Writing Fukushima #13 Ukedo Elementary School: Another Victim of the Disaster

The schoolhouse and their

student days — mirages shimmering

in heat haze

(Manabiya mo manabishi hibi mo kagiroeru)

※kagerō: "shimmering heat haze," describes a phenomenon that occurs in the spring. Strong sunlight heats the earth's surface, giving rise to a kind of haze in which the shapes of things seem to waver and shimmer. In haiku, the noun is sometimes turned into a verb, and becomes "kagiroeru."

On the llth of March, a week after its graduation ceremony, Ukedo Elementary School was hit by a grade 6-plus earthquake on the Japanese scale of 7. The children immediately dove under their desks as they had been trained to do in disaster drills, and held their breaths as the shaking went on for over three minutes. The school is only three hundred meters away from the sea. Expecting a tsunami, the teachers at once decided to have the children race to the nearest high ground in town. The first graders had already gone home (their school day ended earlier than the upper grades), but the remaining 80 children, with teachers and staff, set off at a run for Ohirayama, two kilometers away. Shouting encouragement to each other as the roar of the tsunami sounded from behind, the children clambered up the hill, threading their way among the trees uprooted in the earthquake. Soon the tsunami swallowed up the houses around the school and reached the hill's foot, but when the children and their caretakers arrived at National Route 6, a large truck that happened to be passing by let them all ride on its cargo bed and delivered them to the Namie Town Hall.

At last they reached the evacuation shelter, where most of the children were scooped up by parents who had been frantically looking for them. But for some of the children there was no hope of ever meeting their families again, no matter how long they waited. Next day the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant exploded and mass evacuation was ordered for Namie. How lonely and forlorn it must have been for the children who had lost their families and had to move to places where they knew no one.

Last September, I headed south by car from Minamisoma on National Route 6, which was fully open for the first time in three and a half years. Because it runs north to south through the 20-kilometer radius no-entry zone, it had been impossible to drive there before. Even now no one can enter any area within a 10-kilometer radius of the reactor except with a special pass. All the side roads running east or west from Route 6 are blocked by barricades. Perhaps because it was a Friday, there were many private vehicles, and it was so crowded that from time to time traffic came to a halt. But the moment we entered the Odaka district, everything seemed to undergo a transformation. Buildings crushed by the earthquake and tsunami had been abandoned as they were and the devastated houses were buried in weeds. It was like entering a ghost town.

We were stopped at the inspection point of the road leading into Ukedo district and one by one were required to show our identity papers and permission cards for passage. As we made our way east along the Ukedo River, once famous for its salmon run, Ukedo Elementary School appeared, with the pure blue ocean behind. With almost nothing to obstruct the line of sight, smashed cars covered in rust lay about here and there like crumpled scraps of paper. It was impossible to imagine this entire strip of land as the residential area it had been. In Namie over five hundred people had died or gone missing. Kusano Shrine, famous for its three centuries old Anba (Wave-pacifying) Festival and Taue (Rice-planting) Dance, its shrine grove and its shrine building, had been swept away in toto, and the roots of its huge torn trees barely managed to cling to the earth's surface.

The piles of rubble around the elementary school had been cleared away, but entering the gym, the first thing we noticed was a banner above the stage saying "Congratulations to our new graduates." In the first floor classrooms there were no desks, chairs, or even walls. A single backpack, left open, was covered in mud. The hands of all the clocks pointed to 3:38 PM, the time the tsunami had come. As for the second floor classrooms, which had escaped damage from the tsunami, time seemed to have stopped at the moment of flight four years before. Written on a small blackboard at the back of the room were the words, "This month's aims," and under them, "Let's review the school year. Let's not confuse class time and play time." The students had been planning to look back over the past school year and plan for the coming year. The school building preserved this evidence of the childrens' life from slightly before the earthquake to the future they should have had. The children will not be seeing their old school for a long time. They are not allowed to enter an area with high radiation levels like this. From the classroom window, we gazed out on the indigo ocean and the exhaust stacks of the nuclear reactor plant. Ironically, before the disaster the reactor was hidden from view by trees and buildings.

After the disaster, there was debate in Iwate and Miyagi prefectures about whether buildings that had been damaged should be preserved as monuments in memory of the disaster or cleared away and replaced. But Ukedo Elementary School, neither preserved nor cleared away, was simply left to the elements. To be blunt, it was abandoned. Its image merged in my mind with the children of Fukushima, who even now are powerless dependents of adult society.

As we were leaving, we ran into a group of foreigners touring the school, who turned out to be Buddhists from around the world. I imagined them back at home, talking about what they saw in Fukushima and about Ukedo Elementary School, and I seemed to hear this little school, abandoned like a desert island, turn to the world and begin to raise its once-stilled voice.

Note: All the students of Ukedo Elementary School survived. However, a significant number of them lost their families because of the tsunami. As of 2015, the entire population of Namie is living elsewhere because of the nuclear disaster, in temporary residences spread across twenty-four prefectures, and Ukedo Elementary School has been permanently closed.

Haiku and text: Madoka Mayuzumi

Translation: Janine Beichman

Photo credit: Fukushima-Minpo Co., Ltd.

First publication: 9 June 2015, Fukushima-Minpo Newspaper