Remembering 3/11

Ten years go by quickly these days. Living in central Tokyo Mika and I didn't suffer any of the worst of the aftereffects of the Mar. 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, and her parents on the Ibaraki coast just south of the Fukushima border were OK. The roads in their area were pitted and warped and their house had enough damage that they slept in their car for days without heat or running water, but despite being in their 70s they stubbornly refused to leave and come stay with us in Tokyo. It took the bait of a one-night stay in a central Tokyo luxury hotel that I won at a charity race a week later to lure them away. They were a lot luckier than most of the people just a few minutes to the north.

At the time the earthquake happened, 2:46 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, Mika and I were on the Yamanote Line, the busy train line that circles central Tokyo, en route to meet with a travel agent in Shinbashi we had started to work with in conjunction with the Venice Marathon. It's strange in retrospect as we're hardly ever out together on a weekday afternoon, especially in those days. We were sitting on the train in Hamamatsucho, the station before Shinbashi, waiting for the doors to close, when I noticed that it felt like the train was already moving. I looked up and around and said, "Jishin" to Mika, "earthquake." Looking up from her phone she answered, "Hmmn?" looked around, and said, "You're right."

As it got bigger more people noticed, a couple of young guys sitting across from us, two young Israeli tourist women with an older Japanese guide woman. Everyone jolted in surprise when the doors closed and the train started moving and several of us said out loud the equivalent of "Whoa whoa whoa whoa!" I thought for a second about hitting the emergency stop button, but the train only went a few hundred meters before it screeched to a halt. You could see the buildings right next to the tracks shaking, and right as we stopped chunks of concrete fell from the top floor of the building closest to us, sparking cries of fear throughout our car.

We sat on the train for over half an hour waiting for something to happen, people coming out into the streets outside and looking up at the cracked building, everyone's cell service out, all of us wondering what was happening and whether we were safe, the time punctuated by sharp jolts from aftershocks. A friend had once told me that whenever you feel an earthquake in Tokyo it means it was bigger somewhere else, and we wondered where it might have been and how much worse it could have been there. One of the young guys got a connection on his phone, looked through it, and said something about a 20 m tsunami. The other guy laughed nervously and said, "There's no way that's right!" Eventually JR staff came and evacuated us off the train, helping everyone down ladders and then having us walk single-file inside a set of the busiest train tracks in the world back to Hamamatsucho. 

We got there just in time to see the raging black mountains sweeping across the fields of Miyagi on the TV screens in the station filled with silent people watching. Giving up on our meeting we decided to go home, briefly considering a taxi but, looking at the stream of people starting to spill out of surrounding office buildings into the street, opting to walk. It took about two hours, and by the time we got to Harajuku on the other side of the park from our apartment it was already full of people trying to figure out how to get home without the trains running. We got to ours, on the 7th floor of an old 12-story building, to find one of our glass sliding doors shattered and a couple of shelves and cabinets knocked over.

We decided to go to the supermarket before the majority of the people leaving work early got back. The supermarket across the street from our place had a guard at the entrance limiting the number of people coming in. A lot of things were already running low, but the foreign food shelf was untouched so we stocked up on granola and other things that would last. The one thing that had already completely vanished within three hours of the earthquake was toilet paper and tissues, something that we filed away for future reference and that came in very handy to know at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis.

Mika figured there'd be a run on alcohol too, so we bought a couple of bottles of wine and a case of beer to last us until things stabilized. But as we watched the TV coverage, the endless stream of people walking home through the busy intersection outside all evening and into the night, and sat through aftershock after aftershock, some of them pretty scary, we ended up drinking all of it that night. I was pretty hung over when my parents managed to get through the next day. When I felt up to it I went for a run in the park, and it was an eerily beautiful day, sunny and warm, with a few other people out, one family I remember having a picnic, trying to put on a veil of normality.

In the days that followed, in between watching what was happening in Fukushima Mika worked with our friend Stephen Lacey to put together the charity race I mentioned, which raised about $6000 USD for disaster relief. Stephen passed away from cancer last year. I did what I could to help several people who contacted me through JRN from overseas trying to figure out how to get in touch with family members in the Sendai area, and to try to share accurate information through Twitter, a platform I'd just started using a few weeks before.

When the National University Half Marathon was canceled the day after the earthquake I talked to David Monti about bringing some of the college runners to the NYC Half a week later as a show of support. He agreed to bring over two runners and their coaches if I could get them. I talked to Kiyoshi Akimoto, then head coach of the Honda corporate team, and he agreed to help, but in all the confusion of the aftermath and the events in Fukushima we couldn't pull it together in time. Still, a year later the NYRR did bring over head coach Toshiyuki Sakai and two runners from Toyo University, Yuta Shitara and Kento Otsu, who ran great at the NYC Half. That has turned into an annual program, two national records from Shitara, and a 2:08:15 from Otsu last week at Lake Biwa, so we did manage to turn at least a tiny bit of it into something good.

I later did some volunteer work with an organization processing donations of food and goods to be shipped to the areas hardest hit by the tsunami. Mika was involved with the organization of the first running of the Tohoku Miyagi Revival Marathon in 2017, traveling to the northeastern coastal areas and interviewing people who had survived the tsunami and were trying to rebuild lives and communities along the marathon course. Her interviews were published in the memorial magazine prepared in conjunction with the marathon. We went up to watch and cheer the race that fall.

This is all pretty trivial compared to what hundreds of thousands of others went through and JRN isn't really the forum for it, but it was our personal experience of the disasters and I wanted to put it down before I forget any more of it. Ten years go by quickly, but many of the people and communities of the northeast are still far from getting over it. Most probably never will. In memoriam of all those who lost their lives, livelihoods and loved ones ten years ago today.

© 2021 Brett Larner, all rights reserved

all photos by Brett Larner except 4th and 7th photos, which are by Mika Tokairin