Dogs

Guest Post by Brett L. Walker -- In recent days, film footage of dogs has heightened the emotional intensity of coverage of Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami. One video clip features a restless, obviously agitated dog guarding its injured companion in a flooded, ravaged neighborhood. The Japanese reporter remarks on the dog’s defense of its injured friend, but, frustratingly for viewers, appears to offer no immediate aid. Then, Mr. Kenn Sakurai, a supplier of dog food in Japan, announced on Facebook, perhaps fishing for “likes” from his “friends,” that he rescued the two dogs. But Sakurai’s unwillingness to post pictures of the now globally famous canines has left many wondering whether Sakurai is in fact a fraud. Another bloodcurdling clip features a dog trying desperately to flee a swirling, bubbling stew of shattered homes and mauled cars, only to be consumed by the killer waves. In different ways, these clips, by depicting the suffering and death of Canis familiaris, our most faithful animal ally, evokes fresh agony from the devastated northeastern shores of Japan.

Dogs suffer and die, and they may even elicit misplaced Facebook “likes,” but they also work and rescue and respond to human emotions. A twenty-five member Swiss rescue team with nine dogs was the first to enter Japan after the quake and tsunami, only to be snared by Japan’s strict regulations regarding the transport of dogs. In countries where rabies has not been eradicated, such as the United States and, apparently, Switzerland, Japan requires information such as microchip identifiers, exact dates of rabies vaccinations, documented rabies antibody levels in the animal, and proof that the animal underwent a 180 observation period in the exporting country. If not, then the animal undergoes the 180 observation stint in a cage in Japan. Such was the initial fate of the Swiss dogs. The South Koreans sent a five-member team with two dogs. Four dogs were dispatched from a Gwyenedd rescue team, including a stray Labrador from the streets of Caernarfon, Wales. The Search Dog Foundation in the United States dispatched six rescue dogs: Pearl, Cadillac, Baxter, Riley, Hunter, and Joe. Many of these high-strung, active dogs had clawed their way to rescue-dog status after being passed from owner to owner, and shelter to shelter. Some of them, such as Pearl, Hunter, Joe and Cadillac, are veterans of the 2010 Haitian earthquake and other serious disasters. They bring with them loads of experience.

Dogs evoke powerful emotional responses in people – viewership of these video clips attest to this fact – and we, through facial expressions and other forms of emotional projection, trigger strong emotions in dogs. We have coevolved together; dogs are artifacts of our values and cultures. Human rescue workers desperate to find victims in Japan’s drenched rubble no doubt conjure strong emotions in their dogs. The photos of these dogs in the rubble, their sheer intensity, make this fact clear enough. As for the homeless dog and its injured companion, it is hard to know what collective human emotions they sensed in northeastern Japan’s tattered landscape. We are often cautioned against projecting human emotions onto dogs, this is the specter of anthropomorphism. However, we were most moved by the dog putting its paw around the shoulder of its companion. It’s hard to mistake the dog’s compassion and its profound unease in the wake of the tsunami.

Even across species lines, we are all in this together.

Matsushima

When I was fifteen, my mother and I decided that living overseas might be the best thing for me, a high school girl tired of the American high school ways. Rotary was kind enough to take me on as an exchange student from the state of Oregon and with the promise that I wouldn’t be “loud,” I was allowed to attend an all girls’ high school in Sendai—Miyagi prefecture’s Third Girls’ High School. I’d requested Japan as my host country because I wanted to live near the sea.

Sure enough, from a window of my first host family’s home, I could strain my neck and (with a telescope!) see the sea. I looked forward to going to the nearby Matsushima, ranked as one of Japan’s “three great views.” Matsushima is comprised of about 260 tiny islands, some of them barely big enough to hold a pine tree.

Matsuo Basho made the Matsushima islands famous through his haiku poem in his Narrow Road to the Deep North (1689). Upon seeing the islands, he claimed to be unable to do anything but repeat the place name:

Oh Matsushima! Matsushima ya
Ah Matsushima! Aa Matsushima ya
Oh Matsushima! Matsushima ya

But the islands, it was reported yesterday, have not remained unscathed. Parts of islands have fallen into the sea. One of the larger five meter arches famous with tourists for the belief that by traveling through it your life will extend by three years, is gone. The smaller islands near it have disappeared. Parts of missing islands have been spotted elsewhere. Kokeshi Island named for the hand-painted armless wooden dolls of Sendai is a quarter of its size. A cynical Japanese blogger suggests that the islands' new shape is only bad news for the tourist industry. Another suggests that the islands can be renamed for their new shapes.

And yet, some of the islands with their sturdy pine trees held tight through the tsunami with their tree roots gripping the earth for all they were worth, tree roots like tough little knuckles popping out of rocky protrusions.

The worst news is that some of the islands are strewn with the tools of aquaculture. An island popular with tourists, Niojima, is wound with one of the many nets from the aquacultural industry loosed by the tsunami. Nets and buoys from the seaweed (nori) aquaculture are caught on the islands.

The beauty of Japan's coastline is at stake not for the damage of the tsunami to nature, but for what humans will do to the remaining natural landscape in its wake. Japan's northeastern coastline is both beautiful and horribly over-engineered. Japan, perhaps understandably, is bound and determined to already begin rebuilding in the wake of the tsunami to assert national control over a devastating disaster. I hope that this time the coastlines, the beautiful sea rocks, the blue of the warm sea can remain unscathed by human development. I hope they don’t rebuild. At least not too close to the sea. Let’s leave the beaches for the shellfish, for the sea urchin, the abalone, the sea cucumber, the surfers, the beachcombers. We're all in this together.

Dispersion of Radioactive Material and the Disbandment of Communities

Yesterday on NHK television, a guest on the national channel provided suggestions for avoiding radiation contamination while waving a pointer at a bulletin board: (1) Move around by car (2) Wear long sleeves (3) Wear a mask (4) Don’t get rained on. Then a television drama began to be aired—a historical drama complete with silk kimono clad women, tear-stained faces of samurai men, and cherry blossoms floating amidst a background of blue skies. The Japanese Twitterers were confounded. Surely this isn’t the time to pretend that things are back to normal by airing a television drama?

And today, it’s just been reported that precipitation is imminent in northeastern Japan today. If Fukushima sees rain, then, it’s suggested, it is best not to go out in the rain. But if you do, cover up!

And now the milk and spinach from the radiation zone is found to have enough radioactivity to stop sales. This reminds one of the Tsukiji fish market when the largest fish market in the world banned fish products from Isozu village which was across the Suzuka River from the Yokkaichi petrol chemical company. The fish from that area smelled so badly that mongers in Tokyo refused to peddle their fish and the village wilted into nothing. The milk and spinach from Fukushima are no longer being sold and people living in Fukushima are being asked not to drink or eat their own milk and spinach.

The dispersion of radioactive materials is being tracked across the seas on planes flying into Seattle and elsewhere but for now the only risk seems to regard the locals who must stop selling and eating their own locally grown produce.

Locals would like nothing more than to be able to survive on local produce and medicines. But, in fact, they have little. Minami-Souma residents are finally being bussed out of the area for lack of food and medicine. Another elderly man has died at the age of 82 for lack of care. Even with medicines in the cabinets, there are no nurses in Minami Souma to administer those medicines. So 40 busses from Minami Souma take the aged to Saitama prefecture where they will be fed and have care administered.

And yet, the elderly—a large percentage of the population in northeastern Japan—are in no hurry to leave their homes. They admit that once leaving it is unlikely that they will ever have a home to come back to. Far beyond getting food and medicine, this is their primary concern.

On the other hand, it is the aged in these communities who have brought some slight semblance of normalcy to devastated areas. In one town, an elderly man provides haircuts in the streets; in another a retired woman decides to reopen her shop to serve the locals. Out of his shop an elderly gentleman repairs bicycles—the only transportation in use for now in devastated areas—since they get frequent flats for the junk in the streets.

It is especially the elderly who cannot choose to stay who feel the pain of evacuation the most. Be a yokel, buy local . . . unless you live in Fukushima.

We’re all in this together.

Tides and Coastal Barriers

Japanese see in the moon a rabbit pounding rice cake. With a full moon this week, the rabbit will be more visible than usual and she brings with her higher than normal tides. The water will rise from the sea onto the beaches an extra foot or two. This tide may bring up even more corpses. Bodies have been washing up since Monday and coroners have been overwhelmed. NHK shows families seeking out wooden coffins of their loved ones, draped with white chrysanthemums and a plastic bag holding the shoes the victim was wearing at the time of his or her death.

The Sendai airport is a mere 6 to 7 feet above sea level. People in the airport at the time of the tsunami ran to the roof and the control tower. 1400 were saved. Those at lower levels weren’t so lucky. A heart-wrenching youtube video shows a dog racing madly to avoid being sucked into the tidal vortex of the receding wave and failing.

This week’s tides will be flooding at 1.46 meters on average. At Shiogama near Sendai, for example, the highest tides will occur between March 19^th and 24th, with highs at 1.44 meters and above. Tides will flood above 1.44 meters or 4.7 feet twelve times. The average flooding is 1.1 meters or 3.6 feet, so for that week the coast will experience flooding that is about a foot above normal. This may not sound like much, but when your international airport is six feet above sea level you need every foot you can get.

How is it that Japanese people living in the alluvial areas can protect themselves from this? Most major metropolitan areas in Japan are on alluvial plains. 73% of Japan is mountainous and living there is difficult. 14-16% of land is arable and much of this arable land is covered in concrete and prone to flooding.

New Orleans was in an even worse situation lying 6.5 feet below to 20 above sea level. Katrina hit New Orleans hard because its protective wetlands had been eroded by development. The draining of the wetlands for construction of roads, condos, and marinas has shrunk the coastline. Louisiana loses 25 miles of coastline every year to construction (Independent, September 2005). Levees and dams have been built to protect the city from hurricanes and floods but they’ve had the kind of side effect we see in Japan. The coastlines cannot build up natural barriers. Japan’s coastline is highly engineered with man-made barriers to stop tides and tetrapods to presumably stop erosion. The engineered coastline and waterways cased in concrete essentially funneled water into towns and cities. The saltwater islands and coastal marshes that used to buffer the coast from weather events now no longer do.

We’re all in this together.

Workers Under the Moon

While Tokyo dwellers go about their business in a seemingly defiant act of soldiering through daily routines, a few hundred miles away thousands continue to wait for assistance. While the Tokyo power company is hell-bent on getting trains running with no planned stops in the Tokyo metropolis and succeeded in doing so just today, global and local groups are trying to figure out how to get packs of food and energy to those in the tsunami and quake areas who are hungry and cold. There are complaints from some Japanese that the world is attentive only to the fate of the nuclear reactors. Perhaps this is not surprising because the fate of this particular nuclear plant will indeed have a global impact, both on the health of the planet and on the future of nuclear power. We are in this together.

The prime minister speaks of the life-threatening position in which reactor workers have placed themselves, not to mention the fire-fighting forces at the site out there from 12:30 am this morning, for twenty minutes, pouring yet more water on the roof of Reactor 3. They are called the “Hyper-rescue unit.” They are doubtlessly doing their jobs well and with great injury to self. But, contrary from much of the western reportage from Time Magazine (“How Japan Copes with Tragedy: A Lesson in the Art of Endurance”) the NYT, and elsewhere, this is not about “being taught as a youth the importance of the collective” (NYT, March). My colleague is right to say that it cheapens their situation and their efforts to frame their selflessness in the ways that the NYT has when it publishes phrases like the “Japanese are raised to believe that individuals sacrifice for the good of the group” (NYT, March 15). I would add that it makes those workers sound like robots. And it is ignores the real anger that is out there in the evacuation zone. And it aestheticizes the suffering.

Now the moon has added another level of danger to the situation. The coastlines are about to experience extremely high tides, the depths and times of which are continuously reported on the national NHK station. Fishermen and others who work the coasts are asked to “be especially careful during the hours preceding and following the high tides.” CNN reports that we in the US will have the largest full moon in twenty years. With the ground literally lower than it was before the quake and tsunami, an unusually high tide is the last thing that the coast needs. But the trains roll on.

We’re all in this together.

Gas Stoves and Feminine Napkins

Today’s NHK morning show, Asaichi, teaches women living in the resource-scarce evacuation centers how to make feminine napkins. In response to multiple write-in letters from those in evacuation areas asking for tampons and diapers to be sent, the television program provided detailed instructions on how to make feminine napkins by cutting off the sleeves of a shirt, stuffing cotton into the sleeves and using tape to make it stick. These instructions were followed by further instructions on how to make diapers from cotton towels. It didn’t take long for Japanese Twitterers watching the show to respond with the rather obvious point. If the evacuees had towels, they wouldn’t be begging those outside the crisis area to send tampons and diapers.

One thing that all will agree on: those in the evacuation centers need heat. They need gas, kerosene, and oil to heat the evacuation centers in schools and public buildings. For those who have not lived in the northern regions of Japan, the reliance on kerosene for heating may be unclear. Schools and a large number of homes in the north are heated by kerosene and gas. Homes may use portable units or have gas outlets in various rooms to which portable units connect. Kerosene and gas units have safety features that automatically cut off the fuel supply when the heater receives a shake from an accident or earthquake. They also shut off after two or three hours at night to prevent carbon monoxide fumes from building. The fires following the quake and tsunami could easily have been started from domestic kerosene tanks and loosed connections catching fire.

The most frequent complaint of those in the evacuation centers is of cold. Families sleep together to stay warm. Evacuation centers in the most devastated areas talked today of having only enough kerosene left for the night. Kerosene and oil are in such short supply that even the now famously “non-looting Japanese” have been found to have looters in the ranks. Kerosene has been stolen from elementary schools.

Trucks have driven oil and kerosene up from the south, but the lack of gasoline to keep delivery trucks running has meant lengthy lines that take seven hours to get through or no gasoline at all for these delivery trucks.

Without heat, those with influenza have increased. 21 people have died in evacuation centers in Fukushima from the lack of heat, food, medicine, and medical help; 14 of them in Ishinomaki city. So, while those evacuees in Ishinomaki’s Minato elementary school speak resignedly of having such a dearth of water that they no longer urinate, or that food that is delivered for twenty people that must be divided among twice that amount, or that medicines have been completely wiped from the shelves, or that they must pass buckets of water from the school’s swimming pool up multiple flights of stairs to dump into toilets in order to flush them—despite these complaints—likely the biggest concern is whether they will be warm tonight.

Those in Tokyo are forced to deal with rolling blackouts and train schedules through which TEPCO tries to save energy, but hardly 200 miles north of them, great wave victims wonder how long their heat will last. They are down to only days if not hours now.

Are we all in this together?

Place Names

The idea that this tragedy marks a moment through which the nation has proudly come together, as writer Azuma Hiroki has suggested in a recent New York Times piece (March 16, 2011), has already been squelched. Those people sequestered in towns and cities in Fukushima’s exclusion zone are finding little help from the outside as power and food supplies are rapidly depleted. Elderly Japanese have already died from lack of medicine and heat there. As reported in the LA Times and by BBC, those asked to stay in their homes in Fukushima are feeling sickened at their abandonment by the government. Japanese and foreign aid workers are reluctant to enter a zone that may likely be contaminated, and the government brings no relief supplies even as it asks them to stay home. One group suggests that the government asks them to stay indoors not for their own safety but to make their whereabouts traceable. Mayor of the town Minami-Souma in the exclusion zone, Katsunobu Sakurai, said on NHK television, "The government is demanding that we don't go out, but it isn't bringing us anything . . . Truck drivers don't want to enter the city. They're afraid of being exposed to radiation . . . . If the government says we're in a dangerous area, it should take more care of us!"

Traditionally, Japanese place names resonant with powerful histories. I am told that Minami-Souma has had an annual festival that commemorates the Souma clan capturing, training and offering wild horses to shrines of Souma. “Uma” means “horse” in Japanese. Commemorative battles of Japanese men (and more recently including women and children) in samurai garb sitting atop meticulously brushed horses are held in late July every year. Now, instead of being known for these festival events involving the place name of horse, Souma will be one of a number of areas linked with the disaster in Fukushima.

Sometimes those place names can have ominous associations. Minamata in the south now has a global association with methyl mercury poisoning. Fukushima will likely be forever linked to nuclear contamination much in the way that Minamata is forever remembered for the mercury contamination of its waters when the Chisso corporation began in 1932 to manufacture acetaldehyde, used to produce plastics, there. Mercury was essentially dumped into the water for decades but it was not until 1959 that the Chisso plant was found responsible for the pollution. It took ten more years for Chisso to finally stop production of acetaldehyde in 1968. Sociologist Akira Kurihara called the poisoning of the Minamata Bay a species-crossing genocide. It left hundreds of humans and millions of organisms dead and left thousands permanently impaired with devastating illnesses. Minamata is a name that is forever associated with industrial pollution and the fishing communities who contracted mercury poisoning. The disease they contracted, Minamata-byo or “Minamata disease,” is named for that place. Those with Minamata-byo were heavily ostracized and disparaged for fear of contagion.

Those living in the exposure zone of Fukushima are already linked with “hibakusha” (“explosion-affected people”)— those who survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Postwar hibakusha and their progeny, like the survivors of Minamata, have faced tremendous discrimination in Japan for fear of contamination directly by exposure or hereditarily—by having children with them. Rumors of the prospect of a similar stigma now worry some of those in and around the Fukushima plant. A 65-year old retired engineer from Sugagawa City, 30 miles from the plant who wished to remain anonymous was quoted as saying, "I am worried about the future . . . There could be some rumors that the people from this area are contaminated by radiation, and that people should not get close to us."

We should recall that decades-long fears of contamination from hibakusha or those with Minamata-byo were groundless. And there should be a way to get goods to the good people of Fukushima. Given the strong associations between place and disease in Japan, however, one shudders to think what the symptomatology of “Fukushima-byo” will be.

We’re all in this together.