I met up with my Japanese host and colleague Megumi Sugimoto – a postdoctoral scholar at Tokyo University. She was working in Indonesia in 2004 and joined one of the first teams to visit Aceh. She has been working on a tsunami mitigation project in Padang for the last several years and was with the first group to visit the Mentawai Islands after last October’s tsunami. That was a so-called “tsunami earthquake” – where the ground shaking doesn’t feel very strong but the tsunami is large. Her work convinced me to emphasize how long the earthquake lasts rather than how strong it feels. Tsunami earthquakes may not shake very strongly but they still last a long time.

Megumi has been working in the tsunami-hit area for several weeks now and it’s been very informative to see it through her eyes. There is more earthquake damage than I first thought. Most of it is non-structural – cracks in walls and at the corners of doors and windows, heavy tile roofs that are now covered with tarps, building facades neatly covered with enormous mesh sheets to hide the construction work being done behind. The cleanup of the earthquake damage has proceeded so quickly that it is hard to recognize. She tells me that there is much more earthquake damage in Fukishima Prefecture, but we won’t be working there because of the nuclear plant.

Today we rent a car – a brand new Mazda that we are told not to get sandy – and head towards the Sendai coast near the airport. The airport, located slightly more than half a mile from the coast, suffered major damage in the tsunami estimated to have reached 32 feet. You can see it Here. And the before and after pictures can be seen Here. 1300 people were trapped at the airport for two days. The airport reopened on April 13 in large part due to the assistance of the US military. It was rather bizarre to see an island of well-dressed passengers headed to and from the airport in the midst of total devastation. We wanted to check out the fate of a grove of pine trees that had been planted about 15 years ago as a “tsunami forest”. Some scientists have argued that a sufficiently large grove of trees can dissipate tsunami energy. Unfortunately this grove didn’t have a chance. Most of the trees had been neatly snapped about a foot above the ground and now were mere indicators of the flow direction.

Next stop Matsushima, considered one of the three most beautiful ocean views in all Japan (the other two are Miyajima off of Hiroshima and Amanohashidate near Kyoto City). This picturesque vacation town inside Matsushima Bay was nearly untouched by the tsunami. Waters surged over a five foot wall and several hundred feet into the town but not sufficient to cause much damage. The shape of the bay protected the town from brunt of the tsunami. The town has well-signed evacuation routes leading people to the most beautiful evacuation shelter I’ve ever seen – the Zen Meditation Center within the 13th century Zuiganji Temple grounds. For five days many tourists were sheltered at the temple. Because the town had so little damage, it served as a staging area to launch relief efforts in the much harder hit areas to the north and south. Matsushima was very busy today – with a large film crew, a beauty queen, and several large mascot-sized creatures – all celebrating the reopening of the Matsushima ferry service.

Last stop was East Matsushima just north of Matsushima Bay and unfortunately exposed to the triple whammy of the Pacific Ocean, River, and a canal system. After the beauty of Matsushima, it was a blow to be plunged again into devastation.

Just felt a light aftershock, a 4.8, 65 miles east of here – my first since being in Japan.