The Things that Break Us

Oshika Peninsula Miyagi Tohoku

Today is the last day of March. Winter has confirmed its reprieve and the sakura cherry blossoms are  in their full and glorious bloom. It is the season of new beginnings, of school year starts, and for gathering in parks with friends and family for picnics and outdoor baseball games. March is also the anniversary month of Japan's Great East Earthquake. Two years ago the earth broke Japan while the world heard and watched it being shattered via live aerial footage. All of Japan has been affected economically by the break, with an estimated recovery cost of $309 billion, the most expensive natural disaster in the world, but the people of Tohoku are the ones who have had to live with in the circumstances of the country's brokenness every day since, including coping with the memories and terrible traumas of the events that transpired immediately after and continued during the initial weeks after the disaster.

This month I had the opportunity to visit the Oshika Peninsula, one of the areas that was hardest hit by the earthquake and tsunami, a body of land estimated to be 17 feet farther to the East since the quake. The land on Oshika has also dropped by over a meter making previously beautiful sandy beaches a memory as they are now submerged under the tide. On the streets where there were once homes and businesses there are now only remnants of empty lots with cement pads that used to be foundations. The land is owned by local residents currently staying temporary housing units. The owners are not permitted to rebuild their homes because their land is now too low in relation to the sea.

 I went up to Oshika in order to 'volunteer' in hopes of being a little bit helpful, but mostly I was just reminded that I am a complete idiot comparative to those who are walking out their lives after being broken by the earth.

Caroline Pover, an active leader in local recovery efforts on Oshika and the mastermind of brilliant practical help projects such as school uniform sponsorships and the 'free store' gave us a tour of the peninsula. One of the other volunteers mentioned that her husband had visited Tohoku shortly after the quake. A resident living in the disaster area told her Japanese husband that he felt that Japan had been split in two on 3/11. He said that now there are two Japans; the Japan that experienced the disaster face to face and now understands the meaning of life, and the Japan outside of the disaster zone that does not yet understand the meaning of life. This comment made me wonder what it might be like to understand the meaning life, and how that wisdom looks to have come at the most terrible of prices.

It also made me think about the kinds of things that break the rest of us, those who aren't living in an area that has been hit by a natural disaster. It made me wonder if the things that break us are also the things that are bringing us closer to understanding the meaning of life, perhaps considerably more slowly than the residents of broken Japan. The events and circumstances that break us regular people, like the untimely death of a person or animal or business who is a center piece within our world, and the things from our pasts like being victimized by a person in a position in power over us when we were vulnerable, or the separation from a person we love due to circumstances, or being estranged from family members or friends, or an addiction that is drowning us, or the impractical messy things like unwelcome long lasting economic hardships that devour our best efforts to provide for ourselves or our families,  or illnesses and injuries that take us away from our loved ones and our dreams, and events of the heart like a lover's abandonment, or a partner's betrayal, or deeply loving while not at all being loved. Those kinds of experiences of not having the things that we really really need in life whether they be economic, physical, practical, or emotional can sometimes break us on the inside the way that the earth broke Japan from the inside out in Tohoku two years ago.

In the disaster hit areas of Japan where it is estimated that nineteen thousand people lost their lives and where ninety thousand people are currently residing in temporary shelters instead of in the buildings that until two years ago they called their homes, people have gone without many of the things that they really needed and yet because so they seem to know something that the rest of us don't.  What meaning of life can we also come to know by our comparative lesser brokenness and what can we learn from this part of Japan that already 'gets it'?

In addition to visiting Miyagi twice this month, I have also been hosting an old friend from home who is visiting Japan. He and I attended school together from the age of  twelve and we were always both a bit broken. His brokenness was manifested in the perfect combination of hilarious hyperactivity with intellectual brilliance that resulted in frequent detentions in Mt. Newton Middle School's supplementary desk next to the janitor in the bowels of the boiler room.  My brokenness was more along the lines of being a religious zealot, which was and is so much less cool. While this friend of mine was here visiting I wondered who each of us would be if we hadn't both been a bit broken from life.  Is it even possible to separate ourselves from our brokenness, and therefore is it possible to separate the people of Tohoku from everything they have endured together over these last two years?  Who is Japan without this busted up part of it that still struggles with the very basics of life, where idiots like me visit in an attempt to be of  some 'help' like we did last week throwing in a couple of extra hands for the local seaweed harvest, or a few weeks earlier by cheering up the residents with live music and an art workshop? And should we attempt to help anyways, even if they are so much the wiser than ourselves?

Artist Liane Wakabayashi and I at the workshop

 I think it is important to try to help, even if we are not of as much use as we would hope. Because I think it is important for the people who are living with the long term consequences of 3/11 to know that the other part of Japan, the part that does not yet understand the meaning of life, is still their Japan, and that they are not forgotten amongst the members of the rest of their beautiful country or by the rest of the world. Our visiting faces assure them that they are remembered as is  their struggle to recover some sort of normality. No we do not understand it, and we will never equal them in their wisdom, but they continue to be loved by us, and love as each of us knows, is always the very most important thing, even and especially between those of us who have always been a bit broken.