Hiro’s Last Run

On the afternoon of Friday, 11 March 2011 at about 2:20 pm I happened to be sitting in the United Airlines’ lounge at Narita airport, near Tokyo. I was waiting to return from a conference on Service Science at Tokyo Institute of Technology. At that moment I was startled by a series of strong earthquakes that tossed the building about like an aeroplane in turbulent air, but — thanks to Japanese earthquake engineering — I felt perfectly safe. Twenty minutes later came the Magnitude 9.1 earthquake that devastated northern Japan. I was still feeling safe, but in the next hour some 16,000 people would die and another 2,500 would disappear. Amazingly United Airlines got me home that night with only an hour’s delay (THANK YOU to the captain who decided to just get us out of there), but I quickly returned and spent some months living in Sendai, a large city in the northern province of Tohoku, and trying to learn what had happened, why it had happened, and what can connected world could do about this. Below is a short story I wrote for an urban planning group in Dublin based on these experiences. (30 November 2015)

It was a winter’s morning and the weak sun glinted off the mountains far inland. Well before sunrise, Hiro had fed the cows in his father’s barn and had then walked to a lookout point on the headland above the fishing port. He called it his dreaming place, where he would retell himself the stories he loved to read. But today he was troubled. Soon he must choose between land and sea. After his twelfth birthday he must become apprenticed either to a fisherman or to a farmer. Only a few more months of childhood remained. The prospect weighed heavily on him. For years he and his friends and their mongrel dogs had ranged far and wide along the beaches, the cliffs, the woods, and the hinterland, until he knew every rock and tree and stream and tide pool. Now he must choose a job, a prison that would shackle him to some field or to some boat for the rest of his life. But what if he wanted to see the world beyond, the world he read of in his books?

So on these chilly winter’s mornings, he would walk over from his family’s upland farm to the lookout point above the small bay in which the village and its port were nestled. He sat on his favourite rock and stared inland along the narrow, crooked valley or offshore to the hazy horizon. He felt already the sorrow of separation from his carefree life. He knew that it was a parting and even if he lived forever in this little village of farmers and fishers, he could never again know that freedom. Adult life was tightening around him.

All too soon the school bell began to call and Hiro raced home to collect his younger brother and sister and escort them down to the school building. The village was the largest of a group of small, remote sea ports that were all served by this school and it offered classes from kindergarten up to baccalaureate. So it was a large building with three stories and it took pride of place in the narrow valley beside the river and upstream from the port and the fish processing sheds. Hiro’s brother and sister were still in the elementary school on the ground floor, but he was proud to climb the stairs to the second floor where the middle school was held.

School days all passed too quickly for Hiro, who loved to read and daydream about people and places far away. Midday came all too soon and was punctuated by the testing of the alarm system that also served to signal the lunch break. The alarm sirens sounded various sequences to alert the village to the magnitude of the risk. It was a deafening sound, especially during the monthly practice when the students would be lead up to the roof, where they would be safe from a flood if one of the dams upstream broke or if a tidal wave would surge into the narrow port. Afterwards Hiro liked to linger on the roof and look up to his lookout point on the cliffs above.

On this day of days, the siren test had just passed when the ground trembled moderately as it often did. The students were just descending from the roof when it began, but such tremors were common and they knew that the school building was strong, so they continued to return to their classrooms. Hiro was still lingering on the roof when a much stronger tremor occurred. Almost immediately the sirens sounded again, warning of a big tidal wave. But as that sound died away, Hiro heard another sound from up the valley, a rumbling and crashing that he had never heard before. He turned and could see in the distance white foam crashing down the dam wall. There was no siren alarm to signal both a tidal wave and a dam breech. It was a black swan event that could never happen.

Down in the schoolrooms, the teachers were marshaling the students to return to the roof, when Hiro appeared screaming that that there were two threats. Later it seemed to him to be an out of body experience. His body, his voice, his mind were acting beyond his own volition, willing the teachers and to the students to get away from the building where it lay between the two threats. He began on the third floor with the senior classes, but they were adamant about returning to the roof. On the second floor, his own classroom was in chaos as some tried to rush back up the stairways and others responded to his bellowing and moved to descend. He could not wait and ran down to find his brother and sister below and tell them where to wait for him. Again and again he ran up and down the stairs shouting his warning and listening to the growing roar of the waters.

Finally he had rounded up as many students as he could get to respond and he drove them frantically from the back up towards the lookout point. The path began only two hundred meters from the school and rose quickly. As they reached it and began to climb he longed to look back to see the roaring waters approaching the village, but his body was focused on screaming at the children to keep running. Some stumbled and he picked them up and dragged them panting up the path. As the leaders reached Hiro’s lookout point the two waves converged in the valley below with a thunderous crash that threw spouts of water high up into the air. Less than three minutes had passed since Hiro had first heard the collapse of the dam and the approaching tidal wave, but in those seconds he had lived a lifetime.

Water converged from upstream, from downstream, and from above on to the school, where scores of students and teachers clung to the roof. The walls, pounded from all directions, cracked under the onslaught and began to collapse. In minutes, the force of the water was spent and all that remained of the school was a twisted steel frame. The valley was filled with a flood of debris being swept back toward the sea with trees, boats, and vehicles demolishing everything in its path. They watched it in disbelief, incredulous that their homes, their families, their friends, their teachers, their lives, everything had been swept away in seconds. In shock they could do nothing but stare down into the wreckage, hoping to see someone or something that had survived, something to which their lives were still connected.

Finally silence. The silence of death.

They stayed all night on the hill. Darkness came early in that season and Hiro could see lights moving down in the valley. He called out, but they were too far away. He thought of leaving the young children as they huddled together for warmth, but feared they would be panicked if they were alone. So they waited until the weak dawn revealed the devastation below and then he left the children and walked silently down to the rescuers searching through the debris. The rescuers told him that people were sheltering in a community centre a few kilometers inland. The roads were invisible below the mud and debris, so Hiro lead them along the crest of the valley. In a few minutes he could see below them the abrupt edge of the destruction. Two houses stood at that point, one wrecked beyond recognition, the other untouched. Bulldozers were being unloaded from trailers and setting out to clear a path towards the port, advancing cautiously to listen for the survivors and to look for the dead. Ambulances waited to transport them to the shelter and to seek out their families. There was little to offer except shelter from the sharp wind and from the scenes of death and loss outside.

The edge of disaster.

Of the rest of Hiro’s family there was no sign, though groups and individuals continued to arrive. Hiro settled his brother and sister and promised to go and find their parents. Then he turned and walked back to the valley and joined the search for the dead and the living for a week. He was angry in his grief and vented this in unceasing efforts to find those trapped and then to recover those who had perished. He worked as long as he could see and slept among the wreckage in part to save time, but also to avoid human contact, which he feared would lead his anger to explode.

He excelled at search and rescue, digging into his years of roaming through the valley to imagine where someone might have found safety from the great waves. Other rescuers recognised him as a hero, though he avoided contact with them too. As journalists and disaster tourists began to arrive he was pointed out as such, but he refused to waste time speaking. The longer he worked, the more passionate his anger became.

After some more days government officials and professors from the universities arrived to survey the damage. One of the officials came upon Hiro seated on the lookout rock. He pointed to another rock some ten or fifteen meters lower. “Did anyone ever read that to you?” he asked. Hiro squinted at the familiar rock, which bore strange markings that had puzzled him for years. “It is an old script, probably from seven or eight hundred years ago. There are similar rocks all along this coast.” “What does the writing say?” asked Hiro. “It says: “Do not build below this line.’” was the devastating reply.

When no further survivors or dead had been found for a week, the search was called off and finally Hiro consented to rest. A meeting of the survivors was held at the community centre and politicians came from the capital to express sorrow and to make vague promises of assistance in returning the world to normal. In the short term they proposed to move the survivors to a neighbouring town, where there were empty apartments that would surely be more comfortable than the cardboard pens in which they were living in a local sport centre. But many survivors refused the offer, not willing to be parted from the site of their homes, even if the homes themselves had been swept away. They mocked those who accepted, saying that if they deserted the community, they could never return.

A week later there was another meeting with fewer politicians and fewer promises, but mainly the same audience. Apart from the food and shelter, there had been no sign of the promised assistance to begin re-building. Some started to question the weak promises that were already fading. Such questioning was out of character. The coastal communities were renowned for their stoic independence and at first many tut-tutted the angry speakers. But the anger spread, releasing emotions that had been restrained since the disaster. Many questioned loudly whether the promises would ever be fulfilled. Some had already been reminded by their banks that their debts had not been forgiven.

The village leaders tried to return to the question of how the community wanted to re-build. The audience was quickly split between those who simply wanted everything to be as it was before and those who wanted to avoid another disaster. The fishermen wanted to spend whatever money was given to build a bigger port with bigger fish processing sheds behind it and a bigger road out of the valley. The farmers had no interest in the valley, since the soil would be unfertile for years until the salt from the sea water was leached out by rain, but they wanted new land above the valley for storage and better roads for lorries. Soon the two groups were shouting and cursing one another and assigning blame for the disaster.

As anger grew, Hiro rose from the back of the hall and walked slowly to the platform where the leaders sat. “Why?” he called out as he walked slowly towards them. “Why?”, he cried out. “Why did you build our homes by the port? Why did you not build a higher sea wall? You knew the warnings of the stones! Did you still want to keep it secret, so you can re-build your empires on the bodies of the dead? You were trusted with this knowledge and you hid it for your own benefit.”

He confronted the leaders, standing face to face in a manner that no one had ever witnessed. “Why?” he screamed as he had screamed at the children he lead to safety. “Why?” he spat the word in the elders’ faces. He let a long silence dwell on the hall until the eldest leader stood. He bowed sorrowfully and spoke: “We thought that this time it would be different.” As the silence continued, the elder walked quietly out of the hall and was never seen again.