Contributed by Orcas Island writer Barbara Lewis, who was in Japan when the nation was struck by the recent earthquake and tsunami.
When the Japanese earthquake struck, we were atop Mt. Misen on the small island of Miyajima across the Inland Sea from Hiroshima. We didn’t feel the ground shake. No tsunami reached the island’s pristine beaches. Everything was calm and peaceful. We had no way of knowing what had just happened to the north.
When my daughter, Heather, and I had reached Miyajima by ferry the day before, we were reminded immediately of Orcas. After climbing Mt. Misen, the similarities between the two islands deepened. From on top of the mountain, we peered down at an archipelago of islands and felt right at home – except that across the water where Bellingham should’ve been, there was the sprawling and gleaming metropolis of Hiroshima.
In a way, War World II had brought me to Japan. Ever since discovering a stash of old letters my dad had written to his mother during the war, I had wanted to visit. As part of the occupying forces, Dad had been among the first Americans to enter Tokyo. After the 10-mile ride to the American Embassy, he wrote:
“It is almost unbelievable to ride along broad streets mile after mile and see nothing but feeble, tin shacks made of burned tin roofs, burned and scorched trees lining the beautiful avenues and the hulls of once large and beautiful buildings burned out, lone smoke stacks rising out of factory heaps and modern automobiles at the curb caught and burned right where they were. I haven’t seen a bomb crater yet, it just looks like a huge fire has enveloped the city.”
In his letters, Dad told how surprised and relieved he was that the Japanese people had watched the troops calmly and politely, their soldiers saluting all along the way. When my father’s battalion reached the American Embassy, they took one look at the pool and stripped off their uniforms to go swimming. The night air was warm. The soldiers, most of them in their teens like my father, mud-wrestled on the Embassy’s immaculate lawn. The next morning the Japanese began rebuilding their city. Dad wrote: “Right across the street there is nothing but rubble and only this morning [the Japanese] started coming out of their tin shacks with shovels to help clear away the mess, old men, women, and children all working. They try to clear away enough to put up a shack and a little garden.”
I was thinking about my father as I looked across the Inland Seat toward Hiroshima, knowing nothing of the quake or the tsunami, which would soon be called the worst devastation in Japan since World War II. We only found out about the earthquake when my daughter checked her email after we descended the mountain.
“Mom, something bad has happened,” she said. We turned on the television but we couldn’t tell from the flashing map on the screen just how close we were to the tsunami. The entire coastline was lit up. We sat on the bed and watched the horrible pictures of washed-out beach villages, but couldn’t tell what was going on. The television announcers spoke Japanese. No one in our guest house spoke English.
We’d been planning to meet my son, Christopher, in Tokyo the next day. We tried reaching our Tokyo hotel, but we couldn’t get through because of the earthquake. When we went outside, we found everyone was calm, as if nothing had happened. We figured this was probably because earthquakes and tsunamis aren’t that unusual in Japan. But it was hard to get a clear picture of what was going on in the rest of the country.
Then my husband, Brian, called. He was at a conference in Thailand, and had heard about the earthquake through our two other children in Seattle. For the next few days, most of the reliable information we received about Japan came to us through Brian, who heard much of it from our children in Seattle. Brian told us that the Narita Airport outside of Tokyo had been closed, and my son’s flight was cancelled. The trains in Tokyo had also stopped. Even the taxis weren’t running. So going to Tokyo was out of the question. We decided to go back to Kyoto, hoping that the cheerful, English-speaking concierges would be able to help us.
Polite is the wrong word to describe the Japanese. Politeness strikes westerners as insincere. Politeness connotes a sense of rule-bound reserve. But during the week before the earthquake, Heather and I had experienced Japanese politeness as genuine acts of graciousness. Everywhere we turned someone was smiling and bowing to us, offering us, as well as each other, refreshing words of greeting, gratitude, and good wishes. After the earthquake, when we were trying to figure out what to do, we encountered no irritation. From the concierges to the train attendants to the people we asked on the streets, everyone was kind and patient. If we had to be stranded among a foreign-speaking people during a crisis, Japan wasn’t such a bad place to be.
In Kyoto, I called the number of a Japanese resident, a cousin of an Orcas friend. She was relieved to hear from me.
“We thought you were in Tokyo!” she said. It was great to talk to an American who knew Japan and also understood our concerns. Together we came up with a viable plan.
We considered flying out of Osaka. But the Narita Airport opened the next day and Brian miraculously found me a ticket to fly out at the same time as Heather, but on different airlines. The news of the trouble at the nuclear power plants made the possibility of aftershocks in Tokyo worth the risk. The concierge told us that the train from Tokyo to the airport was running, but when we arrived at the train station, we were told that the Narita Express was only running sporadically. So we weren’t sure when we left Kyoto if we would make our flights. But we found the trains were almost empty and each connection ran smoothly and on time. Outside of Tokyo, we spotted Mt. Fuji. But the closest I came to seeing Tokyo was looking out the train window.
At the airport, I waited patiently in the long line at the Singapore Airline counter, taking my cue from the friendly and courteous airport employees. When the wheels of my plane left the ground, I was deeply grateful.
How ironic that my father was in Japan after the bombings and I was there for this terrible event. But we met the same people, the same calm, gracious, hard-working Japanese. If they climbed out of the rubble left by War World II to rebuild their country, I feel certain that they’ll survive this ordeal. Even so, I’m unable to watch the television. The Japanese no longer feel like strangers to me, and each day the news of those caught in the north only worsens. I’m hoping and praying that the very worst kind of destruction won’t happen to them again.
