Casualties and Damages

Sleepy town reels from tsunami devastation

By Martin Fackler (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-03-14 08:48

NAKAMINATO, Japan - Takako Koguchi turned 78 on Thursday. On Friday, hours before a planned birthday celebration, she saw a wave of black water coursing through the streets of this small fishing town, heading toward her.

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Just 15 minutes had passed since a devastating earthquake rocked Nakaminato and a broad stretch of the northeastern coast.

She rushed to her car and managed to escape before the debris-laden water crumpled one of the walls of her small ryokan, or inn, and left a trail of destruction in this small fishing town. On Saturday, the streets were carpeted with sticky brown mud and stank of the dead fish deposited by one meter of water that had coursed over the roads closest to the ocean.

Koguchi spent the night in a community center, in freezing temperatures, but went home as soon as she could on Saturday. She had not eaten in 24 hours.

"People used to come and praise my inn as beautiful," she said as she tried to clear the silt and fish that blanketed the inn. "Now look at it. It's disheartening."

Many hours after the most powerful quake to strike Japan in recorded history struck off the country's northeastern coast, people here remained on the edge.

They had spent the night without electricity, running water or working telephones, and aftershocks rocked the area all night on Friday and through the day on Saturday. On Sunday, waiting cars stretched for more than half a mile at the few open gas stations in the prefecture, and shoppers lined up in the few open supermarkets.

The scenes of destruction here are especially frightening because they are far from the worst-hit areas.

Nakaminato is on the southern edge of the worst devastation from the 9-magnitude quake and the tsunami it spawned, which swept away whole villages farther north along the coast. Nakaminato sits about 249 km south of Sendai, the northern city that bore much of the brunt of Friday's tsunami.

Before the shaking and the waves hit, Nakaminato was something of a sleepy town, left behind by the industrial buildup in recent decades. People - mostly the elderly left behind by children seduced by urban life - made their livings mainly from fishing; the heart of the town was a fishing co-op on the waterfront.

On Saturday, the waterfront was battered, and Nakaminato's residents were surrounded by the signs of a livelihood left in tatters. Giant freezers in the co-op were stacked on top of each other, packed against a far wall where the waves had pushed them.

The air stank of spoiled fish. Forty-foot fishing boats, tilting in all directions, were piled on top of a long concrete wharf.

And the fish, mostly silver and blue bonito, were everywhere, mouths agape.

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