By TODD PITMAN
Monday, March 14, 2011
SAITO, Japan (AP) _ It’s hard to believe there was
ever a village here at all.
The tsunami that devastated
Japan’s coast rolled in through a tree-lined ocean cove and obliterated nearly
everything in its path in this village of about 250 people and 70 or so
houses.
Now, three days later, Saito is a
moonscape of death and debris, a hellish glimpse into the phenomenal
destruction caused by the killer wave that followed Japan’s most powerful
earthquake on record and one of the five strongest on Earth in the past 110
years.
In Saito and nearby areas, there
is no electricity, no running water. There are no generators humming. The
night is pitch black. The buildings still standing are closed. No stores are
open. Everything has stopped.
“There is nothing left,” villager
Toshio Abe told The Associated Press on Monday as firefighters in bright
orange and yellow emergency suits hacked through the vast wasteland with
pickaxes, searching not for survivors but for the dead. Abe said at least 40
of Saito’s people were dead or unaccounted for.
Abe said he was gardening Friday
afternoon when he felt the earth shake under his feet. Tsunami sirens blared
and a loudspeaker announcement warned people to get to higher ground.
The 70-year-old frantically
climbed a hill behind his home about two kilometers, or roughly a mile, from
the beach. From his safe vantage point, he watched as, 20 or 30 minutes later,
the giant wave arrived with a thunderous roar.
It crashed through what appeared
to be a two-story-high sea gate, then careened through the valley, following a
two-lane road. He saw it rise up, over and through a bridge and smash into
scores of houses, ripping most apart instantly. Other houses, he said, were
pulled from their foundations and slammed together.
Hills on both sides channeled the
wave another kilometer or so inland, depositing the broken wooden innards of
Saito’s homes along the road.
“I never thought a tsunami would
come this far inland,” Abe said. “I thought we were safe.”
Abe pointed to a battered
concrete foundation amid the flattened landscape. It was his own house. “I
will rebuild it,” he said, “but not here.”
Today, everything in Saito is
spoken about in the past tense.
“That was city hall,” said
48-year-old construction worker Takao Oyama, gesturing toward a two-story
white building that stood alone near the beach, leaning at an angle into a
sheet of mud and sand.
“That was our elementary school,”
he said, pointing to a three-story building a few hundred yards away whose
entire facade had been ripped off and was covered in black and yellow ocean
buoys. Most everything else has disappeared.
“We struggled, but it is all
gone,” Oyama said. “Everything is lost.”
Behind him, a tranquil
tree-covered island could be seen just off the coast. That such violence could
come from such a picturesque view seemed contradictory, hard to believe.
One crumpled sign indicated there
had once been a train station here, a fact Abe confirmed. It was hard to tell
where, though. There were no tracks, no trains, no station.
Crushed bulldozers had been
turned upside down. The blue-tiled roof of one house lay across a bridge. The
wheels of a vehicle stuck out from under the roof.
A few yards away, a bloated
black-spotted white cow lay on the foundation of another vanished home,
streams of dried blood running from its pink nose, its eyes looking out over
the destruction. Embedded in the hardened silt nearby lay a blue baby
stroller, covered in what looked like hay.
“We can never live here again,”
Oyama said as he rested with his wife on a concrete ledge of the broken tarmac
road. During an interview, the ledge trembled as another aftershock hit the
region.
Asked how many people died, Oyama
shrugged. “We’ve only seen a few bodies here,” he said. “I think everybody was
swept out to sea.”
In the wider region of
Minamisanrikucho, of which Saito is just one coastal village, Abe cited authorities
as saying at least 4,500 of the 17,000 inhabitants were believed dead. Police
estimated 10,000 dead among the 2.3 million people in the Miyagi prefecture,
the Japanese equivalent of a state.
The firefighters who arrived
Monday came from an inland town to pick through the rubble. Wearing goggles
and dust masks, they carried long pickaxes, chainsaws and backpacks. They
looked like spacemen walking across a gigantic lunar garbage dump.
As a Japanese self-defense force
helicopter circled overhead, they lifted one hunched and frozen corpse from
the mud of a dried canal filled with smashed cars and twisted mountains of
corrugated iron sheeting. The tsunami had pulled the dead man’s dark blue
plaid shirt over his head. His white knuckles were visible, his hand still
clenched.
The firefighters covered him in a
blue plastic tarp and carried him away on a stretcher. Later, they found
another corpse in the rubble and carted that one away, too.
The road that winds through Saito
is broken apart in several spots. At one point — where the tsunami wave
stopped — it leads into a quiet neighborhood of another village where
two-story houses stand perfectly intact, their windows not even shattered — as
if nothing ever happened.
There, on the pavement, in front
of a small government house-turned-shelter where survivors rested on tatami
mats, somebody had scrawled huge white letters in the road for air crews to
see: SOS.
