Harbour Wave

Last month, March 11th to be exact, 'a big one' hit Japan. The destruction that followed from the tsunami hit the area I used to live and a massive stretch of the northern coast in Tohoku. Although I haven't lived there for over two years, the area is very close to my heart. I'm fairly certain the ocean school, Ukedo Elementary School, I used to teach at has been destroyed by the wave. It reached up to and across route six, the main road that runs south/north along the coast.

Namie is in the area that was hit by the Tsunami and the subsequent radiation issue, although it wasn't featured on the news, in a map on the BBC, I can see how close my little town is to the nuclear power station that is now going into melt down. The BBC's Japan feature pages and Facebook were my main sources of info around the time of the earthquake and the destruction that followed.

I can't contact the older people I was in contact with via letter, and I'm pretty sure they aren't on Facebook, although recently, a fellow Namie JET, Aleisha, has put me on to a list issued by our town council naming all the survivors, which I did look at a few names I remember in full and they were on there. So I can only hope they are at least safe somewhere. The friends I know still in Japan and across the world have been pretty amazing at keeping everyone updated on Facebook about what was going on in the place we all used to call home.

Namie is right in the exclusion zone, it must look like a ghost town there and probably will for a while due to the amount of radiation that is now in the area. It's so sad and I can't imagine what happened to the families of the kids I used to teach and the teachers I used to work with and I expect all the rice paddies will be laying fallow this season and for a few seasons to follow.

I really do.

I have folders and folders of photos from my time teaching in Namie, this is a link  (unfortunatly, I now don't look as trim as I do in these photos) to an album I made,  right at the end of my time teaching in Namie which I think sums up my experience and connection to that part of the world.