After the Japanese tsunami of 2011, a city is being rebuilt: now people need to survive

With the reduction of state-led financial support, Rikuzentakata struggles to avoid the decline observed in other rural areas of Japan. Many survivors have settled elsewhere and no large tracts of land in the city center are used.

Momiko Kinno pushed her elderly mother in a cart to escape the wave that took her home and thousands of others to Rikuzentakata on March 11, 2011. After eight years in a temporary shelter, the Mrs. Kinno, now 75, moved into a new two-story house in the city center surrounded by empty lots and sale signs. His son and daughter moved to work in other cities.

“I don’t think a lot of people will come back here,” he said.

Disaster recovery work in 2011 on the northeast coast of Japan, including the collapse of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, has been one of the most expensive recovery projects in the world. Public spending so far is nearly $ 300 billion. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. government spent about $ 110 billion on recovery after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The Rikuzentakata shopping and residential center, located on a low-lying coastal plain, was razed almost completely, and the city accounted for only about one-tenth of the deaths from the worst post-war natural disaster in Japan. In 2014 a project was started to use the soil and rock from the top of a mountain to elevate the central area more than 20 feet. The final sections are due to be completed this year as part of land redevelopment works costing more than $ 1.4 billion.

In 2017 a 40-foot-high concrete wall that spanned more than a mile along the bay next to the city was completed, part of 270 miles of new walls built in the region since the disaster. .

The reconstruction created a “disaster bubble,” Masayuki Kimura said, and the family’s home and bakery were destroyed by the tsunami. Kimura restarted his business out of an old train car and quickly doubled his pre-tsunami sales as an influx of disaster workers, volunteers and tourists took away his baumkuchen-style cake-style cakes. German and other delicacies.

The prefecture or state government temporarily took on its $ 300,000 debt and was able to borrow more, moving its business to twice as large premises, most recently in 2015 to a fake European brick building on a hill in the edge of the village.

With recovery work almost complete and the reduction in visitors in the short term, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, Mr Kimura’s sales have fallen 20% from the maximum. The 63-year-old still has $ 900,000 in bank debt. She is working on developing cakes for vegans and people with allergies as a way to increase online sales.

“I realized that to survive I have to compete with stores in other cities,” he said.

The government offered subsidies and debt relief to companies in the disaster region as part of its ten-year recovery plan. It is said that a new five-year, $ 15 billion package will focus primarily on support for people, including mental health.

Rikuzentakata Mayor Futoshi Toba wants more assistance to revive the local economy now that reconstruction is complete. Less than half of the city’s remodeled land is used.

“We have finally created the conditions to try to attract companies here, in the same way that government support programs are coming to an end,” he said.

Mr Toba, who started work two months before the disaster and lost his wife to the tsunami, said the decision to raise large areas of the city was intended to encourage people to stay, but the protracted project contribute to population loss.

“People can afford to live in temporary accommodation for a year or two, but when they spend seven or eight years they will consider options elsewhere,” he said.

Thousands of people were forced to live temporarily or moved away from Rikuzentakata after the disaster. The population of the city was 18,601 at the end of February, almost 25% over the previous decade.

In an unusual turn, the birth rate in Rikuzentakata rose briefly to become one of the highest in Japan after the disaster, a phenomenon that was sometimes seen after the great earthquakes. It is now in line with the national average, well below the level needed to keep the population stable.

At the current rate of decline, the population of Rikuzentakata will halve in 2060. More than 50% of residents are expected to be over 65 by 2040.

Sakae Yoshida, an oyster farmer, had 30 employees, but now has eight because most have retired. The bay near Rikuzentakata is known for its plump, fist-sized oysters, supplied to luxury Tokyo hotels. The tsunami created better growing conditions for oysters by dredging the seabed, but it is difficult to make the most of the opportunity, Yoshida said.

“Everyone is getting older and no one is taking over the job,” the 73-year-old said when he and his wife had just sorted out the day’s harvest on a small plant next to the tsunami wall.

Some younger people have returned. Twenty-four-year-old Rinnosuke Yoshida returned to Rikuzentakata last summer to work on his grandparents’ vegetable farm after attending university near Tokyo and a brief stint in selling advertising. . Most of his high school friends have moved to other cities.

Rinnosuke Yoshida, who is not related to the oysterist, said he preferred the clean air of the countryside and living by the sea. He also said he was motivated by the wishes of his father, Toshiyuki, who wanted to work on the family farm after retirement, but died in the tsunami.

His grandfather, who is 87, and his grandmother, 82, sometimes tell him how he looks and speaks just like Toshiyuki, who was his son. Toshiyuki was a baseball coach at Rinnosuke High School. Both Rinnosuke and his older brother, who lives in the prefecture’s capital, were enthusiastic baseball players. Recently, Rinnosuke started playing again with a local club team.

On March 11, he hopes to lead his mother and grandparents to the family grave to pay their respects to his father. “I don’t break his death, but of course I sometimes want to see him,” he said.

She hopes to marry her high school sweetheart this year, who is training to be a nurse. He will find out in March if he passed the exams to get the grade. They plan to stay in Rikuzentakata and start a family.

Write to Alastair Gale at [email protected] and Miho Inada at [email protected]