Alex Thomson is in the town of Kesannuma, or certainly in what used to be Kesannuma. It has been obliterated by the tsunami and raging fires are headed in from the peripheries.
Places have suffered on the east coast of Honshu – but few suffer in quite the same way as Kesennuma.
As so often with this situation, I’m not sure where to begin in depicting the peculiarity of the pain that this town’s people are now undergoing.
But let’s start at the harbour side. You look out over the placid waters of a wonderfully sheltered and deep natural harbour and you wonder if, in its placid state, how what happened could have happened. The stillness and peace broken only by the nagging echoing call of crows and above them the giveaway squadrons of circling buzzards. Across the harbour there are ships reduced to blackened hulks – some still afloat, others upended. And all around, flung about on the quayside seven or eight ocean going tuna vessels, smashed into crumpled houses leaning against warehouses, slumped against crippled derricks. Some of them have been left high and dry more than a hundred yards across the dockside.
We wander around for some reason touching the vast propellers of these ships, now silent hulks, slowly weeping their toxic black bunker oil into the wrecked chaos of what was a harbour.
A man walks up. He smells like he’s been drinking for days. “This is my house,” he says. But all I see are four huge tuna factory ships standing in an undergrowth of chains, slime, twisted metal and random smashed up cars. “This – my house,” he says again.
He’s going to start crying but there just is no house. No sign of a house. Then I finally get it. Under the wreckage you can just make out the concrete footings. The Japanese believe in complex concrete footings, all of them strong yet pliant. For withstanding earthquakes. But not tsunamis – the syrupy mix of water, silts, debris and here -an entire fleet if oceangoing fishing vessels.
Yasuo Matsumato looks at those footings. All that is left. And his two grandchildren are here – pointing and laughing; “They’re in shock. Of course. They can’t take this.”
He stares at where the house was. Hemmed in by fifty foot steel-plate canyon walls of the fleet that battered its way inland. The whole dock area, not just pulverised by water and debris – but charred by fire. A ship somehow still anchored in the bay, kept its mooring. But it is a still-smoking, still floating, blackened skeleton ship.
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Oil storage tanks and bunker-fuel pods blackened, melted, contorted by first extreme water, then heat. At the quayside there is one tiny evacuation vessel still working, brings refugees ashore from Oshima Island across the sound.
Greeted by relatives after three days of chaos, Toshiko Mogi says: “See – the fires are getting closer.” And she’s right. Much of the island is clouded in the white wood smoke of a raging forest fire.
Firefighters are ferried in. Refugees out. It is painfully slow. The small open tender which takes perhaps a dozen people at a time. But it is all they have.
Overhead three helicopters work relays to drop water over the flames. Like the efforts to extinguish the nuclear fires on this shore, it is not working.
As we leave town, walking through the collapsed buildings and upended pulverised carts, we can see the flames by night. The helicopters clatter on overhead. The tender offloads another group of frightened, tired passengers
But there’s no doubt about it. That woman was right.
Those flames are getting closer.
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