Onahama July 30

I think we got promoted at the volunteer centre in Iwaki last week when they gave THJ a job quite a way South at Onahama about 50kms from the reactor.  We had to clean out this restaurant which was right on the water's edge and although protected by a large sea-wall and tucked up against a headland the first floor was in bits.

I'd driven around this place before looking for waves and remember the restaurant with the topless mermaid on the sign, and the big fish hanging out the front door but never ate there though.

This time there were 36 of us, a new record and we got the job done relatively easily. Word is starting to spread.

The volunteer centres will take a break next weekend for O-Bon the Japanese festival where it's believed the spirits of the ancestors return to the family home. Extra significance this year.

 Tales Mello from Rio de Janeiro on the bus home reading us his favourite part of Midsummer Night's Dream. Actually he was just (succesfully) trying to talk the flower into coming for a drink with us afterwards. Good on him though, he lives in Osaka and came to Tokyo on his summer holiday to join us for the day.

You pronounce his name with two syllables like  "Tal-es" but everyone uses the English pronounciation with one syllable of Tales. He said his father came to Japan and saw the book, "Samurai Tales" and was stoked to find there was a famous samurai called Samurai Tal-es. Sorry Dad.

Dirk, our resident Dutchman and entertainments-officer.

Thanks to Sylvain and Dirk for the photos.

Rock The Quake

I'm a week behind with stuff now so before I write up yesterday's THJ trip up to Fukushima I wanted to mention last weekend's gig, Rock The Quake in Shimokitazawa's Garden.

Reward were playing with my bass-player, MC, stripper, magician mate Hurricane Sally (she sometimes does all four at the same time) the 5,6,7,8's and a few familiar Shinjuku live-house faces in the crowd but all the other bands were new for me.

The gig was organized by among others Support The Underground the Deadly-Drive MC, Japan Nomads, a group of bikers headed by Mune who have been taking a couple of relief trips a month up North since mid-March. There's a story about them here.

 The cross-section of people invovled in the relief effort continues to amaze me. From Yoshida-san the Japanese Christian last April to a 55-year old refugee from Burma last week, now Mune and the bikers... and the whole spectrum of ordinary and colourful characters inbetween.

The gig was cracking, Little Elvis Ryuta and the S.R.P. lived up to expectations and Mune, the leader of the Deadly Drive MC's band got the crowd moving, probably through fear more than anything else.

I got more bruises slam-dancing with the bikers than I have in 3 months of clean-up volunteering... as you'd expect really.

Power Report

It's starting to heat up here, low-to-mid 20s now but into the high-20s next week. July and August can get up to the high-30s and well humid so with all the air-con that homes, businesses, schools, stations, hospitals, shops, bars, restaurants, host-bars, maid-cafes and S&M bars crank up, summer is always a high electricity-usage time of year.

Japan is currently running 19 of the 54 nucelar reactors that were in operation before the earthquake. Some have been shut down for short term maintenance upgrades, some longer-term and of course the notable meltdown/explosion... so power ain't as easy to come by as it used to be.

I couldn't get to the demo in Shibuya last Saturday but the anti-nuclear rallies in Tokyo are getting bigger with thousands turning up trying to drive a new focus on renewable energies which has to be a good thing.

In the meantime, I've noticed these power-usage graphics appearing at the end of the news. After the weather and between the UV index and the clothes-drying forecast.

This one shows Tokyo's total power generating capcity of 43 million kW and the expected power usage for the day. I took this yesterday on June 15th when they expected the peak usage to be 80% at 2pm. Once it gets to around 90% they start to plan scheduled blackouts to try and manage the demand.

Yahoo Japan's home page has had something similar since the earthquake showing the real-time actual power usage. The pic above was from March 28 when we were in the middle of the rolling blackouts and at 92%. There seems to be another 4.5 million kW available now... but doubt it'll be enough.

I'm not sure if the Ice Bar Tokyo in Ginza will, or should, keep going through the summer. 40 degrees C outside, most of Japan facing power cuts and these guys still want to "magically transport you to the arctic"!  Good to see these trendsetters have got their finger on the pulse of public opinion. 

Power

Summer's coming and Tokyo's under orders to cut down electricity consumption to avoid the rolling blackouts of last March . 

Last week they shut down Hamaoka nuclear power station 200 kms SW of Tokyo. A good thing for sure, but power's going to be scarce. The Hamaoka plant is the same vintage as Fukushima, sits right on the coast and is where the next "Tokai earthquake" is expected by some to hit sometime in the next 30 years or sooner. Too late to ask why they built it there in the first place, but good on them for shutting the bloody thing down.

Two posters from a bar and a subway station. Different demographic, same message.

THJ

Joined the Team Heal Japan guys yesterday on a trip back up to Iwaki in Fukushima, this time on clean-up duty. We didn’t know where we’d actually be needed till we’d reported to the Iwaki volunteer centre where we were given a clean-up job up in Yotsukura, another favourite weekend surfing spot in days gone by.

Apparently the number of volunteers has dropped off significantly since the Golden Week holidays in early May so it seemed a good time to hook up with these guys. Iwaki is about 3 hours from Tokyo. I used to regularly bolt up here early on a Saturday morning for a one-day surf-trip so why not to do the same thing now.

This was the pile we had to clear and it took 10 guys, one day to do about 80% of it.

It’s not just as simple as shoveling it all into a wheelbarrow and trucking it off, everything has to be separated into burnable, non-burnable, wood, metal, stone, soil etc. They won't let you dispose of it at the proper sites if it’s all mixed up. There’s also so much debris that no-one’s sure exactly where it’s going to go.

 

The latest figures reckon that 280,000 homes have been damaged in addition to those destroyed, but they are far from finished counting yet. It took ten of us a full day to shift and sort this pile of rubble and that was with the owner chipping in so I’ll let you figure out how many months or more likely years it's going to take and how many people are needed to get through everything.

On the day of the tsunami the husband was in work about 30 minutes away and his wife was in the house on her own. They're the couple in the middle of the top picture. She said she couldn't hear any emergency announcements across the town's emergency PA system so when the TV reported a tsunami of 6 metres was headed their way, no-one in their street really believed it. After a strong earthquake they usually got a 20cm or 30 cm or 50 cm tsunami warning so even though this earthquake had been a belter, the word on the street was that the TV must have meant 60cms, no-one could believe it was really going to be 6 metres.

The wave rushed into the house and she was soon up to her shoulders in water in the middle of her living room. With the water rushing through the house she was pinned to the back wall and couldn’t move forward far enough to reach the stairs and the safety of the second floor, she just had to cover up and wait and hope the waters didn’t get any higher. She had no idea how long it went on for but the next morning she was black and blue with bruises from all the debris banging up against her while she was in the water.

One of her neighbours from across the road wasn’t so lucky and died, his body was found ten days later. His next-door-neighbour was washed across the road and into her front yard where he managed to scramble up a maple tree and cling on. he now calls it the Tree of Life. They are now living with their daughter about 20 minutes away, he still has his part-time job so they hope to rebuild the house soon. There were a few tears from the pair of them as they shared their story and thanked everyone for coming, but overall, they just couldn't stop smiling.

Anyway, hats off to Sean Muramatsu and the Team Heal Japan guys, they seem to really have it sorted and will be doing regular trips up here for the foreseeable future. If you're in Japan, click on the Team Heal Japan link, or find them on facebook, get in touch and come and join us. Hopefully we can get lots more folks along. There'll be a PayPal link on the website soon for donations to keep these trips going.

Toyoma

Iwaki City, Fukushima is a three-hour drive NNE of Tokyo and about 50kms south of the reactor, well outside the 20km and 30km exclusion zones. These days Fukushima is only mentioned on the news when they're talking about the nuclear situation so it’s easy to forget the hundreds of coastal communities there that were also washed away by the tsunami.

Radiation readings around Iwaki have been back to normal since late March so last week was an interesting time for our illustrious leaders, who increasingly look like they’d struggle to organize a piss-up in a brewery, to announce the jump up to Level 7. Dodgy? Yes, but Fukushima does not equal Chernobyl.

In Iwaki on the day of the earthquake, more than 1,500 people crammed into the evacuation centre, a local elementary school. A lot of those have since got out of town but it still houses about 150 people and there are many more in surrounding houses who either have nowhere else to go, or have no way to get there.

Living in an evacuation centre obviously has its own problems, but people in the centres are now mostly able to get basic food, water, and nourishment. If you lived just beyond reach of the tsunami though and your house is still standing, you can’t register at your local evacuation centre and just have to go back and live in your home with basically no food, water or other services.

Yesterday I hired a van to take food and supplies from Second Harvest Japan up to Iwaki. The four people I delivered to were lucky enough to live in a house that was only built 6 months ago and wasn’t damaged much by the earthquake but still has no tap water and very intermittent power. Their house was far enough inland not to be affected by the tsunami and has now become a makeshift warehouse and distribution point for them to deliver to those who weren’t so lucky.

For the first week or two they’d be lining up for six or seven hours to get water from one central point in town a few kilometers away, but as people left it’s now dropped to about two, or one hour if you’re lucky. Some shops are just starting to re-open again as supply chains start to get reconnected, but its very slow going.

I asked them what they thought about leaving. It seemed an obvious question and they said they had thought a lot about getting out, but felt that since they were old folks anyway, they’d be more help if they stayed put to provide food and support for those who couldn’t leave.

A lot of their friends would also leave if they could, they just don’t have the money or the connections to make it happen. They seemed to have a faint hope that this far outside the exclusion zone things might soon start getting better, but once you leave the larger towns with manufacturing jobs there is a heavy reliance on farming and fishing, so the outlook doesn’t seem too good.

The government and Tepco currently have no responsibility for the costs of moving, housing and feeding anyone outside the 20km and 30km evacuation zones but have recently added five more municipalities NW of the rector outside 30km. Tepco announced on Friday a one-off compensation payment of 1M Yen per family (no matter how many kids) which has been roundly criticized as too little, too late and nowhere near wide-ranging enough for the full effect on Fukushima prefecture. A bit of quick hush money.

About 8km toward the coast from where I dropped the supplies off was the coastal town of Toyoma. When I used to come here surfing I remember thinking the huge sea-walls just looked ugly, spoilt the view and were a pain in the arse to drag your gear over. I say “was”, because there’s very little of it left now.

Five weeks on and there are still months or even years of clean-up work ahead. Seeing all the stock TV images from Miyagi and Iwate concentrated in this area of Fukushima was sobering to say the least. A car bent in half, a single house left standing while all around was wiped out, a cuddly toy on top of a pile of rubble, a kid’s school painting that should have been stuck on a fridge somewhere, some Buddha statues retrieved by rescue workers lined up waiting to be claimed.

 

This  house was tucked up against the south-facing side of the headland (the ocean is on the right) which despite the front windows being smashed in and one end of the balcony being ripped off somehow managed to protect the two perfectly manicured trees in front of the porch.

This beachside road heading south just collapsed almost exactly where a really cool little surf shop used to be.

On the other side of the headland at Numanouchi looking north, those “ugly” sea-wall defences held firm and the town is still basically intact.

Fukushima is Japanese for “fortunate island”.

Art for Japan

Striking image from Chris Mackenzie.

This Japan Times article explains that the proceeds will go to the Japanese Red Cross Society, Second Harvest Japan and the Japan Emergency Team, operated by Jhelp.com

This poster is only on sale to folks in Japan but don't let that put you off. Donate the 5,000 yen anyway to any one of the three above, then instead of waiting a few weeks to receive a bulky 50x70cm poster, simply print out this minimalist 8x11cm happy-snap and frame it with a near foot-thick border.

Or maybe just splash the cash anyway in appreciation of a job well done.

Tsimulation

If the image below isn't moving, click here to see the full animated version of this incredible tsunami simulation from Prof. Takashi Furumura and Project Researcher Takuto Maeda of the Earthquake Research Institute, University of Tokyo.

The blue areas show areas where the ocean drew back to below the normal level before the red tsunami hit.

The Fisherman

My first green wave was when I was 12 years old. I’d tagged along again with my older brother and his mates down to Rest Bay. He came in early and offered me a go on his 6’ Bilbo single-fin before his mates also came in. The sun was just going down, the water was freezing, but that didn’t matter. That first experience of catching a wave, standing up, leaning over and have the board turn vaguely in the direction you wanted to go, and actually staying ahead of the whitewater was a feeling I’ve been trying to recapture ever since.

It changes your view of the ocean, or the sea as we called it then. Even on the very many blown-out days of onshore slop, your eyes would skip across the sections looking for that fleeting bit of clean face or a glimmer of a lip you could mentally smack. It changes your view of everything, you start seeing waves everywhere.

Surf mags were full of images of perfect waves so you start traveling looking for what you could never get at home. Overseas where people just didn’t surf, if the local fishermen thought you were crazy for paddling out you’d just smugly chuckle to yourself thinking they just didn’t understand.

Most surfers know a bit about tsunamis. A building, unstoppable surge of water pushing far inland as opposed to your classic surfable big wave. Before a tsunami hits the tide starts dropping rapidly and possibly further than normal, then when the tsunami arrives it would be visible across the whole bay but with a height much less than you’d expect from something that could cause so much destruction. It was always the surge that would cause all the damage.

 I’d heard second-hand stories about a friend of a friend who was surfing in Sri Lanka when the tsunami hit in 2004. He had no choice but to catch it and ride it in, managing somehow to direct himself over to some beach-front lodgings and scramble up to the safety of the second floor balcony.

Then came this:

And then this shaky hand-held clip.

 I’m not sure how well known this clip is. It was taken by a local fisherman at Nodamura, Iwate and despite the dodgy-looking last few seconds, he and his family all survived and managed to get to one of the evacuation shelters. He lost his home along with his fishing boat but is amazingly lucky to be alive.

Big waves are life-threatening, no doubt about it. There are countless surf stories of big-wave heroes battling monster waves and surviving wipeouts from hell but with a few notable exceptions, these stories usually end up with the ocean “just letting go”. A lucky escape and a ritual good kicking. But what if the wipeout was just the start? What if the ocean just didn’t "let go"?

As of April 2: 11,800 confirmed dead and another 15,540 still missing…