TOKYO (AP) – Images still retain the power to shock.
The dizzy survivors walk under huge sea tanks deposited in the middle of a stretch of rubble and wrought iron, which was once a crowded city, the ships overturned wide like children’s toys. The grieving survivors pick up the flattened remains of their homes. Desert farms are in the shadow of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, where a melting catastrophe is still reverberating.
These arresting images were captured by The Associated Press in 2011 after a massive wall of water leveled part of Japan’s northeast coast, washing away cars, houses, office buildings and thousands of people.
Ten years later, AP journalists returned to document communities that were torn apart by what is simply referred to here as the Great East Japan Earthquake. The urge to rebuild a land that has been destroyed by millennia of disasters – volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, earthquakes, war and famine – is strong and there are areas where there are few or no traces of the 2011 devastation.
But this triple disaster in Japan’s Tohoku region – earthquake, tsunami and nuclear melting – was different from the one Japan has faced so far, and the challenges of returning to what was normal a decade ago were immense. Half a million were forced from their homes; tens of thousands did not return, emptying the cities that were already fighting to prevent their young people from leaving for Tokyo and other mega-cities. Radiation fears persist. Government incompetence, petty quarrels and bureaucratic struggles have delayed construction efforts.
Despite the failures and uneven progress, Tohoku in 2021 is a testament to a collective force of will – national, local and personal. Look carefully, however, and you will see that even the most amazing transformations carry the remnants of what happened in 2011, the scars of that deep wound in the psyche of the region.
These AP images, then and now, raise a fundamental question: How do you mark change after a great trauma?
In a way, it is the simplest thing in the world to describe. Removal of tons of debris here, the absence of overturned oil tankers there. The redeveloped roads where piles of asphalt had been cracked and flamed. The bright new buildings now rise above what had been cleaned of stains.
But the clarity of this physical change also carries the idea of something much less clear, something about the people who live in these places. Their resistance, stoicism, pain and anger and stubborn refusal to bow to forces beyond their control, whether natural or bureaucratic.
All this and much more are present in these powerful scenes before and after, then and now.
The images tell the story – of a great change and of the people who made it happen.