A View from the Ground: Two Months On...

There are still a few lingering traces of the earthquake, mostly in the form 
of new cracks in walls and pavement here and there.  Every now and again one
may also pass by some building or area which has been cordoned off due to more
extensive damage.  By and large, though, Kawamata doesn't seem to have taken a
great deal of harm, at least in the physical sense.

On a more personal note, I seem to have acquired some new neighbours.  A whole 
family rather suddenly moved into the long-empty apartment next to mine, 
although I'm not totally certain where they came from.  

All in all, it's been a busy couple of months since the earthquake struck.

By early April the situation in the aftermath of the earthquake seemed to 
have achieved, if not exactly stability, then at least a sort of equilibrium.
Gasoline shortages had finally eased, most areas now had power back, supplies
were getting into the harder-hit areas, and the supermarkets and conveniences 
stores were largely stocked with food again.  

Here in Kawamata, about three quarters of the shops and businesses were open
once more.  The bulk of the evacuees had moved on; there was only one
shelter remaining in operation now, mostly housing people from Namie town 
who were evidently expecting to stay for a while.

More significantly from my perspective, the new school year had started.
(School in Japan starts in April and ends in March.)  The disruption caused
by the earthquake had mostly fallen into the spring vacation period, 
although the end of the school year had been truncated by about a week.  

A number of evacuated children from other towns (mostly Namie again) were
enrolled in the local elementary and junior high schools (possibly in the 
senior high school as well, although I don't teach there so that's only 
speculation).  Kawamata Elementary School gained 34 'new' students, about a 
third of whom seemed to be first graders, entering school for the very first
time.  Fortunately, they all seem to be integrating into the school and 
making friends very quickly.

I'd met some of these new students a couple of weeks earlier, when I visited
the last remaining shelter to entertain evacuated children there.  That 
particular shelter, the Ojima Community Hall, was actually a former 
elementary school which had been closed down three years previously (about
seven months after I started here).  I'd been quite fond of that school, so
returning there to teach children once again (this time with evacuees packed
into every room and corridor) was a surreal and somewhat bittersweet 
experience.

Besides the 'normal' aftermath of the earthquake, the other major subject
of concern was, and is, the nuclear power station near Okuma, a scant 45 km
southeast of central Kawamata.  The ongoing problems with the cooling 
systems for the nuclear reactors had led to intermittent leaks of radiation.
As mentioned before, a twenty-kilometre evacation zone had been declared 
about the plant in the days immediately after the earthquake.  In addition, 
residents between 20 and 30 kilometres from the plant had been instructed to
stay indoors as much as possible.  Many people in this extended area were 
deciding, with government encouragement, to evacuate as well.

Daily measurements were being taken of radiation levels in the air and water
at various points throughout every town in eastern Fukushima (and probably
beyond as well).  In Kawamata, the levels were at their highest (which was
not actually very high) in the week immediately following the earthquake, 
and had been declining steadily since then.  The radiation level in the 
local water had slightly exceeded the 'safe' level of 300 Bq for about a 
day, leading to a brief advisory against drinking it, but that had passed 
quickly.  Of somewhat greater concern was the impact on local produce.  

About a week after the earthquake, the Japanese government announced that
levels of radiation exceeding the official safety limit had been detected in
milk from Yamakiya.  Legally part of Kawamata, Yamakiya is a sprawling 
farming village up in the mountains to the south-east, which makes up roughly 
a third of Kawamata's geographic area.  While central Kawamata, as mentioned, 
lies around 45 kilometres from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, parts of 
Yamakiya are much closer to it.  Combined with its higher altitude, the result 
was that Yamakiya has had noticeably higher radiation levels than the rest of 
Kawamata right from the start.

This news was followed by other warnings about various types of vegetables and 
other produce from all over Fukushima prefecture.  Given that agriculture is 
the main industry in Fukushima, this is promising to be a serious blow to the 
economy.  Needless to say, morale is suffering greatly as well.

But worse was still to come.  In the second week of April, the government 
abruptly announced that several areas previously outside the mandatory 
evacuation zones were now being designated as "planned evacuation" zones, 
which meant that everyone was to leave those areas within a month.  The
reasoning, apparently, was that the radiation levels in those areas were high 
enough to be potentially risky if maintained for more than about six months.  
(Based, it must be said, on a extremely conservative estimate of what the 
maximum safe level is for human beings.)

The new areas to be evacuated included all of Iitate village, all of Namie 
town (those parts which had not already been evacuated)... and Yamakiya.

So much for things settling down.  The announcement immediately set a frantic
scramble into motion as the new evacuations had to be managed somehow.  From
my point of view in the school offices, the main concern was figuring out 
what to do with all of the schools in the affected areas.  

Yamakiya has three schools: a kindergarten, an elementary school, and a 
junior high school.  All of these had to be accomodated somehow.  It was
quickly decided to move the elementary and junior high school students into 
Minami ("South") Elementary School, the second-largest public school in 
Kawamata, located on the south side of the central town (and the closest to 
Yamakiya, albeit not by a great deal).  The kindergarten students (about a 
dozen children) would be rolled into the nearby Minami Kindergarten.

And so it was done.  Minami Elementary School, fortunately, had some spare
space already (legacy of the slow decline in the town's population over the 
past several years); after some minor reshuffling, a total of four classrooms
were made available for the Yamakiya Elementary School students.  (The first
and second grades shared one room, and the third and fourth grades another.)
Accomodating the junior high school took a bit more ingenuity; fortunately,
Minami Elementary School also has a large, open-space lunch room designed to
seat the entire student population.  With some hasty renovations, this was
partitioned off into space for Yamakiya Junior High School: four classrooms
(one for each grade plus the special needs class) and an ad-hoc staff room.
That left enough room for some shared space and another small staff room for 
the Yamakiya Elementary School teachers.

Yamakiya Junior High School had had twenty-seven students up to this point.
Sadly, three students were pulled out as a result of their families relocating
after the disaster.  One of the girls from the second year simply moved to the
town's other junior high school; the other girl in that class, however, would
now be attending a school in Fukushima City.  The three remaining second-year
students, all boys, now looked rather lonely even in their small, temporary 
classroom.  

The other student to leave was in the third year.  On my last visit to (the
real) Yamakiya, I discovered (along with the other changes) that her entire
family was moving to Kobe, halfway across Japan.  An impromptu farewell
ceremony was hastily arranged for that afternoon .  It involved an awful lot 
of crying, from the teachers as much as from the students.  I was glad to be 
able to say good-bye; I gave her a Canadian penny for a keepsake, which is 
something I normally do at graduation.

Yamakiya, of course, was not the only community being newly uprooted.  As
mentioned, the neighbouring village of Iitate was also to be evacuated.  As
with Yamakiya, the schools in particular had to be moved somewhere... and,
once again, Kawamata has become the destination.

The renovations of the past year are now complete, but the students of 
Kawamata Junior High School had no chance to enjoy the full use of their 
building again: close to a third of the school has now been transformed into 
the newly-relocated Iitate Elementary School.  We soon had to grow accustomed 
to the cheerful background noise of small children during our classes.  One 
end of the school ground has also been turned into a parking lot for the 
Iitate teachers.

Unfortunately, this isn't the only way in which my students' facilities have
been constrained.  While I was unaware of this prior to the start of the new 
school year, it transpired that the school gymnasium had suffered damage (to 
the roof, apparently) during the earthquake sufficient to render it off-
limits.  A school without a gymnasium, particularly in Japan, is a school in 
need of considerable improvisation.  Assemblies were curtailed.  Such 
ceremonies as were necessary (an inevitability in this country) were stripped 
down to the bare minimum number of participants and relocated to various 
ad-hoc locations.

Accomodating the various after-school sports clubs was a bit more complicated.
The solution arrived at was to book space in the various elementary school 
gymnasiums around town, and send the students there as needed after the day's
classes were finished.  I'd rather expected these arrangements to lead to mass
chaos, but in fact everything seems to be working reasonably smoothly so far.  
Children are an adaptable lot, and none of the students seem overly bothered 
by the strange new system.

The students and the evacuees aren't the only ones having to make some 
adjustments in their daily routines.  It was eventually decided that the town 
hall, a rather old and drab office building built in the traditional "concrete
block" style of architecture, had suffered too much damage in the earthquake 
and its aftershocks, and was no longer safe for working in.  In the middle of 
April, therefore, all of the municipal workers (including my section, the
Board of Education office) were moved into the central community centre on the
next block.  My group wound up on the second floor, in what had previously 
been a traditional Japanese "tatami" room; the rice mats were removed in 
order to accomodate all of our furniture.  The old town hall has now been sealed
off, protected with numerous warning signs.  Nobody that I ask seems at all 
certain when it might be repaired or rebuilt.

There seems to be quite a lot of that sort of uncertainty going around, 
actually.