Two Years After the Tsunami

April 23, 2013 I found myself heading again towards Ishinomaki, one of the hardest hit areas of the March 2011 Japan tsunami, for the first time in almost exactly two years. My first visit to Ishinomaki was 2 weeks after the tsunami when I went with the Millard brothers' house church on a mission to deliver supplies to Minato Elementary School. The school had been turned into an evacuation center, and had requested the truckload of supplies we were bringing, which included kerosene heaters, as it was still winter, and food, in addition to other supplies. The road to Minato Elementary took us past piles of debris along the coast. It was as if whole neighbors had been put into a blender, and then poured out into a giant heap of rubble. Cars wrapped themselves around telephone poles like pieces of fabric, and sat half emerging from the houses and storefronts they had been thrust into by the raging sea. The road had barely been opened, and we drove through lakes of seawater that lingered in the lower lying areas. We also drove past boats in the middle of the road in completely dry areas far from the shoreline. We drove over a bridge, which gave a view of the surrounding area, including the riverbank piled with ruined boats and rubble that used to be homes and businesses. Minato Elementary was in quite a state itself. The lower levels had been totally wiped out by the tsunami, but people were living in the upper levels. The gymnasium had been cleared of debris and was being used as a staging area for supplies and meal preparation. The school sat nestled up against a cliff, with just enough space for a graveyard in between. The graveyard was piled with overturned cars that had been smashed into the gravestones when the waters rose. The Japan Self Defense Force had parked a few of their vehicles outside, and the men were busily preparing a meal for the tsunami survivors. A dog who had also survived wagged his tail and sat near the entrance to the gym. An elderly woman was helped across the muddy puddle that blocked the entrance to the parking lot. We unloaded our supplies, and were welcomed by an elementary aged boy and girl who were living in the school. They were eager to help, and had stepped up to the challenges around them with an air of bravery and adventure that can only be expected from those in their age group. I will never forget the few hours I spent at Minato Elementary that day in March. Today, I found myself on a bus from Sendai. Destination: Ishinomaki. Destination: unknown. All cities change over time, but I could only guess at the changes I would see today. My friend Alea and I arrived at Ishinomaki Station, where my friend Danielle, an American missionary married to my German missionary friend Matthias, was waiting for us. We jumped in her car and headed across town towards her apartment. As I would only have one day in Inshinomaki, she asked what I wanted to see. I told her that I just really wanted to drive around town and go visit Minato Elementary. Right as I said that, I saw the school approaching on the left. "There it is!!!" I shouted, and Danielle pulled over. As I stepped out of the car, I heard the door clang shut behind me. It was silent. Gone were the Self Defense cars, engines idling in the background. Gone were the evacuees exchanging greetings and offering to carry supplies. The place where the black dog sat was empty. The puddle that the elderly woman crossed was dried up. The debris was gone, making the parking lot much larger than it was before. The white car almost floating atop a pile of rubble was gone. The fire engine smashed into the pedestrian overpass was gone. The cars in the cemetery were gone. The broken out windows and doors on the first story were boarded up. The school that was once the safest place to be was now closed off as an unsafe place, a testament to state of the surrounding area two years ago versus now. The school hadn't changed much, but Ishinomaki had. I walked around the grounds, alone and in silence, conversations from two years past lingering thick in the air. Where were they now? Only God knows. I got back into the car and we drove towards Matthias and Danielle's apartment, driving over the same bridge I had driven across two years ago. We picked up Matthias and headed to the shore. The ocean was beautiful, and there was a lone windsurfer taking advantage of the sun and wind. The debris that had consumed the area was gone, and the sand glistened in the sunlight. We drove around town. Here, a junk yard full of cars that were destroyed by the tsunami, there, a destroyed building, but in between, there was very little evidence of the destruction that was so recent in Ishinomaki's history. Very little evidence for the outsider, that is. Areas that once contained whole communities were reduced to rubble on that fateful day. Now that rubble has been cleared. Instead of rubble piles are empty fields. Those that call Ishinomaki home know that those fields were not always empty. We stopped by another elementary school that was left in the same condition as after the tsunami. The clock had stopped during the earthquake, and the needles still pointed to the same numbers. The school had lit on fire as cars were smashed into in and exploded, leaving the school ravaged by both water and fire. There were a handful of people walking around the school grounds, looking at the building. Some were clearly from out of town. A makeshift memorial stood to the right of the main entrance. Various things recovered from the school had been stacked there, including a concrete statue of a student on the way to school whose head had been broken off, and a large piece of granite engraved with the school song that was missing the left side. A man stood next to the memorial with his pet dachshund. I don't remember who started the conversation, but pretty soon the man told me that this was the elementary school that he had attended as a child. He turned around and pointed at the empty field that stretched from where we were to the water’s edge and explained that that used to be his neighborhood. His house, his grandparents’ house, his friends’ and classmates’ houses, all gone. He told me his family's story. His parents had evacuated to the school, and then hearing that the school was unsafe, fled to the mountains just in time to escape the tsunami and ensuing fire. His dachshund was 11 years old, and had evacuated with his family. He lived at Sendai at the time, but was soon running supplies up to places that the Japan Self Defense Force had not even reached yet. We faced the school again, and he began to point. "That was the teachers’ room. I was in class 1-1 in first grade, which was all the way down the hall on the first floor. My third grade class was up there..." He grew silent for a moment, memories obviously flooding back. I looked at the broken black stone engraved with the school song that stood in front of us. I smiled at him and asked him if he would mind singing the song. Immediately, he began singing. His voice was matured by time and conditioned by loss, full of memories of singing with his classmates in a time where tsunamis were not thought of. Ironically, some of the song’s lyrics told of the beautiful sparkle of the ocean. The song's lyrics were missing after the middle of the third verse, where the granite slab had been split in half. His voice trailed off right where the words disappeared from the stone. "I always forgot the lyrics right about there when I was student too," he said with a small chuckle, a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. As suddenly as our conversation had begun, it was over, and I walked back towards the car. A Japanese man in his 30s approached me and said "HELLO!!!" in English. I would later find out that he was the Japanese celebrity "DJ Ketchup." We had just received a call that the Nozomi Project would be opened for us despite the fact that it was a national holiday. We invited DJ Ketchup and his friends to come with us, and they accepted the offer. DJ Ketchup was so fun to be with! The way he laughed and talked made me feel like I was on a Japanese TV show! The Nozomi Project is an employment project where women in Ishinomaki make incredible jewelry out of shards of broken pottery left from the tsunami. Nozomi means hope. The jewelry is hope tangible, and brokenness is turned into beauty. DJ Ketchup and the rest of us looked through the jewelry and picked out pieces we wanted to be our own. We were rushed out of the Nozomi Project and over to Be One house church for the baptism of Ayumi, a high school girl who had decided to put her faith in Jesus. Through her experiences in Ishinomaki surviving the tsunami, a short term relief program which took her to Texas, and her encounter with local Christians and missionaries brought her to the realization that real hope and real life is found in Christ alone. She shone today as she was submerged into water, representing death to her old life--an even more poignant symbol in Ishinomaki--and raised up representing her new life as God's daughter. May God continue to have mercy on Ishinomaki. May the faith and healing seen today continue to put down roots, because of and in spite of the saltiness of the soil.