First Days
The country of the rising sun gave me a warm welcome almost immediately: the emerging つゆ、or “rain season” in Japanese, had wrapped the megacity of Tokyo in a thick mist, and warm droplets of rain gushing from thunder clouds were giving my skin a warm touch after a 14 hour flight. Somewhat hurriedly, I walked towards the Marunouchi district, home to the Tokyo station - a magnificent red brick building wrongly rumored to be modeled after the Dutch canals - my first destination. Crossing the Ginza district, with its flashy signs and extravagant alleys, felt like a movie coming to life. “This is it,” I thought, “I am in Japan, I made it.” Fidelious to my task however, I did not stop in Ginza to adore the elegant and many times rebuilt Kabukiza theatre, nor the well-lit and almost courteous-looking Chūō-dori, and instead continued northwest towards the station. I did not have much time, or so I thought, as if the station that has been there for more than a century and that has withstood WWII-era bombings would suddenly uproot itself from the ground and walk away.
The first step in my LiA was actually getting to Otsuchi, a remote coastal town in the Northern Iwate Prefecture in the Tōhoku region. Japan, a country known for its well-connected rail network, immediately impressed me with just how orderly and efficient the transit system was. After some six hours, a donburi on the Tōhoku Shinkansen, a peculiarly named Iwate Galaxy Railway train, and a ride with my friendly supervisor, Yuki-san, I was there - my new home for the next six weeks. Time was already running low - which is descriptive of my overall life - as the first workshop for local students was scheduled just a day after.
The Other Side of Japan
On the steamy hot afternoon of June 5th, I sat in Yuki-san’s car, holding my haphazardly printed maps of Sanriku coast in my hands. We set off to Kamaishi High School - where my workshops were scheduled to be held. Only on this drive I started to notice a pattern about the whole area - hollowing out.
When the 2011 Great Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami struck, the town of Otsuchi was completely destroyed, leveled to the ground. More than 10% of its population had fallen victim to this catastrophe, and its impact was still showing almost 15 years after. Many people had vanquished in the disaster, but even more had left and never quite returned, and this isolated coastal community never recovered to its pre-tsunami population or lifestyle. Middle of the city was dotted with empty spaces and occasional spots of barley-colored grass - it was where houses once stood. Buildings that existed beyond people’s memories and old photographs looked brand new, with sleek facades and shiny windows, probably rebuilt only five or six years ago. Huge walls of concrete had been erected all along the coastline with evacuation instructions printed every fifty meters.
My First Workshop
As I was carried away in thoughts, observations and a cordial conversation with Yuki-san about Iwate’s dairy culture, the car pulled up to a tall and wide, imposing building - Kamaishi high school, but despite its size, less than one hundred students called it their alma mater. The marks of depopulation permeated my surroundings more and more.
The first workshop was my everything - it was when the students saw me for the first time and got their hands on the software - ArcGIS. I showed them the map of the coast where they lived, told them briefly about the Laidlaw scholarship and a distant University of Toronto, before proceeding with the actual workshop. The projector a school coordinator had procured was small and somewhat dusty, and, once turned on, it cast a blurry image on the whiteboard I later realized was of my own screen. I spun a little wheel on its frontal lens, but to no avail.
As I looked around while meticulously (in my mind) explaining the basic functions of this esoteric piece of software, it struck me that a gap was widening between reality and how I imagined these workshops months back. In my February-March predictions of my time in Japan, I pictured these sessions in a large classroom filled with students, sitting at circular tables and diligently working through exhilarating GIS problems. I was quite wrong. The classroom was much smaller, and so was the number of students who had signed up. Perhaps I had not realized that in a school of a handful of dozen, I could not assemble a full classroom of GIS-zealous students.
My broken Japanese was in no way enough to explain software mechanics, and while students could understand and speak English to some level, we all agreed that translation would be better. So I stopped my speech every now and then for Yuki-san to regurgitate my spiel in Japanese, which she did diligently, with a somehow reassuring passion.
The first workshop was a success, despite technical problems and my internal doubts over the number of people attending or even understanding anything about what I was saying. The students had their software up and running, and we had already explored populating the map with various esoteric layers like sea water temperatures and marine biodiversity index.
Settling In
Perhaps because I felt some pressure come off as we exited the classroom and headed towards the exit, I noticed how tight the green slippers I was wearing were. I had hastily put them on after taking my shoes off some three hours prior when we first walked in. Walking without shoes in most public buildings and even offices was perhaps one of the greatest cultural shocks I observed immediately, yet it started to feel somewhat natural and comforting just a few days in.
On the next, even hotter, June day, I successfully familiarized myself with the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute (AORI) of the University of Tokyo, which is my host institution. Azure blue mural of various sea animals native to Sanriku coast greeted me as I entered AORI - a quite imposing, modern and sleek building, and after being introduced to all the researchers and the director of the institute, I was promptly taken by Yuki-san to my desk in the researcher room #2.
I spent the rest of the week exploring Otsuchi on a small e-bike that always stood next to the blue mural, and winding down after a long journey followed by a hastily assembled workshop. つゆ (rain season) took a couple of days longer to reach this north, so I bathed in the Sun’s warm radiance before it gave way to warm showers emanating from cotton-shaped gray clouds, reminiscent of my time in Tokyo.