Today is Children’s Day – the final National Holiday that closes Golden Week. The day is marked by flying large gaily painted koi representing family members from poles or wires. First stop today was the evacuation shelter in Iwanuma City– the next city south of Yuriage in Natori City. Several koi were flying on the flag pole outside of the shelter – at half mast. Iwanuma has made progress in moving people out of the cardboard cubicles in the evacuation shelter and establishing temporary housing. Neat rows of three room mobile housing filled the open spaces around the evacuation shelter. We talked to people still in the main evacuation shelter and to people who had moved into the new temporary spaces. The difference in morale was night and day – no surprise that having one’s own space beats four cardboard walls and the floor.

Next we headed north to East Matsushima. Over 1700 people died in the East Matsushima – Higashi area where tsunami surges attacked from three directions – the coast, the Naruse River, and a canal that cuts across the city and joins Matsushima Bay to the Naruse River. We looked at the designated evacuation place in a school auditorium that was located only 2/3s of a mile from the coast and less than 800 feet from the canal. The building had no upper floors and was filled with tsunami debris. It seemed and odd choice for vertical evacuation when it was located right next to the three-story reinforced concrete elementary school. Megumi thought that the reason the school wasn’t the choice was that, unlike the school in Yuriage, the stairs were within the building and Japan has been very nervous about allowing outsiders to enter the interior of schools ever since the Osaka school massacre in 2001.

We met a group of volunteers wearing Animal Rescue T-shirts. The group included two women -from Ireland and British Columbia. These are the first Caucasians I’ve run into in the disaster area. They said their group was sponsored by FEMA, which has become very active in animals in disasters since Hurricane Katrina. The situation for pets is very difficult in Japan. The women told me that many shelters won’t accept animals and some tsunami survivors have had to give up their animals to city shelters and near-certain euthanasia. There are several animal rights groups working to develop alternatives.

We finished the day with a quick tour out to the tip of the peninsula that separates Mastushima Bay from the Pacific Ocean. We chose a bad time of day to do the drive – 4 PM when all of the dump trucks and other heavy equipment were heading home for the end of the day. Some places were a very tight squeeze. The contrast between the impacts on the Pacific side and the Bay were remarkable. On the Pacific, communities were obliterated. On the Bay, the main impacts were from liquefaction and the tsunami was relatively negligible.