‘Noto is kind, right down to its soil’: A community’s long road to recovery

Wajima, Ishikawa Pref. –

Pressing his gloved hands together and bowing his head, Seiji Yoshimura, helmeted and sporting a bright orange jacket over his jumpsuit, offers a silent prayer toward a crushed home from which he helped recover the body of an elderly woman. She was among the now 215 casualties of the giant earthquake that rocked the Noto Peninsula in central Japan at 4:10 p.m. on Jan. 1.

The wooden structure’s roof tiles are cracked and strewn about; splintered beams and scattered furniture accumulate snow as the temperature falls, foreshadowing further complications in relief and rescue efforts in the coming days and weeks.

What the woman was doing when disaster struck is unknown — perhaps she was watching New Year’s Day variety programs on television, or chatting with family over traditional dishes prepared for the holiday.

Wajima, where Yoshimura, 58, and his crew are conducting aid operations, is a city on the northwestern edge of a scenic cape facing the Sea of Japan. Long known for its lacquerware industry and a 1,000-year-old morning market popular with tourists, it was also one of the municipalities that was hardest hit by the magnitude 7.6 temblor that shook and swayed the region, triggering tsunamis up to 5 meters tall.

Fires that broke out after the massive jolt soon merged into raging infernos, razing to the ground over 200 shops and residences lining the main street of the market. A week later, the district still reeks of burned rubber and steel, certain sections smoldering long after the seismic catastrophe, one of the deadliest the nation has experienced since the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 claimed more than 18,000 lives.

“So far we helped retrieve three bodies from the rubble we’ve been clearing out, including an old man who was hit by a large stone Shinto torii gate that fell,” Yoshimura tells me as he walks through the streets and alleys that he and his crew have made passable since arriving in Wajima.

“Around 90% of buildings here have been damaged to varying degrees,” he says. And with mobile and landline networks disrupted and many roads severed, access to quake-hit areas has been compromised, slowing down urgently needed relief work.

While towering tsunamis were primarily responsible for the damage and death toll that northeastern Japan sustained in 2011, a majority of those who perished during the Noto quake have been found under crumbled homes and buildings, many of them wooden houses that couldn’t withstand the ferocity of the initial violent shake and strong aftershocks.

The cruel truth is this: Japan, sitting on or near four tectonic plates and along the western edge of the Ring of Fire, will always be prone to earthquakes. As a result, the country has learned to respond with efficiency and speed to such disasters, building quake-resilient infrastructure in urban areas and establishing a widespread volunteer network.

The calamity that struck on the first day of the Year of the Dragon, however, is presenting a series of new logistical challenges for isolated, rural communities in areas with limited transportation access, while highlighting the growing vulnerability of the nation’s rapidly aging and shrinking population.

“We won’t be able to undo this damage in three or four years,” Ishikawa Gov. Hiroshi Hase told reporters on Jan. 6.

Yoshimura, a certified disaster-prevention officer, agrees. He has been active in reconstruction work for decades now, including during the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake and the March 11, 2011, disaster in Tohoku.

I ask him how long he plans to stay to help out and he shakes his head.

“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s going to be a long battle.”

Ravaged roads

Gray, rugged winter waves crash against the shoreline as our team drives up the western coast of Ishikawa Prefecture from Kanazawa, the prefectural capital. Self-Defense Force vehicles, police cars and trucks hauling food, water and fuel are among the wheels making their way north on the highway toward the peninsula.

We get off the main road and encounter the first of many detour signs that now litter the way to Anamizu, a town with a population of 7,800 that experienced deadly landslides, and where thousands have been huddling in evacuation centers.

So far, the only way into Okunoto, or the inner areas of the peninsula, is via the city of Nanao on Route 249, a national highway running along Nanao Bay. Significant portions of the inland Noto Satoyama Kaido road are closed due to the disaster. Those west of Nanao, which can be bypassed, remain blocked.

With no alternate passages available, the area has become a bottleneck, with traffic jams occurring at various points along the 249. And since it follows the coast, the road twists and curves in kind. Add to that numerous cracks, crevasses and sinkholes, and drivers need to be on constant alert in order to avoid punctures, bottom outs and other accidents.

This lack of access has been one of the primary reasons behind the delay in getting much-needed aid and relief workers into the most-affected areas.

“It is urgently necessary to resolve the isolated settlements in the northern part of the Noto Peninsula,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said during a meeting with the emergency disaster control headquarters on Jan. 8. “Please coordinate with the relevant ministries and agencies to accelerate emergency restoration … by accessing all coastal areas that can be reached as soon as possible, such as the devastated National Route 249.”

From Anamizu to Wajima, the roads become even more hazardous as we enter mountainous terrain. There are vehicles left abandoned after falling into gaping fissures; a gigantic rock blocks part of a tunnel; mudslides have clawed off vegetation from entire canyon walls, forcing one-way traffic on many lanes.

At one point, we take a right on Route 51, believing it will give us a shortcut to Wajima. A man waves us over, gesturing us not to go farther.

Isolated communities

Shinji Myogo, 44, says the path is shut off, and we’ll need to make a U-turn. As we speak, another vehicle drives past us. “It’ll eventually have to come back down,” he says, running his fingers over his stubble.

Myogo was working at the Wai Plaza Wajima supermarket in the city when the quake struck. His wife and children were on their way back from Kanazawa, and had to spend the night in their car by the side of the road. They all managed to meet on the night of Jan. 2 at their residence in Futamatagawa, a rural, mountainous corner of Wajima’s Monzencho district. The house was a mess, but the framework was intact.

“Water and electricity have been out, and there’s been no guidance on when they will be restored or how to access food and water,” he says. “We’ve been getting by with our stocked supplies and goods that my siblings living in Kanazawa deliver.”

Myogo says he has been making four-hour trips to his workplace in Wajima’s city center, a drive that typically takes around 30 minutes. He and his colleagues have cleaned up the supermarket and gathered items that could still be salvaged, offering them for ¥50 and ¥100 to help local residents.

His aging parents, in the meantime, have been living out of their car at a community center in Hongo, an area close to their home in Futamatagawa and one that has been isolated due to severe road conditions.

According to Ishikawa Prefecture, as of Jan. 10, at least 3,124 people in 22 districts of four cities and towns in the Noto region are still isolated. These communities often lack kerosene, blankets, medical supplies and other goods needed to bear the severe winter cold, leading to concerns of hypothermia and reports of a rising number of influenza, norovirus and COVID-19 patients.

Many of the evacuees are old, too. The ratio of those 65 or older in Wajima, for example, stands at around 46%, far higher than the national average of 29.1%.

“I have no idea when things will get back to normal,” Myogo says before he waves farewell.

Torn traditions

Rain turns to hail, and then to snow as we approach Wajima, a city of 23,000. The blanket of white makes it additionally strenuous to navigate the cracked roads. Many of the larger shopping malls and drugstores in the city center seem relatively unscathed, though their windows are dark. Much of the residential districts, in contrast, lie in ruin.

Yoshimura and his team are working from one such neighborhood, near the remains of Nakashima Sake Brewery, a small but respected craft sake maker established around 1868 and known for its Noto Suehiro brand of sake.

Yoshimura heads Humanshield Kobe, a non-governmental organization funded by donations and subsidies that is dedicated to reconstruction assistance in Japan and abroad. He was one of the first responders, jumping in his truck loaded with heavy machinery, coming in from his home in Shinanomachi, Nagano Prefecture, soon after the convulsions hit.

The roads were a mess, however. He traveled through Toyama Prefecture, stopping by Nanao, where he met up with other disaster response specialists. He then entered Anamizu before arriving in Wajima on Jan. 3.

On this wet and gloomy afternoon, he is operating an excavator with a grapple attachment to remove a mangled garage shutter from a crumbled home in order to salvage a car belonging to a friend of Ryotaro Nakashima, the president and chief brewer, or toji, of the Nakashima brewery.

Wearing an apron with his brand’s logo, Nakashima appears as if he could go right back to work producing Japan’s quintessential tipple if it weren’t for the fact that most of his brewery has been demolished. It’s not the first time, either. His family’s business was destroyed once before when a magnitude 6.9 quake struck the peninsula in 2007 — Noto, in fact, is known for its frequent seismic activity.

“This quake was far bigger than last time,” recounts the 35-year-old. “At first, my mobile phone’s emergency earthquake alert went off while I was making sake, and my family and I rushed outside. The shaking wasn’t too bad, though.”

Soon the alarm went off again. This time, it was the big one. Nakashima, his sister and her husband had moved by then to a quake-resistant building they constructed following the 2007 quake, but their mother was left behind.

“She got trapped in a crushed home, under the roof,” he says. “Luckily, we were able to rescue her.”

Blessed with quality rice and water, Ishikawa is known as sake country. Nakashima’s ancestors have lived in Wajima for 350 years, and he’s the eighth-generation successor of their brewery. Despite his family’s centuries-long affiliation with the land, he’s at a loss on how to move forward. There are 3 tons of unused rice still buried under the debris.

Meanwhile Yoshimura has managed to dig out a large wooden signboard from the rubble, one with the Suehiro brand engraved.

“We live in an area with frequent earthquakes,” Nakashima says. “Even if we were to rebuild our business, we need to think of how to fix things so (our structures) won’t suffer similar calamities in the future.”

Noto is kind, right down to its soil

By the next morning, Okunoto is carpeted in snow. Caravans of dump trucks snail along Route 249, frequently getting stuck in traffic as ambulances blaze their sirens up and down the opposite lane.

In Nanao, a city of 48,000 on the southeastern coast of the peninsula, volunteers are busy doling out water and other supplies. While portions of the city remain damaged by the quake, electricity has largely been restored and many shops have resumed operation.

At City Hall, Mineaki Kawara of the finance department is managing logistics, giving volunteers orders on where to distribute the goods being collected and stored. “During the first few days, we basically relied on things being delivered by individual volunteers,” he says. “But now we have plenty of relief supplies from corporations, enough for all of Nanao.”

The question now, says Shinichi Iida, chairman of the Nanao City Regional Development Council Federation, is how to help bring the goods to the ravaged areas farther north. Iida has been managing one of Nanao’s largest evacuation centers at the Nanao Sunlife Plaza, a community hall where up to 800 evacuees sought shelter in the immediate aftermath of the quake.

“Now that figure is down to around 300,” he says. “Ideally, necessities should be delivered to suffering areas such as Anamizu and Wajima, but that’s been hindered due to the bad weather and transportation issues.

“Nanao, however, is at a halfway point, so there’s a strong possibility this facility will soon become a base station for relief supplies.”

By the entrance of the community center are a few temporary showering facilities called Wota Box, supplied by tech behemoth SoftBank. A group of six or seven evacuees are waiting to take turns washing themselves with hot water.

Standing by one of the tents is Yukiyoshi Yamano, a strategic adviser for SoftBank and the former mayor of Kanazawa. “I was up in Suzu yesterday,” he says, referring to the northernmost city on the Noto Peninsula. It was flattened by the seismic upheaval and its coastline slammed by tsunamis.

“It’s exactly like what you read and hear in newspapers, on television and the internet — the situation is very bad.”

I ask Yamano, as a former mayor, what can be improved in terms of disaster preparedness in relatively rural areas such as Noto.

“It’s not just Noto, there are other places across the country that harbor similar issues,” he says. “Relying on land routes may be fine on an everyday basis, but we should be prepared, and at least simulate how air and sea routes can be utilized in emergencies.”

That seems to be happening as I write. On Jan. 11, the prime minister told his disaster response panel that temporary restoration of the Noto Airport in Wajima has been completed, allowing Self-Defense Forces transport aircraft to arrive and depart.

Things appear to be moving forward, albeit slowly. However, the January cold and the freezing months ahead are a cause for major concern, with reports of disaster-related deaths among older evacuees hitting the headlines.

Before leaving Nanao, we talk to Midori Kawabata, whose family operates a local fish shop. She’s been frantically flitting about the city, volunteering at soup kitchens and emergency shelters, delivering adult diapers, vegetables and fish to those in need.

She tells us she’s confident that the situation will improve, and conjures up an old saying handed down in the region: Noto wa yasashi ya tsuchi made mo.

“It means, ‘Noto is kind, right down to its soil,’” she says, her eyes welling up. “The people of Noto are kind. We help each other out. We will persevere.”