Heading north to MinamiSanriku. Tried to get onto the highway and found the rally point for rescue teams heading south towards Fukushima. I saw fire trucks from Kawasaki and Osaka in addition to teams local to Sendai. These dozens of red fire trucks were waiting to get on the highway to which they said there was damage that was preventing them from heading south.

We’re taking mountainous back roads to Minami Sanriku since the coastal highway is badly damaged and limited to emergency vehicles – one of the hardest hit areas. I’m not a geologist but it seems these granite peaks held firm during the quake as road conditions up here are fair with only a few areas where the roads are damaged. I’m sure it will be bad as we get near the coastline. Descending towards the coast, there are many more buildings that’ve been mostly or completely destroyed.

Local Residents are again today lined up for miles for gas stations that may or may not have gas. Saw a JSDF team get stuck in traffic. Looked like they were on their way to Kessennuma. Hope they aren’t too late getting to wherever they need to be…

Entered the town of Minami Sanriku. Coming down the mountain towards the coastline, we hooked back up with the JSDF team so we are going to follow them straight into whatever chaos there is at the coast.

Arrived at Minami Sanriku. Grabbed gear and left car to walk down into what one of the cameramen spontaneously refers to as Tsunami Valley. The Japanese word 破壊 (Destruction) is the only word that fits the scene I saw today. Amid the rubble of what was a small city I saw people finding each other – cries of ‘you’re alive!’ repeated here and there. People trying to clean up a place that used to be their house but is now just a heap of wood, metal and mud. We interviewed a woman who was looking for her mom and all she could do was wander around this nowhere place. That’s all she could do.

We had made our way up a hill and were filming inside a day center for the elderly when there was a tsunami warning. We were already up above the valley so at first we slowly made our way up the hill while filming the coastal waters.

Reports were of a 5m high tsunami that was growing in size headed our way. The police told us ‘firmly’ to make our way to the top of the hill which we did – the journalists more reluctantly than the coordinator.

A group of cops had a large transceiver and I was listening to reports that there was another explosion at Fukushima. We were directed to go inside the high school at the top of the hill which we did slowly as the crew filmed the rescue workers filing into the school. The police next began making announcements that there in fact had been an explosion at the No 3 reactor at Fukushima And that there was a risk of exposure to radiation and that we should put on masks and make our way to the north side of the building.

The news crew I am assigned to immediately got nervous – that we would be stuck for hours if not days in the school and while I wasn’t in any rush to go outside I agreed that we should not let ourselves get stuck there so speaking with the policeman who seemed to be In Charge – or maybe he just shouted the loudest- and asked him for permission to head back to our vehicle. He seemed genuinely worried that we could be caught in a tsunami on our way thru tsunami valley but not so much of the radiation. When he saw that we were going to demand to be let out, he pulled me aside and explained that the incoming info was in fact too confused for him to know whether or not something – whether a tsunami or radiation – was coming or not. After what the British team called ‘a respectful 10 minutes’ we donned the paper masks the cops refused to give us – and which townsfolk graciously provided, we left the school and made our way back down the hill into tsunami valley. I will never forget the walk back to the car. Keeping one eye on the coast and lugging a backpack full of tapes and batteries, the wind picking up as we hugged the cliff face and headed back to the mouth of the valley where the van was waiting. I did not realize how far into the valley we had walked until we were humpin it back to the car but luckily a clean-up crew in a pick up truck gave us a ride. Escape at last!

On our way to 陸前高田

Stopped for supplies at a general store but surrounded by locals stocking up on anything and everything – we could not bring ourselves to buy water or food. Left the dark store full of ji-chan and ba-chan with two six-packs of Asahi and a set of long underwear for our driver Noguchi.

RikuzenTakata basically does not exist anymore. There is no way to describe the destruction other then as awesome.

Felt like a vulture for the first time today when we found our way to the evac center at the top of a hill overlooking the bay and interviewed evacuees. Standing in a hallway thrusting a camera into the smiling tear-streaked faces of people reuniting with friends and loved ones, poking around a gymnasium full of people who lost their homes, families, lives with a beta-cam and lights, while not the high point of my professional life- I understand and see clearly the necessity of it. I found it most interesting that even amidst the death and awful destruction, most people are still pulled to the TV camera and find it a positive thing. While rescue personnel and the authorities are of course not at all impressed by the cameras, people who have lost everything do not hesitate to give interviews when asked, and in the case of one high school girl, made a point of asking to ‘let’ her ‘explain’ what happened to to her mother and sister – all of them at home when the 9.0 brought decimation.

Otsuchi-cho

Today I saw what I would call raw destruction at the coast city of Otsuchi-cho. We approached from the mountains to the west of the ‘town that disappeared’, as the Japanese media has dubbed it, and slowly made our way towards the coastline. Maybe the worst hit area in terms of the body count: compared to the places I went yesterday and the day before, Otsuchi-cho was the most devastated.

After being destroyed by a tsunami, the sea wall built to protect the city from a tsunami trapped the wave in the small coastal valley multiplying the damage. The combination of wooden homes, unfortunately located fuel stations and the kerosene tanks most homes in the area used for heating sparked a ravaging fire. The fires from the town had spread to the surrounding woods and when we got there JSDF helicopters flew overhead shuttling tons of water from the sea and dousing the dozens of forest fires while the town itself was a smoking sea of blackened metal with fires burning here and there and the wreckage still giving off warm heat and the smell of oil. Teams of rescue personnel streamed in and out of the low lying town on paths thru the soot black cars, hollowed out houses, and other parts of peoples lives that were now reduced to smoldering debris.

While many of my generation have gone to war, I and most if not all of my friends and family have been fortunate enough not to have been to Afghanistan or Iraq or were in Haiti, or Sumatra and I am more thankful for that now then ever before. I also hope I never become a man who is jaded to the extent that the sights as I have seen does not effect him like a punch in the gut as they have done me today.

えいぶ