Rikuzentakata and Ofunato

The great earthquake and tsunami may have been several years ago, but for the people affected they experience the consequences every waking moment. We made a trip to the worst affected area with two main purposes.

Firstly to deliver some money that had been raised by the Adelaide community to a school in the worst affected area.


We wanted to hand it over prersonally to the headmaster so that it didn't get tied up in various bureaucratic accounts or spent on things other than the children.

There are about 80 children at the school we visited. They are in a temporary school as theirs was completely destroyed. Many are orphans and being raised by their grandparents etc. 85% live in temporary housing.

Secondly we wanted to visit a friend who has returned to the area to look after her mother and see for ourselves what was happening about helping these people.

Whereas some of the towns are about 1/2 intact Rikuzentaka has basically ceased to exist. It resembles a parking lot on the moon, with giant machines moving earth about.

For every big city or town destroyed there are dozens of little villages and settlements that are no more. The coastline is incredibly crenelated with many rivers and streams. Every stream and indented valley had a settlement of some sorts.

 

This is a giant conveyer which is moving a mountain. They are demolishing a nearby mountain and transfering the soil by conveyer in order to raise the whole area by many meters. Rikuzentaka will then be rebuilt on the raised platform.

All along the coast this sort of thing is happening and giant concrete sea walls are being built. This is fairly controversial as many people believe that the vast amount of money involved would be better spent helping those affected to rebuild somewhere else on higher ground.
 It's a good point as you can't put a wall around the whole coastline and even if you did you have to to leave entry gates to ports and exit gates for rivers. These are always weak points and useless if they cannot be closed in time.

Indeed in Ofunato there was a very big concrete wall and gate and the tsunami went straight over the top of it.

So about 170,000 people are still living in temporary housing that looks like this:

 

Each 'house' is about the size of a shipping container. 

There are quite a lot of volunteers from all over Japan who have come to help people  rebuild their homes and lives. However there is an enormous amount yet to be done and many of the settlements will never be rebuilt.