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I lived in Japan for two years. I lived in the south, a long way from the Tohoku region, and in fact I never visited that part of the country. But I lived in a coastal town, just like the coastal towns in Tohoku. My town looked very similar to the ‘before’ pictures that were common one year ago, and that are recurring now. The same wooden houses, the same blue-green fishing boats, the same tiny white trucks.

My town, like the coastal towns in Tohoku, was constantly aware of the risk of tsunamis. The centre of town occupied a small isthmus, a flat, low stretch of land between the coastline and a hilly peninsula. On one side, the town was protected by a large island. On the other, nothing. The steep hills just inland forced all the buildings – the houses, shops, restaurants, offices, schools – to occupy a narrow space, around a kilometre wide, between the slopes and the sea.

The town was constantly aware of the risks; just a few decades before, in living memory, the town centre had been destroyed by a tsunami. You would never know to look at it – as you would never know to look at the city of Kobe, now, less than twenty years on from the earthquake there – that it had been completely rebuilt.

The town was constantly aware of the risks; the schools held regular drills. A kindergarten I taught at sat in a narrow bay: reportedly the most risky place on the island. Every morning, the children practiced running up the hill behind the school. A school I taught at sat right on a pier, three sides facing the sea. It was built as a ‘strong’ structure; during the drills, the children crouched on the ground, waiting for the ‘shaking’ to stop, then ran to the roof of the school. Another school was on a tiny patch of land between the sea and impassable hills. A platform – two stories high, with concrete steps – had been built between the houses. An artificial high place, better than nothing.

The town was constantly aware of the risks; the schools were all designated emergency gathering places, concrete structures unlike the wooden houses that surrounded them. They kept bottles of water everywhere, emergency supplies, usually a defibrillator and other medical supplies as well. I was issued with lists of what to put in my emergency bag, where to go, what the town PA system would do in an emergency. How to leave messages for loved ones on a central system if the mobile phone networks were overloaded.

I was lucky – during the two years I was there, I only felt two quakes; one short shock that rattled my windows early one morning, and one long, rumbling shudder that lasted long enough for us to open the door of my friend’s apartment, just in case,* on the last night before I flew home for good.

I was lucky – the town sirens never went off for an approaching tsunami. I had two or three false alarms – announcements over the PA system that woke me, and had me out of the house with my coat and emergency bag, before I realised that they were warning of a fire in another part of town.

I was lucky – an earthquake the size of the one that struck Tohoku one year ago did not hit my town. The sheer magnitude of the earthquake, and the enormity of the tsunami that followed, was more than anything that my town – like the towns in Tohoku – was prepared for. My nearest designated shelter – the library behind my house – was six metres above sea level. The tsunami that struck parts of Iwate prefecture was over thirty metres high.

The towns in Iwate and Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures may never be rebuilt. Those towns, like the town I lived in, were slowly shrinking as the population aged and young people moved to the cities in search of a better life. But those who stayed, like those who stayed in my town, lived their lives like everyone else. They worked, and played, and prepared for disasters like the rest of Japan. But no matter how much preparation goes on, it may never be enough. The news coming from Tohoku in the last year has focused on the effects of the tsunami on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor. That’s an important story and it needs to be told. But today I will remember those in the little coastal towns who did everything they could to prepare but who were overwhelmed by a disaster of unimaginable scale.

このたびはご愁傷さまでございます。

* Opening the door at the start of a quake ensures that you won’t be trapped if the doorframe buckles.