explaining they had been given a lot of extra food by relief teams, couldn't eat it all, so please enjoy.  The mom's name was Kyoko Kouno, and with her was a 3 yr. old son, Yoshikatsu, and a 18 mo old daughter, Sachiko.  The dad was at work, so we didn't get to meet him, but later did meet the grandma, Sumiko Asakura.  After chatting a while about routine stuff, we began to learn their stories.  Kyoko said the water came up to their property, but she and the kids had run further up the hill.  She heard a terrible noises as the water rushed in.  She was able to return that day because no damage to their house, but didn't know what happened to grandma who lived down in the town, or her sister in law who lived on the main street just up above that intersection.  Turned out that the wave had come up that main road from town and had even gone over the top of the hill at the point we had been blocked from entering and washed down the other side.  That was a distance of about a kilometer from the Onagawa harbor and main downtown area at the bottom of the main road.  

After lunch, and after we finished working about 3 PM, Kyoko and Sumiko offered to show us around downtown, so we jumped into the vans, cleared the army blockade, and drove into the remains of sheer horror.

The scope of it is almost too much.  4 story buildings with cars on the roof.  A 3 story building pushed over on its side.  Rubble everywhere.  In some ways, it looked worse than a war-zone.  We asked where Grandma Sumiko's house was, and they said it wasn't in this valley but in the next one over.  It hits you again - THUD.  Another valley?  Just like this one?

Train car up the hill

We got into the vans and drove around the corner and looked into the remains of hell.  It was even worse here, because the angle of the wave was much more in a direct line up this valley.  The Onagawa station had been in this valley, and for the first time I saw train cars scattered around. 2 cars in different places on their sides, and one car had been lifted 50+ feet up to the top of a hill and dumped on it's side in a graveyard.  I still can't believe I saw that.  Half a kilometer further up the valley was a 100' fishing boat dumped in the woods.  The army was working here to clear debris, and let us drive around a little, though prohibited us from one area where we figured they were still finding bodies.  It was time to head back, so we said goodbye to Kyoko and her family, and to the Steve and the pastor and picked up the shattered pieces of our souls and drove back to Takayama.  

We debriefed a bit as we drove, and everyone seems to be handling this pretty well.  We talk about what we've seen, about what strategies to put into place for future teams, for church planting, for what's next for these people, and how long it will be before these towns are back to "normal" again.  And the inevitable discussion of why it happened in the first place, especially if God is who he is.  We talk about a strange thing: downtown Sendai and actually many areas even out close to the shore where the tsunami hit look completely fine from the outside, but inside are cracks and broken connections, but in some buildings, it's just a shell.  Why are they seemingly fine and just a few steps away a gigantic weed-whacker has leveled everything?  One thing has surfaced, and it was mentioned by Mako Fujimura (did I mention I met him in Tokyo?) who said the exterior of the people seems resilient and strong, but the interior is where a very long-term disaster will need attention.  The desperate need for hope is crucial.  

Whew.  That's long, but really only a summary.  So many details I had to leave out. Hope we can get photos posted sometime today.  Stay tuned on that.