By TODD PITMAN
Mon, March 21 2011, 1:49 PM
SHIZUGAWA, Japan _ Bodies are
strewn among the knotted skeletons of entire towns. Military helicopters
clatter overhead. Survivors who lost everything huddle under blankets in schools-turned-shelters
as foreign governments dispatch aid and urge their citizens to flee.
After years spent reporting from
desperate and war-torn corners of the world, the scenes I’ve witnessed here
are unsettlingly familiar.
It’s the setting that’s not.
Here, in one of the richest and
most advanced nations on earth, I’ve found one of most challenging assignments
of my career.
Japan’s cascading disasters were
spawned by one of the planet’s strongest quakes in a century. Next came a
tsunami that killed more than 10,000 people and demolished vast swaths the
northeastern coast in minutes. That triggered a nuclear emergency that has
amplified a deepening sense of apocalyptic doom.
The grim sights have been widely
compared to the astonishing destruction wrought here during World War II. But
it also reminds me of Lebanon in 2006 — when Israel’s Hezbollah-seeking
rockets vaporized whole villages — or any other conflict zone filled with
refugees and military convoys.
When I stepped off the plane in
Tokyo the morning after the quake, Narita International Airport was quiet. The
escalators had been shut off. Stranded passengers lay on sleeping bags
throughout the terminal.
Outside, not a single taxi stood
waiting. We finally found one willing to take us downtown, but only at the
departure hall where a dozen others dropping off fleeing travelers had already
refused to give us a ride.
Later, I headed north toward the
tsunami zone with a team of three other Associated Press journalists. There
were obstacles at every turn. The GPS system could not know that some roads no
longer existed or that others had been blocked by mudslides or ripped apart
during the mighty tremor.
That first night, it took 14
hours on backroads to cover 300 kilometers. When we finally reached the ruined
port of Sendai the next morning, we found survivors wearing surgical masks
picking through the wrecked junkyard of their annihilated city.
In a tech-savvy society better
known for hosting robot marathons, the crisis has produced surreal images,
some more apt to appear in a novel about life after a nuclear holocaust: Cut
off with no electricity and no phone reception, the hungry and isolated
braving long lines outside near-empty grocery stores just to get food; the
desperate homeless warming frigid hands in heavy snow above fires fueled by
the wooden planks of their own pulverized homes.
In Kesennuma, I saw the hull of a
behemoth ship parked inland on a sea of burnt debris beside a wrecked
7-Eleven.
In Shizugawa, a lone member of
Japan’s military, the Self Defense Force, thoughtfully swept a small strip of
pavement that somehow survived, a futile and slightly bizarre effort
considering the entire city surrounding it was reduced to a mashed heap of
garbage.
Most of these towns have simply
ceased to exist. In some, far from the ravaged coast, everything is still
closed: restaurants, malls, pinball arcades, drugstores — even ATM machines
because they cannot function without power.
We have survived mostly on snack
food — peanuts and potato chips and canned coffee scavenged from mostly empty
street-side vending machines. When we found one small food store open, it’s
dwindling stocks already plundered, we bought everything left that we could
fit in our car — raw sausages, dried squid, bread.
Finding fuel is a constant
concern. Vast lines of cars queue ominously at every gas station — even those
that are closed — waiting up to 36 hours to buy limited rations.
We need gas not only to move, but
to charge our laptops and satellite transmitting equipment through an inverter
that connects to our car’s cigarette lighter — which at one overloaded point
blew a fuse, threatening to bring our mission to a halt.
One big problem with Japan’s
crisis: It doesn’t feel like it’s over.
Every night, we are woken by
aftershocks. These come during the day, too — during interviews, while parked
in our car — grim reminders that what started it all can be unleashed again,
anytime.
Every day, we hear snippets of
news about the possibility of total nuclear meltdown at the Fukishima Dai-ichi
plant, more than 240 kilometers from where we have been working. There is talk
of helicopter crews testing positive for radiation exposure, of foreign
governments urging their nationals to leave.
The experience got even more
surreal when AP issued me a pocket-sized “dosimeter” — a device that looks
like a Maglite flashlight and monitors surrounding radiation levels from the
safety of one’s pocket — and a ration of potassium iodide to protect my
thyroid from cancer in the event of a serious nuclear event.
With heavy snow now adding
another level of desolation, I sometimes wonder: If it gets any worse, can we
get off this island?
With nowhere else to stay, we
spent many nights in makeshift shelters, sleeping alongside displaced families
wrapped in blankets on the crowded wooden floors of school basketball courts.
At all of them, large
wall-mounted clocks are still frozen at 2:46 p.m. — give or take a few minutes
— the moment when the earthquake changed everything.
It’s hard not to be impressed
with the immense grace of the people we’ve encountered along the way. I’ve seen
no fighting, no shouting, only patience.
We’ve been offered miso soup and
rice balls — by people who have lost everything and have no idea when or how
they’ll ever go home. The shelters we’ve stayed at are so well organized that
one even offered different trash bags for recycling, and there were group
calisthenics
at dawn.
On the surface, there seems too
little emotion, too much stoicism. But loss is everywhere.
At Ishinoseke, a man who has not
seen his wife since he spoke to her minutes before the tsunami told me with
the utmost certainty that she MUST be alive. After failing to find her at
seven different shelters, he began searching for her inside a city
gym-turned-morgue where the bodies of 300 tsunami victims lay under blue
tarps, waiting to be identified.
At a shelter in Shizugawa, I
watched an elderly man tell a group of survivors that those who’d
gone missing had not yet been
confirmed dead.
Was it denial or real hope? I
couldn’t tell.
As he read out the names of
dozens not been seen since March 11, women listening intently on their knees
began weeping in silence.
AP Bangkok Bureau Chief Todd
Pitman, who has spent much of his career reporting from war zones in
Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East, as well as some of the most troubled
nations in Africa, has found one of his most challenging assignments in Asia’s
richest and most technologically advanced country.
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