After the 2011 tsunami in Japan, a city is being rebuilt – now it needs people to survive

With state-run financial support declining, Rikuzentakata is struggling to prevent decline in other rural parts of Japan. Many survivors have settled elsewhere and large areas of land in the inner city are unused.

Momiko Kinno pushed her elderly mother into a cart to escape the wave that swept their home and thousands of others in Rikuzentakata on March 11, 2011. After eight years in temporary shelter, Ms. Kinno, now 75, moved to a new two-story house in the downtown area, surrounded by empty lots and signs with ‘for sale’ signs. Her son and daughter have moved to other cities to work.

“I don’t think many people will come back here,” she said.

Disaster recovery work on Japan’s northeast coast, including the meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, has been one of the world’s most expensive power generation projects. Government spending so far is nearly $ 300 billion. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. government spent about $ 110 billion on recovery from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Located on a low-lying coastal plain, the commercial and residential heart of Rikuzentakata was almost completely wiped out, and the city alone was responsible for about one-tenth of the deaths from Japan’s worst post-war natural disaster. In 2014, a project began using soil and rock from a mountain top to raise the central area by more than 20 feet. The final sections will be completed this year as part of the redevelopment works costing more than $ 1.4 billion.

In 2017, a 40-foot concrete wall that stretched over a mile along the bay next to the city was completed, part of 270 miles of new seawall built in the region since the disaster.

The reconstruction caused a “disaster,” said Masayuki Kimura, whose home and family-run bakery were both destroyed by the tsunami. Mr. Kimura restarted his business from an old train car and quickly doubled his sales before the tsunami when an influx of workers, volunteers and disaster tourists picked up his German baumkuchen layered biscuits and other treats.

The prefecture or state government temporarily took over his $ 300,000 debt, and he was able to borrow more by relocating his business to larger premises twice, most recently in 2015 to a fake European brick building on a hill on the hill. edge. from the city.

With the restoration work nearing completion and with the number of visitors declining in the short term, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Kimura is down 20% from their peak. The 63-year-old still has $ 900,000 in bank debt. He is working on developing cakes for vegans and allergy sufferers to boost online sales.

“I have realized that to survive I have to compete with stores in other cities,” he said.

The government offered subsidies and debt relief to businesses in the disaster area as part of its 10-year recovery plan. It says a new $ 15 billion five-year package will focus primarily on supporting individuals, including mental health services.

Rikuzentakata Mayor Futoshi Toba wants more help to revitalize the local economy now that reconstruction is over. Less than half of the city’s redeveloped land is in use.

“We have finally created the conditions to try to pull companies out of here, just as government support programs are winding down,” he said.

Mr Toba, who started work two months before the disaster and lost his wife to the tsunami, said the decision to build large areas of the city was meant to encourage people to stay, but the long-term project carried contributes to the loss of the population.

“People can live in temporary housing for a year or two, but when it’s seven or eight, they’re going to consider other options,” he said.

Thousands were forced into temporary housing or moved from Rikuzentakata after the disaster. At the end of February, the city had 18,601, almost 25% less than ten years earlier.

In an unusual turn of events, the birth rate in Rikuzentakata rose briefly to one of the highest in Japan after the disaster, a phenomenon sometimes seen after major earthquakes. It is now in line with the national average, well below the level needed to keep the population stable.

At the current rate of decline, the population of Rikuzentakata will be more than halved by 2060. More than 50% of residents are expected to be over 65 by 2040.

Oyster farmer Sakae Yoshida used to have 30 employees, but now has eight as most are retired. The bay at Rikuzentakata is known for its thick, fist-sized oysters, delivered to luxury Tokyo hotels. The tsunami provided better growing conditions for oysters by dredging the seabed, but it is difficult to take full advantage of this opportunity, Mr Yoshida said.

“Everyone has gotten older and there is no one to take over,” the 73-year-old said as he and his wife finished sorting the day’s crop into a small plant next to the tsunami wall.

A few younger people have returned. Twenty-four-year-old Rinnosuke Yoshida moved back to Rikuzentakata last summer to work at his grandparents’ vegetable farm after studying near Tokyo and a brief spell in advertising sales. Most of his high school friends have moved to other cities.

Rinnosuke Yoshida, who is not related to the oyster farmer, said he preferred the clean air of the countryside and life by the sea. He also said he was motivated by the wishes of his father, Toshiyuki, who wanted to work on the family farm after retirement but died in the tsunami.

His grandfather, who is 87 years old, and grandmother, who is 82, sometimes tell him what he looks like and talks just like Toshiyuki, who was their son. Toshiyuki was a baseball coach at Rinnosuke’s high school. Both Rinnosuke and his older brother, who lives in the prefecture capital, were avid baseball players. Rinnosuke recently started playing for a local club team again.

On March 11, he expects to drive his mother and grandparents to the family grave to pay their respects to his father. “I’m not torn by his death, but of course I want to see him some time,” he said.

He hopes to marry his high school sweetheart this year, who is training to be a nurse. In March she will find out if she passed her exams to be qualified. They plan to stay in Rikuzentakata and start a family.

Write to Alastair Gale at [email protected] and Miho Inada at [email protected]