31 March 2015

Two days in Tōhoku

Jason James, the Director of the Daiwa Foundation, gives us an account of his travels through Tohoku in March 2015. Weaving through the region in a worryingly small car, Jason finds locals determined to stay despite the slow progress of reconstruction.

—

The Shinkansen was packed when I got on at Ueno, but after Sendai – the only really large city in Northern Honshū – it thinned out rapidly. Shin-Hanamaki, where I got off, looked like a two-horse town, even 30 years after the Shinkansen station was built there. (I know the station was 30 years old, because the car rental office gave me a small towel and a small bar of soap to celebrate.)

The two car rental staff were waiting apprehensively outside their office – a foreigner had booked by internet, and they foresaw difficulties ahead. Their relief that I spoke Japanese was palpable, though they still had difficulties negotiating my international driving licence and working out how to fit a non-Japanese address on the form.

The car they provided was a tiny, underpowered Nissan. The car rental lady couldn’t provide a map, but the car had a navigation system, and she told me, waving vaguely at the mountains, that Kamaishi, my destination, was “in that direction”, about two hours away.

The Shinkansen route, and the main roads, seem to follow the large rivers more or less up the spine of Honshū, branching off every now and again to head through the mountains towards the coast. The bigger towns look dispiritingly utilitarian, but the rest of the scenery makes up for this. In late March, there was still a fair bit of snow on the higher mountains, but down below, the temperature was comfortably above freezing, and the season of tyre chains was over.

As I entered Kamaishi – one of the coastal cities devastated by the tsunami – I felt a growing sense of foreboding. In fact, as with the other coastal cities I visited later, there were large sections that the tsunami had not touched at all. I wonder what kind of “survivors’ guilt” there is for the people who just happened to live a little further inland, or a little higher up. The population has declined since the disaster, but Kamaishi feels much the same as any of Japan’s smaller regional cities, until you get to the tsunami zone itself.

In Kamaishi, and the other tsunami-affected areas I visited, the buildings suddenly more or less stop, and you find yourself driving through a large construction site. The construction, for the most part, is not of buildings; they haven’t reached that stage yet. The work at the moment is about levelling and raising the land. All along the coast, about half the vehicles on the roads are trucks carrying earth, aggregates, or concrete blocks of various kinds. Enormous diggers scoop up earth and move it from one pile to another. In most places not only are they not building actual buildings, but you get the impression they won’t start to for some time.

The coastal road, Route 45, makes its way across terrain that is challenging even by Japanese standards. Tunnels are frequent, and often long (the longest I experienced was on my way through the mountains to the coast, and was about 5km). Elsewhere, the road winds its way tortuously along trying to keep as flat as possible, but it’s still a roller coaster, vertically speaking. Or at least it would be in a proper car. Mine groaned torturedly on the uphill sections, reminding me of Stevenson’s problems with his donkey in the Cevennes. At times, like him, I started thinking it might be quicker to get out and push.

I headed north from central Kamaishi to my hotel, the Hōraikan, on the outskirts of a village called U-no-sumai (“Where the cormorants live”). The video on the website showing you how to get there by car didn’t seem quite accurate, and I think it must have been recorded before the disaster. Every time Route 45 dips, there is a notice saying “Past Tsunami Inundation Zone”, and you are told where the flooding started and finished, as well as being regularly updated, in the longer sections, how much more of it you have to pass through. Whatever may have been there before, in these sections now there is only the to-ing and fro-ing of the earth-moving trucks and diggers. Finding it difficult to get my bearings, I missed the turning, but I worked it out eventually, and turned eastward off the main road towards the sea.

This section of the coast is marked by a series of small peninsulas jutting out into the Pacific. The major settlements are on the flatter land at the heads of the resultant bays, where the rivers from the westward mountains disgorge themselves into the sea – and where the tsunami rushed in in the opposite direction. But many of the peninsulas themselves are surprisingly thickly populated; they are easily accessible from the cities, and have much better scenery.

The peninsula on which the Hōraikan stands seemed an exception. The population, such as it was, seems all to have been on the lower ground, and there’s hardly anybody left. The Hōraikan stands largely alone, looking northward, across a narrow strip of pines, over the sea toward the next peninsula. There’s a sandy beach below the pines, but its sea defences are currently being repaired, so it’s out of bounds while the construction work goes on.

There’s plenty of construction work going on at the Hōraikan too, particularly in the main section. The parts that have been refurbished or rebuilt look smart, and my room, though small, was beautifully appointed with bare wood and fresh tatami. But to get to it I had to cross a section covered in blue plastic builder’s tarpaulin, and through an open door (marked “not to be left open under any circumstances”) I could see and hear men in hard hats busy drilling away. When I slid open the shōji screening my window, the view of the sea was framed by scaffolding.

Having missed lunch, I opted to have dinner as early as possible, at 6pm. But it was still only 4.30 when I arrived, so I ate the biscuit in my room and set out on foot to get a feel for the immediate area.

Right in front of the hotel is a solemn black stone memorializing the tsunami. There is a poem on it whose gist is “just run for it, to higher ground”. In fact, the ground rises steeply behind the hotel, and there is a zig-zag pathway with a wooden railing running up the small mountain behind. I followed the pathway up for a few hundred metres, until it ended at a small flat area from which there is a lovely panorama. The mountain, like all of this coastal region, is covered with pines, and these leave plenty of space between them, making it relatively easy to continue climbing the mountain even where there is no actual path. But the trees also obstruct the view, so although I climbed almost to the top, there turned out not to be much point. Eventually the mountain steepens into a serious crag that would have required me to climb with hands as well as feet, and I decided to give up. I gather there are plans eventually to create a walkway all along the top of this higher ground.

Walking along the sandy strip of pine trees between the beach proper and the hotel, I came to another construction site where ground levelling was going on. Looking out to sea, the view is beautiful. But the ever-present reminders of the tsunami in this area give this coastline a sinister undertone that, for me, the seaside has never had before.

My dinner was typical ryokan (Japanese inn) style, with lots of small dishes, including the obligatory one cooked by a glorified tea light at your table. It contained no meat, focusing instead on local seafood. (The Japanese term “umi no sachi” – “bounty from the sea” – includes seaweed as well as fish and shellfish.) The dinner as a whole was a cut above average, with one or two dishes I hadn’t come across before, including a delicious plate of fish chunks in a miso-based sauce.

The owner, Akiko Iwasaki, came and said hello. I’d guess she’s around 60, and she exuded a contradictory impression of both earnest energy and a deep underlying tiredness. I was there partly because I know this is the site for an art project planned by University of the Arts London, so she had been told to look out for me. But she was apologetic about how busy she was – she had to go out that evening and wouldn’t be back until 8.30pm, and she would be away visiting Tokyo the whole of the following day. But we agreed to have a chat when she got back later that evening.

After dinner, the bath was another pleasant surprise. In the rebuilt wing of the hotel, the men’s bath was on the second floor (counting in Japanese style with the ground floor being the “first” floor), looking out over the ocean, though screened from it by a rough-slatted bamboo fence. There was nothing special about the inside bath – I think it’s not fed by an actual onsen (mineral spring) – but the small rotenburo (outdoor bath) on the balcony was made of hinoki (Japanese cypress) wood, and being new, smelt delicious. I soaked myself up to my neck to the rhythmic sound of the waves crashing in on the shore below.

I still had some time to kill before Akiko would be back, so I lay in my futon reading, but jet lag, the sake I had with dinner, and the bath, caused me to doze off, so when she rang up to say she was back, I was rather groggy. She immediately guessed from my face that I’d been asleep, but I gamely denied that I was tired. This was my only chance to hear her story.

My Tokyo friend Imamura-san had asked her to tell me about her experiences during the tsunami. Back in the restaurant, she showed me a video on a laptop. One of her staff had just bought a new smartphone and was experimenting with it when the tsunami hit. He (or she) had rapidly escaped with most of the other staff up the mountain path I had walked up earlier, and the video showed Akiko walking into the car park with a few other people. From the path above, Akiko’s daughter was repeatedly screaming “Run, quickly, run up here!” but the people below initially looked fairly unworried, and I’m not sure they were really running. Then the water surged down the road behind them, coming for some reason from west to east rather than from the north, where the sea is. In any case, the road was suddenly full of water, and the video showed a car being swept down the road by the flood. At this point the people in the car park started running in earnest. Shortly after they disappeared from the picture, the carpark itself was awash, with the cars there also tossed around in the water. The video subsequently went a bit wild, and that was the end of the useful section, but it seems that all those in the car park successfully made it to higher ground. Nevertheless, to watch it sitting there with the lady from the video, and to listen to the terrified screams of her daughter – terrified for her mother, since she was in no danger herself – brought the whole experience closer to home.

Perhaps because of the easy access to higher ground right behind the hotel, all of Akiko’s family and staff escaped. But the hotel was swamped up to about the middle of the second floor, and the wing, which protrudes forward from the main section, had to be entirely rebuilt. Apparently three-quarters of the cost was covered by insurance, and the government has made available interest-free loans for the rest – but the loans still have to be repaid. The construction site I had found earlier to the east of the hotel, Akiko told me, was a small fishing village. Like several similar small villages along the coast, it was completely obliterated – I didn’t notice any houses on higher ground that had come through intact.

But Akiko really wanted to talk about the future, and she certainly has a lot of projects on the go. Reconstruction is all very well, but young people have been drifting away from the area, and she wants to ensure that there are sustainable things for them to do once the building work is over. Among various projects, perhaps the most exciting is the rugby stadium, to be built just round the corner, between the hotel and the main road. It’s been agreed that it will be one of those used for the 2019 rugby World Cup, which is to be held in Japan. I expressed doubts about the transport logistics (I can’t imagine hundreds of foreign tourists descending on the car rental office at Shin Hanamaki, and there don’t seem to be many trains). But she says it will be sorted out, and I never doubt the Japanese when it comes to transport. There’s a scale model of the proposed rugby stadium just outside the ryokan’s dining room, and the site looked perfect, nestled between the river mouth and the steeply rising ground behind.

Kamaishi is famous for rugby, by the way. When I mentioned that I was planning to visit, rugby was the first thing mentioned, both by my (Japanese) wife and by Ambassador Keiichi Hayashi in London. The local team was, or is, sponsored by Nippon Steel, which had a major plant in the town – in the same way that British football teams were traditionally associated with factory towns. Kamaishi is also famous for steel. In fact, Akiko told me, it was the site of Japan’s first blast furnace, as a result of the fact that the rocks in the nearby mountains are loaded with iron ore. She showed me a video of someone holding a magnet attached to a cord near one of the rocks. The magnet snapped to the rock just as a fridge magnet does.

She explained that the coming together of tectonic plates in the area forced up to the surface rocks that had been turned into iron ore as a result of the intense heat in the earth’s mantle. As she noted, various aspects of Kamaishi are connected by its geography – its history as an iron and steel manufacturing centre, its famous rugby team, and its exposure to the tsunami. They all ultimately stem from its position at the edge of a moving tectonic plate.

I won’t go into details on Akiko’s various projects, but I got a sense of her motivation. The hotel had been opened at this scenic spot by her parents, and is an important component in the local economy. I had the impression that when people in Kamaishi want to have a smart party, this is where they come. Of course a hotel needs tourists, and Tōhoku is hoping to attract foreign as well as domestic tourists. But a hotel like this needs a thriving local community too. I don’t mean to imply that she’s doing it all for the money. Her hotel makes her a key member of the local community, and they all share the same objective – to provide opportunities for coming generations to continue to live and thrive here.

Although I was the one who had fallen asleep earlier, I started eventually to worry that it was she who needed to go to bed. She had to leave for Tokyo early in the morning, and she looked very tired. I made my excuses, and after another quick dip in the bath, the sound of the waves quickly lulled me back to sleep.

I was awake again at about 5.30 with residual jet lag. Another bath before breakfast, and I was in there when it opened at 7am. I was less keen on the breakfast than the dinner – I left the nattō (rotting soy beans) untouched, and I’ve never seen the attractions of cold fried egg. But there was homemade bread to toast, a tasty slice of fish over the tealight device, and plenty of excellent rice and pickles.

Outside, it was a sparkling early spring day. There was still a bite in the air, but at times in the sunshine later on, it was almost T-shirt weather. Akiko had given me various pamphlets and tourist information, but since my primary objective was to get a sense for progress with tsunami reconstruction, I decided to stick to the coast. Since I was already near the northern end of the disaster zone, I decided to go south, toward some of the place names I heard so often in the months after the disaster – Ōfunato, Rikuzen Takata, and Kesennuma. But I didn’t just visit construction sites. Indeed, you’re not allowed to, really, and there’s not much to see there, anyway, once you’ve got a broad idea how they’re getting on. I decided I’d also visit some of the areas tourist attractions.

There wasn’t much along the coast that changed my first impression of the reconstruction after the disaster. Almost everywhere it was the same picture of endless trucks carrying earth and aggregates, and ubiquitous earth-levelling activities. One additional feature I saw on this second day was that sometimes the earth-levelling is going on at sites far too high up to have been affected by the tsunami. This reflects the fact that in a minority of cases, it’s been decided to shift whole communities to higher ground. I think that in other cases these sites are for sale to individuals who want to buy land where they can be confident their families will be safe. I have heard that the cost of these higher pieces of land has rocketed since the disaster, so normal commercial factors are probably driving the supply of more to the market.

I also saw occasional groups of what I took to be temporary housing. Pre-fab terraces, in a region where houses in general are much more spacious than in Tokyo, these houses seemed to have been put wherever there was a convenient bit of empty space, such as in roadside laybys. They looked noticeably badly served by shops and other facilities. Again it struck me how divisive the tsunami must have been, with some people unaffected, while others have been reduced to second-class citizens.

My first stop south from Kamaishi was Ōfunato. My tourist pamphlet urged me to visit Goishi Beach, on the Matsusaki Peninsula, and the photograph looked attractive, so I turned off onto the smaller roads to aim for it. After a few wrong turns, I stopped the car and worked out how to use its navigation system – luckily it had heard of Goishi Beach. From then on it was straightforward.

Once I parked the car I headed off in the opposite direction from Goishi Beach itself, but the peninsula turned out to be a delightful place, with 6km of walks along the coastline.

A notice stated that this section of coast has been chosen as one of Japan’s top 100 coastlines. This seemed an underwhelming accolade, but in fact the scenery was beautiful. The rocks along the coast have twisted themselves into all sorts of archways and caves, against which the Pacific Ocean thunders with spectacular displays of spray. Some of the larger rocks form small islands that have been colonised by sea birds, or in some cases pine trees and other plants. Across the sparkling sea, and over sections of low-lying mist that the sun hadn’t yet burnt away, the next peninsula along was generally visible – unless of course you looked eastward in the direction of the ocean itself. The coast consists of a sparse pine forest, easy to walk through, with a springy matting of needles underfoot, and a pervasive pine oil scent. This area has been designated as a “Revival National Park” to encourage tourists, and here, at least, there was good signage in English as well as Japanese. Steps have been set into the steeper sections of the walk, and there are benches and picnic tables.

One of the first sights I came to was Kaminari-iwa, or “thunder rock”, a massive crag separated from the mainland by a narrow channel. The shape of the holes in this rock is such that the sea rushing in and out of them does indeed make a deep booming noise reminiscent of thunder. Further on, I reached what at first sight looked like an orchard, but a notice nearby said “Camellia Garden”, and I realised that it was a plantation of camellia bushes, above which was an imposing log cabin-style house. The camellias continued up the next rise, and also stretched back some way from the coastline – all individually labelled by type. Here in Iwate it seemed a little early in the season for most of them, but some of the pink ones, in particular, were in full bloom.

Eventually I reached a little fishing harbour – these never seem as picturesque in Japan as they are in Europe – and decided it was time to turn back and see the main attraction, Goishi Beach. Somewhere along the route I had read a sign explaining that the beach is famous for its black pebbles, which were collected to be used as Go pieces for the Lords of Date, the clan that for centuries controlled a vast territory in northern Japan. Rather than retrace my steps, I took a short cut inland. After walking past small-scale cabbage fields, and some lovely plums in full bloom, I reached a well-equipped campsite, empty at this time of year, and the other side of the imposing log cabin. Walking on through and past the camellias, I eventually reached Goishi Beach, but it was disappointing. It was covered with the right kind of pebble, but no more than one or two others I had already discovered that morning. And while some of the other beaches were still in their original natural state, Goishi Beach was a fishing harbour, with concrete steps and ramps, and a dilapidated looking minshuku (“pension”). On the two breakwaters to the seaward side of the harbour, one of which looked new, were two large mechanical diggers. Goishi Beach, too, is strengthening its tsunami defences.

It was time for lunch. My pamphlet told me that the “sanma [pacific saury] ramen” at the “rest house” (and souvenir shop) was not to be missed. Walking back to get my car, I discovered that Ōfunato describes itself as “Camellia Town” and that there is a large greenhouse one can enter – presumably for a fee – to see yet more displays of this flower.

Lunch was a disappointing experience. There was nothing wrong with the food, when I eventually got it, but as a foreigner, even a Japanese-speaking one, I felt immediately out of place. Some of the tables had numbers on them, but it wasn’t clear to me whether these meant that they were reserved, for instance for coach parties, or were just to help the waitresses deliver orders. I opted for a non-numbered table by the window, and was ignored by the waitresses, who I expect were all hoping somebody else would deal with me. Eventually I got up and asked for a menu, but once I had decided what to order, I couldn’t catch anyone’s eye, and was only attended to once one another customer complained to a waitress on my behalf. I then faced a wait of more than half an hour, and as I became aware that other customers who had ordered before me were all being served, I had to get up again and ask whether my order had been forgotten about. I think it had, because it was a further 15 minutes before my food arrived.

I don’t think that on the whole the Japanese are actually racist, or in any case, not in a malicious way. They just have a strong preference for avoiding embarrassing situations. And foreigners, who usually aren’t familiar with Japan’s detailed social rules, are a rich source of potentially embarrassing situations. I didn’t see another identifiably non-Japanese person at any point during my 2-day stay in Tōhoku, so the locals can perhaps be forgiven their unfamiliarity with the situation.

I drove on down the coast to Rikuzentakata, and eventually on to Kesennuma, which is in the next prefecture (Miyagi). While Ōfunato seemed relatively advanced in its recovery, with a spanking new fish market on the sea front, Rikuzentakata was depressing. For one thing, the “Past Tsunami Inundation Section” there goes on for about 5km, reflecting the unusually large area of flat land on which the city used to stand. And while earth and aggregates elsewhere were being moved around by truck, here the quantities were so large that a vast system of conveyor belts had been set up across the devastated area, These conveyor belts, five to ten metres up in the air, gave the whole scene a surreal, science fiction quality.

Rikuzentakata is also famous for its “Miraculous Lone Pine”. Originally, there was a famous band of thousands of pine trees protecting the city from the sea. But on “3.11”, they were all uprooted except one, which subsequently became a symbol of the region’s determination to recover from the disaster. Unfortunately, this last remaining pine also eventually died, and I believe the current one is a replica – a fact that doesn’t seem to bode well. Still, I thought I might as well see it as I went past. I missed it on the way south, so I thought I’d have a better look when I headed back home.

Slightly shaken by Rikuzentakata, I decided to take another tourist detour, down the next scenic peninsula. It wasn’t as well organised as the Goishi Beach area I’d seen in the morning, but again there were some spectacular rocks along the coast, including the “ore-ishi” or broken rock, like a 6-metre finger pointing up out of the sea. According to the noticeboard, it gained its name because the top section of it was broken off in the earlier tsunami of 1896.

Returning to my car, I hoped to catch at least a glimpse of the island of Ōshima, off Kesennuma. I remembered interviewing an applicant for the Tohoku Scholarship whose parents owned a hotel there, which had been wrecked by the tsunami, though it wasn’t actually swept away. Her family had escaped by running up to the 3rd (top) floor. But it looked as though this would take too much of a detour, and actually to reach the island would require a ferry, for which I didn’t have time. So after driving through Kesennuma I turned round and headed back North.

On the way back through Rikuzentakata I turned into what I hoped would be the place where the “Miraculous Lone Pine” would be. In fact, it was the remains of what looked like a warehouse, with several pines twisted in together with the debris. Perhaps they plan to keep this as a reminder of how destructive the tsunami was. There was a map showing where the “lone pine” was, and peering over to the right, I finally saw it. It looked quite some distance away, across the bleak wastes of construction sites, so I decided not to walk over to it, and perhaps you’re not allowed to anyway.

On the Sunday morning the builders were back at work by 8.30, drilling and hammering next door to my room. Since I was out all day, I’m not sure whether they had worked Saturday as well, but I assume they must have done. Presumably builders have been working 7-day weeks all over Tohoku for four years now. Akiko had told me the work was due to finish and the hotel officially reopen in April – but she was grateful to guests who were willing to stay while construction was going on. She explained that apart from the financial impact on her, she needed to be able to provide work for her staff to do, or they would drift away looking for work elsewhere.

Since I had stuck to the coastline the day before, my plan was to visit some inland sites on the Sunday, gradually making my way back to Shin-Hanamaki for the shinkansen back to Tokyo leaving just after 2pm. As I checked out of the ryokan, the member of staff on the front desk said that Akiko was hoping to see me before I left, whereupon she immediately appeared. I told her that I was planning to visit the remains of Kamaishi’s 19th century blast furnaces, and perhaps also to see something of Tōno if there was time.

She seemed worried that I wouldn’t find the blast furnaces on my own, though I assured her that I had a map and would be fine. In any case, she said she had a friend who worked up there to whom she wanted to introduce me, and she insisted on showing me the way by driving in front of me. I was startled by her number plate, which read 3 11 (the date of the tsunami). I meant to ask her whether this was just a coincidence, but sadly I forgot.

I warned her that my car wasn’t very fast, and once or twice she nearly disappeared out of sight in front of me on the uphill stretches. With her numerous projects, and her determination to get Kamaishi back on its feet, I suspect she’s not normally the type to let the grass grow under her accelerator pedal.

As we headed west into the mountains, residual banks of snow started to appear along the verges. After climbing for some time, we eventually pulled up at an isolated, dilapidated-looking house advertising that it sold “mountain pass curry”. This, it seemed, was where Akiko’s friend and her husband lived, operating a café, and looking after the historical blast furnace site.

Akiko explained that one of her other projects had involved getting the “sea mothers” and the “mountain mothers” together to exchange cooking tips. Shizuko, the café owner, had been one of the “mountain mothers”. Although Shizuko was clearly the elder woman, looking over 70, she always addressed Akiko as “O-kami-san” – her title as the manager of the ryokan. I never heard anyone address her as anything else. This seemed to reflect both the fact that her personality has become absorbed into her work, and a general sense of respect for her key role within the Kamaishi community.

Even though I’d just had a large breakfast, Shizuko brought out various things for Akiko and me to try. I think it was really Akiko who was the target; her opinion was sought on various mountain vegetables, some grown in Shizuko’s garden, and some foraged wild. One of them was a bitter spring vegetable cooked like tempura. It was similar in its bitter taste to “fuki-no-tō” (butterbur flower heads), but apparently called something else. Shizuko told me that it grows up through the snow in early spring. Despite its dilapidated exterior, this café was passionate about offering visitors an authentic taste of the mountains. Shizuko said that she hoped to continue producing the best food she could, at least until she was 80.

She and her husband were very proud of their mountain lifestyle, and indeed the scenery was spectacular, provided one ignored their own shack. A fast-flowing mountain river was chattering its way past just below us, while we looked across at a mountain slope dotted with bare trees, among which were thick patches of snow. They assured me it would be much more beautiful when the trees came into leaf. The air was cold, but tasted deliciously clean and fresh.

Shizuko’s husband shouldered a mattock, with which he occasionally broke up patches of snow to encourage them to melt faster, and took me up to see the blast furnace remains. There is some excitement about these in Kamaishi, since they have been incorporated into a UNESCO World Heritage bid related to Japan’s Meiji Period (late 19th century) industrialisation. As it happens, I was briefed on this bid when I was working for the British Council, since Sir Neil Cossons, a former Director of the Science Museum in London, was an enthusiastic proponent of it and was advising the Japanese side in their application. The vast majority of the industrial sites covered in the UNESCO bid are in Kyushu and Yamaguchi (the most westerly Prefecture in Honshu), home of the Satsuma and Chōshū clans who overthrew the Shogunate and opened Japan to Western ideas. I hadn’t realised there were linked sites as far north as this.

In fact, there’s not a great deal to see, and relatively little signage or information, even in Japanese. There were three blast furnaces, built one after the other as the Japanese gradually got the hang of the technology. They were supervised up here by British engineers, who worked with them to get the project off the ground. The location, though remote, was perfect. Most important was the iron ore itself, but there were also plenty of other large rocks, which were cut into blocks to build the furnace chambers, surrounded by wooden outerbuildings, and topped with wide brick chimneys. The fast-flowing river was used to drive the bellows, while the thickly-forested mountain provided wood that was turned into charcoal for fuel.

Japan, of course, had already been making high-quality steel for centuries, most notably for its famous swords, which were produced from steel made in small-scale “tatara” furnaces. What was different here was the ability to produce steel on an industrial scale – these blast furnaces slightly predate the Meiji Restoration and belonged to the Shogunate, whose first priority was to make cannons.

All the wooden buildings have disappeared, leaving only parts of the three blast furnaces themselves. These are much smaller than modern blast furnaces, being only a couple of metres square, with angled holes at the front from which they were fed, and through which the bellows operated. In the mouth of the third blast furnace there remains a large piece of the resultant metal. Shizuko’s husband suggested that perhaps it had been left there because it was too poor-quality to use, and indeed it looked more like rock than metal. The first blast furnace, which is furthest up the hill, was in much better shape than the others, and I think it has been restored to some extent. Wearing ordinary slip-on shoes, I was trying to avoid sinking too deep into the snow that surrounded it. Elsewhere, rocks from the blast furnaces were scattered around where they had fallen. If UNESCO accepts the bid, someone will have some work to do at this site.

On the way back to the café, Chizuko’s husband pointed out a large grove of cherry blossoms. This far up the mountain, they showed no sign of budding yet, but he told me they are very popular when they bloom in mid-May. For those wanting to spin the cherry blossom season out as long as possible, this is one of the last displays in the area, and the café benefits from a seasonal boom in business.

Thanking Chizuko and her husband (Akiko had already headed back to her ryokan for another meeting), I chivvied my car over the pass towards Tōno. This was a serious mountain road of a type that doesn’t exist in the UK. It wound its way upwards in a lengthy series of turns, often only wide enough for one car, with steep drops to the left, beyond a rudimentary metal barrier. As well as being nervous about the drops, I was also worried that my little donkey wasn’t going to make it. In that case, I’d have to flag down a car coming the other way and ask to borrow a phone, since I’d left my mobile in Tokyo. But I eventually reached the top without incident. There were five cars parked there, but no sign of any people, or any obvious view to look at. I think they must have been climbing up to the summit of the mountain further up, though it looked to me like cheating to have come so far by car before starting.

The downward journey wasn’t as twisty, and suddenly I came out on a broad and sunny plain. Tōno literally means “Far field”, and I suppose that in the past, this plain surrounded by mountains must have been tough to reach. I reckoned I had time to visit “Furusato no Mura”, a collection of old farm houses assembled to recreate a traditional Japanese village.

When I got there I half expected another friend of Akiko’s to appear – she’d mentioned that she had one here – but this didn’t happen. They had a leaflet in English, though they warned me that the prices were wrong, since they hadn’t updated it since the April 2014 consumption tax increase. When I told the man on the ticket counter I was British, he said “we had another British person here recently”. I got the impression that foreign visitors are rare.

I strolled around the thatched houses in the sunshine. In this part of Japan, traditional houses were L-shaped, with the bottom end of the L being work-related, and the rest being living space. At the business end, some had carpentry or farm implements, and a couple of the houses contained actual live horses. Several of them had a fire going in the corner of the L – I’ve heard that as well as keeping the house warm, the smoke from these fires discouraged insects from living in and degrading the timbers. The smarter rooms, floored with tatami, were at the opposite end of the house from the horses and implements. The village headman’s house, furthest back from the entrance gate, was the largest and smartest but also had a separate store house. While he got the best house, he was also responsible for ensuring that the village produced its quota of rice for the local daimyo, and I imagine this was a heavy responsibility in bad years.

There were paddy fields and a pond, as well as a small village shrine. But even on a fine spring Sunday, there were only a handful of other people there, and there was no sign of the craft demonstrations mentioned in the leaflet, or of the ladies selling local delicacies in the house that doubled as a refreshment room. I hope it gets busier during the summer holidays.

A bowl of noodles, and it was time for me to head back to the Shinkansen station and return my rental car. In the end, I cut it rather fine, having failed to take into account that I needed to refuel the car, and that the nearest petrol station was 6.5km away from the station. I eventually found it, and was on the platform waiting for my train with less than 10 minutes to go.

As I hope I’ve conveyed, my visit left me with mixed feelings. There’s no doubt that Iwate Prefecture is a delightful part of Japan. It has some wonderful scenery, as well as kind, old-fashioned country people with a real sense of community. If you like mountains and craggy coastlines, as well as frequent hot baths, it’s the place for you.

On the other hand, I think it might be difficult for visitors who don’t speak and read Japanese. All of the tourist pamphlets I was given, the information in the hotel, and the menus I looked at, were in Japanese only – though the menus had pictures at which foreigners would be able to point. Tourist attractions were not well signposted – sometimes not even in Japanese. I think these days the locals rely on their car navigation systems, making signposts redundant. In the ryokan bathroom there were two types of shampoo and conditioner, and as it happens, one of them was labelled in English. But English in this part of the world is used for decoration, not for information. The one exception was the good English explanations at the Goishi Beach area, now that it has been officially designated as a National Park.

The areas affected by the tsunami are for the most part small, and limited to low-lying stretches immediately by the coast. So to think of the whole region as devastated is a mistake – though I fear most locals must know people who lost family members, or were displaced from their homes. But four years on, it’s depressing how little progress has been made. I would guess it will take at least another four years before the tsunami-affected areas start looking moderately normal.

While it’s tempting to rail against the government or the “authorities” for their failings in this respect, I’m not sure that would be right. Perhaps the government could have moved faster if it had imposed top-down solutions rather than engaging in lengthy discussions with local residents, but I think that despite the delays, the residents prefer to have had their say. Even after all the consultation, there remain elements of the reconstruction plans that don’t make sense. But Akiko told me that she and her friends had decided at this stage just to go with the flow rather than complain and slow things down any further. I didn’t get the impression that she was angry with the government.

I think we were all struck by the stoicism of Tōhoku residents immediately after the disaster. But what seemed even more remarkable is that four years later, after all the delays and disappointments, and the gradual drift of population away from the region, regional leaders like Akiko remain as determined and energetic as ever. The tiredness shows in her eyes. But there have been some major successes, like the planned rugby stadium. Her many meetings, her day-trips to Tokyo (a 10-hour round trip), and her determined smile, show that the fight goes on.

—