Transcriber: Masako Kigami Reviewer: Hiroko Kawano
Ivan Kovac: Hello, everybody, thank you for coming.
We have a little movie to present for you today.
Exactly eight months from the day of the tsunami,
we went up to Ishinomaki with a good friend and director, Paul Johansen.
And we went up there to shoot our movie.
Jeffrey Jousan: This is about our friends and extended family in Ishinomaki.
"Then and Now." Here is the film.
(Music)
[Ishinomaki, Japan]
[Then and Now]
Mr Fujita (Japanese): Just as my mother and I were talking
about how we could bring my aunt into the house,
when...
there was a loud crash and I saw a huge truck swept by right before my eyes.
Woman1: My husband said he had to go back to get our mortuary tablet,
but I told him we just had to escape.
Just as we reached the higher ground, the tsumani arrived.
Woman 2: The water kept coming.
It was like a river.
As fast as I could, I had the outside stairs to get to the second floor.
The entire road was water ... water.
Mr Fujita: I screamed to my mother,
but she ran to the living room, opened the window
and grabbed her sister, or my aunt, to help her get inside.
I saw the tsunami, looked at my mother and then back to the tsunami
1... 2... 3... and then the tsunami hit.
My family's story ended at that moment.
All had gone.
Mr Chiba (Japanese): At my restaurant, the tsunami reached a height of 2.20m.
The first floor was totally destroyed, and so I was put out of business.
Mr Matsumura (Japanese): My uncle's house was in Kadonowaki-cho,
but everything was swept away except for the foundation,
and all his memories were washed away.
Mr Fujita: Dwelling on memories and looking back has no value anymore.
The tsunami took people's lives away, obliterated houses
and stole the lives of family members.
In short, it destroyed everyone's lives.
Mr Matsumura: I didn't lose many people close to me,
but there are many people who lost their whole family.
[November 2011]
(Music)
(Kids' voices)
Mr Fujita: There were so many cars
piled up here at the school grounds.
The tsunami came from over there,
where the Pacific Ocean is.
All the people and cars were washed along and crushed into the school,
and they ended up pilling up here.
Tremendous amount of cars.
A huge fire broke out after the tsunami.
Mothers, fathers, children and grandparents,
all were burned to death in the car.
People couldn't find escape as they couldn't open their car doors.
The fire burned and burned for a very long time.
Of the people who escaped into here,
only those who set the ladder up the hill over there could survive.
All left down here died.
(Sea sound)
Mr Fujita: Even now, we have no answer to the question,
"What shall we do?"
(Japanese) Without finding that answer, eight months have already gone by.
Mr Yamakami (Japanese): If the national or prefectural government
could show us just one light at the end of the tunnel,
then every survivor could do their best to reach it.
But there's no light, and nobody knows where to go.
Therefore people commit suicide.
I have no kitchen, no bath, no living room.
All I have is a bedroom upstairs.
Could these politicians live in a place like this for even a month or two?
Mr Fujita: When I speak about Ishinomaki,
it's hard to even imagine it recovering.
Basically impossible.
I'm afraid that it won't happen.
What I mean is
we can reconstruct buildings and houses,
but when it comes to people's spirit, it's very difficult.
People need to have heart-to-heart conversation.
As you may already know, at the temporary housing facilities,
people don't know who their neighbors are,
so people don't talk to each other.
No conversation.
There's no human contact between people.
So what we have to do first is to extend our hands
to people feeling isolated, people in despair,
to people crying all the time.
Reach out your hands to them.
Ask them "How are you doing?" "Let's set up a soup kitchen."
Mr Yamakami: There was a neighborhood association
set up to help survivors.
But they decided to close it, which was a decision I couldn't accept,
especially with so many people needing help.
So I said, "I'll take it over," and that's how I started running this place.
Mr Fujita: We have to start from there,
or people who feel isolated will choose to kill themselves.
Mr Yamakami: People can't see any kind of future.
At least two people I know have already committed suicide.
Ms Abe (Japanese): I think mothers are still struggling
and don't feel at ease yet.
Mr Fujita: About one out of every two people is still unemployed.
They're not able to find jobs.
Ms Abe: Ishinomaki is located along the ocean.
There were many fish processing plants, where a lot of the mothers were working.
Now that all factories are gone, they don't have jobs.
To take their next step forward, I feel what they need most is to work.
Mr Fujita: In Ishinomaki, ten people commit suicide a month.
That makes one person in every three days.
They have no vision of a brighter future, so they choose death as an easy way out.
(Crows cawing)
Mrs Sato: It's a big challenge to restart our business again.
But without trying, we feel like we may have an emotional breakdown
and become listless.
People might see it as foolish, but we'd like to try as long as possible,
even if it's only for one or two years, right?
Mr Sato: That's right.
Mrs Sato: We'd like to do it.
Mr Sato: We'll definitely try!
Mrs Sato: During the three-month stay in the evacuation shelter,
we had nothing to do there, and both of us became really sick.
Mr Chiba: Now I am selling ramen in a truck belonging to a restaurant
called "Shochiku."
I gave up on restarting my restaurant, and was unemployed.
But I began to help out at Shochiku, which my friend owns.
Now I'm waiting for my US working visa.
I've been asking them to issue it sooner, but I haven't got it yet.
"Give me my visa, dammit!"
"Give me visa."
(Laughter)
Mr Matsumura: Under these circumstances, we all wanted to do something
to change the character of Ishinomaki,
from a very closed community to a more interesting, open one.
where everybody can give their opinions.
So we started a project called "Ishinomaki 2.0."
As a part of the project,
we open this bar as a fun place to gather.
There wasn't anywhere to get together at night after the disaster.
So we needed to have a place to gather.
And it happened.
This building was flooded with water reaching just 5cm below the ceiling.
The building had been empty.
There were a lot of empty buildings around
due to the sluggish economy in Ishinomaki.
We negotiated to rent this space at a good price
and turned it into a bar.
The whole process was DIY.
None of us were professional carpenters.
We were all amateurs, but we painted walls and made interesting designs
and created a space where we could enjoy ourselves
and think about our recovery plan for the future.
And we made that happen.
(Siren sound)
[April 2011]
Mr Matsumura: After the disaster, we had no telephone calls,
no Internet access, no electricity,
no Twitter.
To get by we actually had to talk to the people around us.
People in Ishinomaki had never communicated much,
but they had to survive.
When walking through the town in April,
everyone was greeting each other,
and it was such a good environment.
Mr Yamakami: A massive amount of money has been donated,
but we haven't seen any of it.
(Music)
Mr Fujita: The Japanese Government
is preoccupied with the ciritical situation
of the nuclear accident in Fukushima.
This accident could end up on the same scale
as the Chernobyl catastrophe or even worse.
Under these circumstances,
the Japanese government is gradually loosing its resources
to support tsunami victims in Eastern Japan.
Mr Yamakami: Listening to broadcasts from the Diet,
I never hear the Japanese Government talk about how to help out survivors.
Mr Fujita: Taking all these factors into account,
I think it's going to be extremely difficult
for Ishinomaki and Tohoku itself to recover.
Mr Yamakami: In a sense, for the governments,
we survivors are just a burden.
Mr Fujita: Koganehara Hall is a great house,
not just for the residents in the Koganehara district
but also anybody in trouble.
What we do as local volunteers
is running a soup kitchen, distributing goods,
offering counseling for people with problems,
as well as removing rubble, cleaning houses.
We also provide educational support for the local kindergartens and so on.
We're doing a lot of different things.
I'm just an ordinary person.
All I try to do is to wake up with courage and hope every morning.
So how can I do that?
I can do that because I have so many friends around me.
Mr Matsumura: Before the disaster, we let other people manage the town,
and let other people make political decisions.
I was living under their system.
But now, I and other people are shaping our own place to live.
Not only me but also many people around here
get together everyday, and hold workshops proactively,
inviting experts and professors with helpful knowledge.
By rebuilding this way,
it makes a huge difference from leaving the system up to other people.
In knowing the structure of our own town, life becomes more comfortable,
and it is an easier place to live in.
Ivan Kovac: As you can see, his house is semi-rebuilt now.
It's not completely rebuilt, but it is semi-rebuilt.
And he is sleeping on the floor of his house,
as do we sometimes when we go and visit him,
and his volunteer team as well, we all sleep on the floor there.
Jeffery Jousan: Yeah, incredible man.
IK: Definitely.
JJ: The Satos, Mr and Mrs Sato,
their shop is back in business.
And we go there every time we're in Ishinomaki
because they give us hugs and smiles.
And it's so wonderful to see them.
And they have awesome sake.
IK: They have awesome sake, which is sometimes a problem
for film makers.
IK: And this is Chiba-san.
Now, there's an interesting story about his time after the tsunami.
JJ: Yeah, he was walking through the rubble,
climbing through the rubble,
and he said it was like being in Bio Hazard, a game.
(Laughter)
IK: He is still waiting for his visa to come through, his American visa.
And in the meantime -
JJ: Yamakami-san was a kind of an outsider in the community.
But after the tsunami, he kind of took everyone in his neighborhood,
and made it his responsibility to feed them every day for over a year.
IK: That's right.
Abe-san still has a lot of children under her care,
and she takes care of their emotional and physical needs.
JJ: Amazing woman. They're all amazing.
Matsumura-san is super positive.
He's always high on what is going to happen in Ishinomaki 2.0,
what is going to happen next.
He thinks that Ishinomaki is going to become place like Berlin,
where artists come from all over the place.
It's like a place for us to get together.
But he is carrying Ishinomaki on his shoulders and he is tired.
IK: You know, about eight months have passed since we shot this movie.
And not much has changed since then.
We went up there recently
and there is still a hell of a lot of work to do.
And -
JJ: Yeah, and what can you do?
Go to Tohoku, if you haven't.
If you have been before, go again.
Go see your friends, make new friends, be with people, and connect.
It's very, very important
that we do not forget and we act on this.
OK?
I'll end with a quote from my monk friend:
(Japanese) Megenai, Nigenai, Kujikenai:
Don't back down; Don't run away; Never falter.
IK: And just remember, everyone, the health of Japan
depends on the health of Tohoku.
JJ: Thank you very much.
IK: Thank you.
(Applause)