Read Online Facing the Wave by Gretel Ehrlich - Free Book Online Page B

friends from Kyoto came to help volunteer, and we all lived communally. Once she experienced it, she began to accept me. She liked this way of living. We cooked together, slept in small tatami rooms, used the outhouse, and bathed in the
ofuro
, the wood-fired bathtub. It was more like the way life was when she was a girl.”
    Patches of blue slide by and are overtaken by radioactive mist. Abyss-san says the government should give everyone a Geiger counter. “The radiation is not just at the coast,” he tells me. “It’s up in the mountains where I live too. It’s everywhere.”
    Earlier he’d given us a list of dos and don’ts to avoid radiation contamination:
    Drink only bottled spring water.
    Don’t hang washing outside.
    Don’t use hair conditioners—they hold radiation particles to the hair, which are absorbed by the scalp.
    Cut hair and save it in a Ziploc bag to use as a baseline for how much more radiation has been absorbed.
    Drink 3 grams of charcoal to 3 grams of water a day; eat brown rice, vegetables, and miso. No meat.
    Use coffee filters and charcoal to filter water.
    Wash whole body with salt scrub.
    In the
ofuro
refill with clean water each time.
    For two months after the tsunami, Abyss-san used his van to transport food and supplies to anyone in need. He’d pull up to a center, open the back doors, and say, take whatever you need. He recalls that he got almost no sleep. Friends from distant places showed up and pooled their money to buy toilet paper, diapers, rice, tea, potatoes, cabbage, onions, and carrots for the refugees. “People were hungry,” he said. “Some gave what little food they had to their children. I tried to make sure that everyone had something to eat.”
    His van runs on biodiesel and can also run on propane. When gasoline ran out in every Tohoku town, he could still get around. “If the government had told people about running their cars on propane, some lives could have been saved. The politicians care too much about order and normalcy. That’s our Japanese flaw. It does no good to suppress fear and cling to conformity. We have to meet the truth. There is no order now.”
    Koinobori
—cloth fish—flutter from bamboo poles, seemingly taller because everything around them is gone. We drive through Kesennuma, Abyss-san’s hometown, where the new baseball stadium, completed just before the
jishin
, is now charred. One lamp pole was left standing, its light twisted and bent around as if peering into someone’s ear. The squashed steering wheel of atruck has been pushed to the side and hangs out of the driver’s opened door.
    A line of blue-uniformed policemen lift the roof of a house that’s grounded in deep water to retrieve the dead body of one of the town’s hundreds of missing. A few damaged houses have signs that read: “Please don’t demolish; there are still important things inside.” We pass a “three-up”: a house on top of a convenience store on top of a ship. Rubble has been shoved and shaped by bulldozers into a mountain range that mirrors the mountainous spine running north and south through Honshu. “Another version of the Japanese Alps,” Abyss-san quips.
    As we leave town Abyss-san says, “The tsunami was an incident within prediction boundaries. I knew it would happen someday so I moved from the port of Kesennuma to the mountains in a place with good water. I chose to live this way because I’m not satisfied with the ‘normal’ world, and as small as I am on the planet, at least I can start being a part of a change. There’s so much to be done. I continue to be active in helping now to pay respect to those who died in the tsunami.”
    A tow truck with a red Ferrari in back zooms by. Nikki flakes out on the bed in back and quickly falls asleep. Three policemen hover over a hole in the ground. We pass a mountain of coal, a dam holding milkshake-brown water, a stone lantern store, a rack of used clothes for sale by the side of the road, an