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Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
Starting over A year after the Tohoku earthquake, as a community struggles to its feet, ‘recovery’ remains a long-term challenge
Yohei Chiba (MPP ’12) surveys the damage in Rikuzentakata, the coastal town where he was born, during his 2011 internship with Direct Relief International.
Japan has known earthquakes—the Great Kanto quake of 1923, the Great Hanshin quake of 1995, the Fukui quake of 1948, and hundreds of others— but Japan had never known an earthquake like the 9.0 Tohoku quake that struck just off the northeast coast last March. It was the fifth largest earthquake in recorded history, and the largest ever to hit the Land of the Rising Sun. The damage it left behind—mostly triggered by the massive tsunami that followed—was catastrophic.
T
he tremors shook southeastern Russia and the Northern Mariana Islands. Houses and buildings crumbled in Jayapura, Indonesia; Kailua Kona, Hawaii; and Pisco, Peru. A hemisphere away, vast portions of the Sulzberger Ice Shelf—two times the size of Manhattan—sheared into the sea. At the headquarters of the nonprofit Association for Aid and Relief (AAR) in Tokyo—230 miles from the epicenter— computers toppled and pictures crashed to the floor. But for Ford School master’s of public policy student Yohei Chiba (MPP ’12), the Tohoku earthquake hit home. Warning sirens blared as coastal communities in the Iwate Prefecture where Chiba spent his childhood were struck by a 75-foot tsunami thirty minutes after the initial quake. Powerful seawater surges swept fishing boats over flood walls, tossed cars and busses through the streets, and tumbled buildings and homes, claiming the lives of 20,000 people, and leaving behind mounds of sodden debris— the remnants of a town. Only two buildings in coastal Rikuzentakata, the city where Chiba was born, remained standing. One was the hospital where Chiba’s mother, director of nursing, spent the minutes following the earthquake rushing patients to higher floors to escape the rising waters. (Chiba’s mother and her patients survived: staff who remained on the first floor did not.)