The scars of the tsunami linger a decade later in Japan

TOKYO (AP): Images continue to have the power to crash.

Stunned survivors walk under huge sea cisterns deposited amid an expanse of rubble and twisted iron that was once occupied in the center, the ships lying on their sides like children’s toys. Sadly afflicted survivors pick up the flattened remains where their homes once stood. Abandoned farms are in the shadow of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, where a catastrophic disaster still resonates.

These captivating images were captured by The Associated Press in 2011 after a massive wall of water leveled a part of Japan’s northeast coast, washing cars, houses, office buildings and thousands of people.

Ten years later, AP journalists have re-documented the communities that were uprooted from what is simply known here as the great earthquake in eastern Japan. The desire to rebuild a land that has been devastated by millennia of disasters (volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, earthquakes, wars and famine) is powerful and there are areas where there are few or no traces of the 2011 devastation. .

But this triple disaster in the Tohoku region of Japan (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown) has been different from anything it had previously faced in Japan, and the challenges of returning to what was normal a decade ago have been immense. Half a million were forced from their homes; tens of thousands have not returned, emptying cities that were already struggling to prevent their youth from marching on Tokyo and other megacities. Radiation fears persist. Government incompetence, petty fights and bureaucratic fights have delayed construction efforts.

Despite setbacks and uneven progress, the 2021 Tohoku is a testament to a collective willpower: national, local, and personal. Take a good look, though, and you’ll see that even the most impressive transformations carry the remnant of what happened in 2011, the scars of this deep wound in the psyche of the region.

These AP images, then and now, raise a fundamental question: how is change marked after a great trauma?

In a way, it’s the simplest thing in the world to describe. The removal of tons of debris here, the absence of downed tankers. Asphalt roads where previously there had been piles of cracked and folded asphalt. The bright new buildings now rise above what had been cleared of earth.

But the obscurity of this physical change also carries with it the idea of ​​something much less clear, something about the people who live in these places. His resistance, his stoicism, his pain and anger and his stubborn refusal to bow to forces beyond his control, whether natural or bureaucratic.

All this, and much more, is present in these powerful scenes of before and after, then and now.

The images tell the story: a big change and the people who made it happen.