Japan - Hearts Break For You | Cape Cod Daily News

By TRB

There was a CNN reporter at the side of a mud road who looked vaguely Japanese, but spoke like a mid-Westerner. She was explaining that the Japanese victims of the quake and the tsunami are very difficult to interview. And she said this was "typical" of Japanese people victimized by natural disaster. The things you "learn" about a people when it happens.

Yes, the things you learn, things you should have already known, had you been paying attention

People do not like to have microphones thrust in their faces when they have just lost everything they ever had. And the most ignorant question ever: "How will this disaster change your life?"

Bad things certainly happened to the Japanese, especially those living in the North. An 8.9 earthquake. At first I thought that figure must have been the result of a poor reading. Surely it could not be that large. But it was.

First the shake, then the tsunami, When I first saw it - the ocean - snaking its way over a tall retainer wall in what looked like slow motion, I thought, "well maybe this won't be too bad." These things don't look like giant waves, not from helicopter camera shots anyway, or even small non-tsunami waves, that always seem as though they are on a leash and something keeps pulling them back - Like the moon and magnetics in general.

This tsunami "wave" slowly rises out of the ocean, in this case to a level of 39 feet or more and then it begins to move forward. Like a very large man, who is on his way to kill someone with his bare hands.

Then slowly it dawns on you what the wave really is. It just seems slow and looks like a dark syrup; maybe that's what threw you off. But now it comes up against a wall maybe two or three feet higher than it is, and you see that the force, those unknowable tons of pressure behind it, are going to push it anywhere. That the pressure behind it is so great that you would be crushed by it. You see entire fleets of cars crushed against the side of a large building that quickly gives way and is driven into what looks like a unit of row houses. That too is picked up and taken by the wave, which almost seems as if it knows where it is going.

While this wave is carving everything away from the landscape leaving almost nothing behind, it is dragging all of this "debris," some of it actual human beings across the horrible wasteland it is sculpting and creating. It travels inland, as it did in some places in Japan for nearly six miles. Then it drags that millions of tons of debris and bodies all back, not depositing all that much of it, taking huge amounts of it back to the sea. Forever. Back with it into the sea. And it once again drags all those sharp and hard objects all those six miles, re-carving the landscape and picking up what it might have missed the first time.

And it leaves the water behind toxic, with fuel oil and chemicals, even dioxin. It will have to be cleaned up. The forever broken homes and machinery will have to be removed. The bare ground will have to be scoured. Ground that used to be their neighborhood, their town or their city. The Army will tell them they have to leave, There is no shelter at their homes, which are no longer there. It is getting dark and the Army officer insists that these people begin walking back on that mud path, back to higher ground where a school will serve as their shelter.

But what real shelter?

They won't have any lighting at this school They won't have any lighting for at least 30 days. Worse yet, they won't have any heat at this school. No on has heat and the atomic reactors on the shore are showing signs of melt down and orange skies mark the flaming fuel oil facilities that continue to burn day and night.

But it is winter in Northern Japan and the temperature will drop to 30 degrees tonight. The people will all gather on the school room floor; they will get together huddling as close as they can. The elderly and the children will be positioned in the center of their gathering in order to receive the most body heat.

The next morning they will awake and do it all over again, looking for homes and lives that were taken out to sea by the thousands. It is like one of those bad dreams that you just have to revisit until you get it into your head that it is not a dream at all, that the tsunami has stolen your home and your family and your friends -- because it could.

And you shiver, standing there in the cold weather, a plastic bottle in your hand, You wonder how you will clean your dirty body with this single bottle of cold water but you know it has to be done. You have to keep living.