'No smiling please. There is a tsunami right behind you'

Fishing boats rest piled up on debris in the northern Japanese city of Kesennuma a day after the 8.9 magnitude quake and tsunami hit the country. Photo / Getty Images

On the fourth anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan, Isaac Davison finds a community that's battered but unbowed

I am at the start line of a running race in Kamaishi, a small fishing town in northern Japan.

"No smiling please, it is very serious," our Japanese interpreter says as we take our marks. "There is a tsunami right behind you."

There are ten of us taking part in the traditional race from the town centre to the Senjuin Temple on the hillside above. Most of us are foreign journalists, some wearing ties and leather shoes. The starter yells "Go!" and we sprint down a side street before starting the steep, winding ascent to the temple.

My legs quickly tire during the climb and my glasses begin to fog up. I think of the YouTube footage of the 2011 tsunami washing down the exact street we are running along, of the black-brown torrent of seawater slipping under cars and flipping them, of the cracking and popping noises of wooden houses being shredded.

I quicken my pace. The other runners' keys and phones are jangling in their pockets. One of them trips and falls. I'm the first to make it to the temple and I savour the relief of being high above sea level.

"If you're going to win a race, it may as well be the life or death one," the interpreter says.

Exactly four years ago, hundreds made the same mad dash up this hill as a 4.3-metre-high tsunami crushed their homes below. The race is a regular event, and serves as both a disaster memorial and an evacuation drill.

The tsunami on March 11, 2011, eventually reached about 1km into the Kamaishi township. Standing at this watermark later, I look around. There is not even a sniff of the sea, a seagull, or any other sign that the Pacific Ocean is near. The town lost 1250 people to the tsunami, but the toll was unusual because it included just five children.

Frozen in time

"They knew to run up the hill and not look back," the temple's priest Ebo Shinasaki says, praising the locals schools' regular evacuation drills.

New Zealand's ambassador to Japan Mark Sinclair tells me that if New Zealand could learn one lesson from Japan, it was the way the schoolchildren were taught how to respond to a tsunami warning. They learned never to return home, never to look for family, and to run for high ground without hesitation. This simple safety message was credited with limiting the death toll to 3 per cent of the population living on low-lying land.

After Kamaishi, our bus tour heads south along the eastern coast of Japan, skirting the worst-hit prefectures of Iwate and Miyagi. Many towns are like post-quake Christchurch, with conspicuous holes in the landscape and a constant hum of reconstruction. Land is being raised by up to five metres and new buildings are being built without a first floor to allow any future tsunamis to wash underneath. Communities are being moved to higher ground, and seawalls are being rebuilt higher than before at a huge cost - up to $700 million in Kamaishi alone. Some of the coastal townships have been erased altogether by the tsunami and are now barren dirt fields.

Children pray during a memorial ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of the tsunami. Photo / Getty Images

The only relics of the disaster are cherished. The single surviving tree out of a forest of 70,000 in a town called Rikuzentakata is known as the Miracle Lone Pine Tree. An overpass nearby is called the Bridge of Hope.
We drive towards the sea in Sendai, where the tsunami's watery fingers reached 4km inshore. Gradually the houses reduce in number, and soon we are driving alongside a bare landscape of ruined rice fields.

The five-storey Arahama Elementary School is the only building left standing. On the day of the tsunami, 320 people huddled on the roof of the school while every other structure was swept away.

Its classrooms are frozen in time. The blackboard still has the teacher's instructions for "How to Hold a Pencil" from that day four years ago. My blood runs cold when a tour guide points out the salty watermark at waist height on the second storey - the tsunami's high point.

Later, our shuttle driver in Sendai tells me of a friend who developed post-traumatic stress disorder after witnessing people disappearing in the pall of seawater and being sucked into manholes. He also talks about the absurd things he saw in the quake's aftermath. Dozens of people dug in the dirt for 18,000 beer cans which were buried when a Kirin beer factory collapsed.

Never Forget

There are regular reminders of New Zealand in this part of Japan. I meet a Japanese firefighter, Tokihata Tateish, who becomes tearful when talking about his deployment to Christchurch in February 2011. Not because of the difficult search and rescue work he did there, but because Christchurch residents cheered for him on the streets. "I will never forget the gratitude they showed me," he says.

In Sendai, I am told about a Japan-New Zealand Association which had been planning a fundraiser for quake-affected Christchurch residents on March 11, 2011. The association's members were about to head out onto the streets with buckets and flyers when they were stopped in their tracks by the Magnitude 9 quake.

Some residents in Sendai prepared for the worst but it was nearly not enough.

Arahama Elementary School during the tsunami. Photo / Supplied

Arahama Elementary School now lies abandoned. Photo / Isaac Davison

Kenji Hiriyama, the general superintendent of manufacturing company Sendai Works, developed a safety manual 35 years ago in anticipation of a one-in-1000-year disaster. He helped build an artificial hill on the company grounds eight metres above sea level, as well as raised roads and a dense forest which acted as barriers to a tsunami.

When the moment he had feared arrived, he helped evacuate every staff member to the hill within six minutes.

"They knew what to do," Mr Hiriyama said. "They knew not to drive. They knew to get the highest point and stay there."

However, the initial warning by the Japan Meteorological Agency of a three-metre wave turned out to be an underestimate. As Mr Hiriyama and his employees stood on the hill, the water continued to rise, eventually covering their shoes.

"It was terrifying," he said. They had picked their evacuation spot and they had to stick with it. Luckily, the seawater stopped rising after an hour. They lit a bonfire and stood on the hill all night as the water subsided. The spot is now marked with a red shrine and the words "Never Forget".

Rebuilding lives

After the great quake, Mr Hiriyama was not taking any chances. He built a state-of-the-art, solar-powered evacuation tower on the company's site, 16 metres above sea level.

I ask him what drove his fear of a tsunami. Did he lose someone in a disaster? Did he have a traumatic childhood experience of an earthquake?
His looks blankly at me: "We are a manufacturing company. Safety is our priority."

The unprecedented quake in March 2011 has left coastal towns in the north of Japan battered but unbowed. During 10 days in the region I do not hear a single complaint from residents about the circumstances the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster left them in.

Devastation in Japan. Photo / Getty Images

Instead, the country has adopted two mantras: "Build Back Better" and "Never Forget".

As we leave Sendai, I ask our driver for any advice for New Zealanders on disaster preparedness. He says that four years on from the Great East Japan Earthquake, as towns rebuild and lives are restored, memories of the event are fading.

Echoing a common refrain, he says that if Japanese are to learn from the tragedy, they must never forget it.

"When we catch a cold, that is when we think of our health," the driver tells me. When our lives are comfortable again, we have to think of the bad times."

On alert

New Zealand is watching Japan and its preparedness for tsunamis carefully, very aware that it shares the same geological conditions which produced the 2011 mega-quake and tsunami.

"New Zealand's geological setting on the Pacific Ring of Fire is almost identical," says GNS natural hazards scientist Graham Leonard, who was in Sendai last month to work with local experts.

Both countries are island nations which sit on the tectonic plate boundary where the Pacific Plate subducts below another plate.

Of primary concern to New Zealand scientists is the Hikurangi margin, a plate boundary which runs through the Alpine Fault in the South Island, along the eastern side of the North Island and northwards to Tonga.

"We can't rule out ... a similar length of that very large faultline rupturing similarly to what happened in Japan in 2011," Dr Leonard says. "And that's very concerning."

Kenji Hiriyama, general superintendent of manufacturing company Sendai Works, with an evacuation tower constructed after the March 2011 tsunami. Photo / Isaac Davison

Around 700 years ago, an earthquake rose up out of Cook Strait, washing over the land where Wellington airport is now situated. Scientists are looking at onshore deposits to see how far our previous tsunamis reached inland.

Dr Leonard says there could be some value in upgrading the public alerts system in New Zealand to send warnings to mobile phones about tsunamis caused by distant mega-quakes, such as in the Pacific Islands or Chile.
"Every extra minute we can get for an early warning is really important because we wouldn't feel the earthquake here," he says.

False alarm

Japan's alert system goes even further. It is the only country in the world which gives automated warnings before a large earthquake even hits. After detecting the fast-moving "p-waves" which travel ahead of a tremor and are picked up by sensitive instruments, the Japan Meteorological Agency sends alerts to mobile phones, desktop computers and TV screens.
The warnings provide enough time for bullet trains and nuclear reactors to be shut down.

Dr Leonard believes there is little merit in this more advanced system in New Zealand. The distances between major faultlines and cities in New Zealand are shorter, meaning the expensive technology would give seconds, not tens of seconds' warning. There is also a risk of false alarms, which can make people more complacent about disasters.

He says people should not wait for official warnings, but follow this simple piece of advice: "If you feel a long earthquake, more than a minute, or a strong earthquake that's hard to stand up in, you need to evacuate and not wait for any official warning."