Any Ring is Commitment,
Even One Made of Fire…
Previously published in The Kyoto Journal, Digital Issue 85
Rain pelts down in muscled sheets. I wonder if the veranda tarp we’ve just hung is really secure and if triple knots have what it takes to withstand wind and rain. This is Tokyo and it is typhoon season. There are not one, not two, but three typhoons, all swirling somewhere in the nearby-Pacific; I worry about what will fly off.
When I first moved here I did my best to shop for emergency gear in a huge Tokyo home goods store. I emerged completely slack-jawed and breathing rapidly. There were entire floors dedicated to fire extinguishers, special latches and pipes, hooks to station shelves for the rattle of earthquakes. I was not prepared for the bevy of personal emergency toilets, or non-cook rice or spools and spools of floor-to-ceiling plastic sheeting for who knew what. Eight years later, I have a giant suitcase and half-a-closet of earthquake stuff. Because being prepared means I can breathe. It’s just what you do in an earth-
quake zone. It’s not about being Type-A anymore. It’s just what we do to be safe, maybe all we can do.
Japan is an archipelago, a string of 6,852 islands, 430 inhabited, that must deal with various prospects along the Ring of Fire, the 25,000 mile-continuous stretch of volcanoes and trenches around the basin of the Pacific Ocean, all buckling and arching in tectonic activity. Typhoons shake down and wipe out all of Okinawa’s tropical crops. Islands like Shikoku and Kyushu flood interminably, sometimes not bailed out before the next storm.
I’m from Florida, where Doppler radars point out a swirling, barreling storm when it’s still far enough out at sea that everyone has time to pull in their speedboats and tape up their windows, even if that never really works. We cover our computers with Hefty black garbage bags and bunker under propped-up mattresses, canned food and candles at the ready, and mostly, it
is fine. Hurricanes don’t just appear the way earthquakes jolt you into a new reality. Earthquakes just come: a sudden tear, a schism down deep that releases waves, ripples, and trembles, sometimes a string of them.
So rain, I’ll take. I’ll harness the wind, too. It can take my bike and crash it down. It can scare my rowdy dogs into barking the night through. Rain and wind are easy.
But here I live in a land of earthquakes. Japan was my home at the time of the most recent devastation, a 9.0 on the Richter scale. More than 16,000 people were killed by the tsunami and nearly 4,000 people are still missing. In elementary classes of seventeen, four children survived, many orphaned.
They say animals can sense tectonic change, imminent disaster, wobbles in electrons. I’m sure the dolphins could feel the Tohoku quake. After all, it produced an infrasound wave detected by a satellite in space. Yet, so sudden was the ensuing tsunami that 110,000 nesting seabirds on the Midway Atoll, north of the Hawaiian Islands, died. Warning alarms are set to sound for tsunami along the coastline of Japan, and they sounded that day, just after 2:46 pm, the time of the earthquake, but not in time.
It was terror on sea-legs. The tsunami waves set in motion by the shifting of subduction plates on that spring day burst onshore at about 100 kilometers per hour. Those waves, once on land, crashed from up to 38 meters, that is, as high as an eleven and a half-story building. Water rose three times higher than seismologists advised the town of Minami-sanriku to build its seawall. People couldn’t move fast enough to clamber upwards to high ground. Maybe, with that force, they hardly had a chance.
Though a resident, I was not in Japan at the time. I was curled-up with my six-month-old girl, in a luxury bed in a luxury hotel in Palm Beach, home in the States for my sister’s wedding. I awoke to my buzzing cell phone at six am, my family friend with the news that Japan had just experienced a 9. I didn’t know what a 9 meant exactly, but I knew it was not good, not good not good not good. I pictured everyone dead. I woke up the entire suite of mother, baby, and cousins. My husband was home in Tokyo, and I hysterically beat out the numbers to his cell via Skype. Nothing the whole morning. We turned on the news and saw disaster in the form of a black wave. That was a 9.
That morning, I inhaled coffee, nursed, and tried to be happy for my little sister getting married, all the while nauseated as TVs all around played the only coverage anyone had: hell called a tsunami swallowing my adopted country, black waves taking cars, eating roads, and licking away real people, my people.
Back when I was an American girl in Florida, before I’d ever been abroad, before I moved to Asia, I thought earthquakes were simple, momentary shakes. I could have remained in Florida, plotting the next hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico on my paper Doppler radar graph, but I chose to be with a man who, while he grew up in America, is a Japanese national. After we married, we moved to Japan. Yes, I traded the tropics for marriage on the Ring of Fire.
The first tremors were cursory, a kind of “Welcome to Japan. Yokoso.” But there is nothing settling about being woken from sleep, bed shaking left and right. There is nothing culturally fun about wondering if all of our wine glasses and dishes will pour out of rattling cupboards and break. More than that, I could not understand a syllable, much less the message, from our local disaster center. Do I stay in or out? For how long do I wait inside if it is a big one? I hated every quake and aftershock. Now that I’m a mom, I’m responsible for other lives, my kids’. How strong are their bunkbeds? Disasters enact themselves in my head. I some-what-periodically enroll in English safety classes, carry flashcards with pertinent disaster information and vocabulary, and I stock the earthquake bag. It’ll never be fun, this getting equipped; it’s simply par for the course and territory.
Maybe the process of living abroad is letting go of false security. I loosen my grip on what I used to have and what I think I need, receiving, instead, new opportunities, useful phrases, earth-quake safety tips, and emergency weather gear for each season.
I’ve stuffed foiled tarps for heating children and adults high in the
linen closet, in case we have no heat, no electricity in winter. I’ve
squirreled away meal bars and gelatinous pouches of sports drinks
for each of us to subsist on for a few days. I have a kind of mantra
I say, to make me feel better about all of this: “And really, what
place is Eden, nowadays? Every country or state has its downsides
or risks.”
I stayed in the U.S. with my daughter for three weeks after
my sister married, extending my ticket along with everyone else
who could still stay away from the earthquake, tsunami, and now
grief-battered land. I had to convince worried parents and family
that it was not idiocy to return to Japan, where diapers and bread
were rumored to be yet unavailable. No one wanted to trust my husband; clearly he just wanted his wife and baby home. The nuclear plants were in meltdown. Nothing felt stable, yet it was still home. I returned with my baby, All Nippon Airway’s flight attendants reading and singing to distract and placate her, as gifted as Montessori teachers. I felt bonded to them. I wept in the galley over salty osenbei and a banana.
Heading back to the country that had become my home, I envisioned the spring graduation season with parents and children gone, seniors stranded in safety centers. Cherry blossoms would still bloom. Maybe it was just me, but it seemed the country needed its sakura petals to mark the national grief of missing neighborhoods. We needed drinks held with equal parts reservation and timid declarations to hope. It was only when I returned to Japan after the earthquake that I realized how much I’d held myself back from allowing that country to become my own. I longed to mourn and sob and laugh with the people who’d taken me in and given me strength. I allowed myself to fall in love with people here. I didn’t have to be so tough; what did that do for anyone? I smiled at strangers. I stopped to ask questions. I biked my groceries up the hill, praying silently, sometimes aloud, for the tired people I saw. Everyone shared their story of that day and how they walked home from work or wherever. Everyone was affected.
Grief helped me connect to the people here, who I’d previously seen as untouchable. I learned the melody for the national anthem and looked for ways to celebrate the nation, starting from elderly neighbors on my block. What shakes and tremors they’ve known from wars, firebombs, and earthquakes. We all say “good morning, ohayo gozaimasu” a little louder. Grief, empathy, empowerment — I want to help. In the end, I’ve only used a handful of words.
In the months after the tsunami, many of our friends went to Tohoku, to aid in distributing clothing, blankets, and food. A total of 116 countries, 28 international organizations, and countless churches and groups dug people out of mud. Israel set up a hospital with 42 tons of medical supplies. China gave a navy ship, tens of thousands of tons of fuel, a mechanical arm to pump out water, and endless bottles of fresh drinking water. People listened to stories, served tea and hot curry meals. I wanted to nurse survivors, but I was nursing my young daughter. My husband went instead.
He returned, drained and distracted with stories of empty homes
and the child’s Anpanman lunchbox he found, rusty like all of the
lunch boxes that had been swept away. He dragged with fatigue,
but he was lit with empathy and the presence of people he had
talked with and helped.
That Anpanman lunch box is something my kids would love.
That character is beloved here. It could have been any child’s. It
represents the sorrow a whole people share — a house, a mother, a
father, a child, obaachan, ojiichan, times whole towns and villages.
That morning is a scene we all could picture, routine and structure knocked on its side and carried off, rather, sucked out with that wave. It was and still is devastating to watch footage of the earthquake and aftermath. The world was selling T-shirts with Pray for Japan, songs to download with all funds going to Tohoku. Our ketchup bottles had “Gambatte Nihon,” sentiments like “You can be strong, we believe in you” alongside the national flag and all you could do was see these reminders, aware of thousands of people missing their families and communities, and bow quietly while trying to silently squeeze a dollop of the sweet ketchup, and pray. Loads of foreigners, even those situated here for years, suddenly transferred and were gone. Those who wanted to stay seemed to do so with resolve. We’re here and the thing is, there are no, absolutely no guarantees that such a disaster won’t occur again. This is the Ring of Fire. We’ve got to be reconciled to that, emotionally, down deep. I prepare for earthquakes the way I know how — by buying more emergency packets of rice, a scary-looking portable toilet, and meal replacement soy bars, though I always forget to stash cash.
Crying tears for victims just a train ride away, the country feels more united. I see other nations differently, too. The world is smaller. All of the bumping and sliding of tectonic plates, each news blast of an earthquake, mudslide, or major typhoon sends me to the best of humanity — praying, thinking of others. I show my children our globe and many maps. No one is so far from here, maybe. The whole world is but a train ride or jet away. It is a quick route to growing in humanity, to letting one’s passport and imagination run away. What is the difference among people when we all can be, in a fierce moment, brought to tears or joy? We are but one plane ride, or essay, or story away from a deeper heartbreaking, but I show my kids the map of Japan, the places hit hardest. I explain the realities of earthquake safety, still cringing at the kanji for “disaster.” Home is the danger and the peace, the simple ways we come to protect what we love, what makes it worth staying. Tomorrow I’ll buy more protein bars to stick in the kit. I’ll even make some notes about ways we may still help. We’ll make sure all pictures, vases, and books are secure and
away from our children’s sleeping heads.
Everything has the potential to come crashing down, but the real treasure is what I most protect. I moved for love and this is what it takes — calling on love and faith to steady the frames, trust the foundation, and hold your hands up to surrender instead of simply fear.
Because we are home, even and especially when plates sway and crack.
Home is the danger and the peace, the simple ways we come to protect what we love, what makes it worth staying.
