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29 March 2024

Japan's next tsunami – the ageing population

Japanese eat meal at a makeshift shelter in Onagawa, Miyagi prefecture. Ageing population is one of the major problems the country will facing in the coming years (AFP)

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By Reuters

Michiko Yamada, 75, ran barefoot with her husband to the rooftop of a hospital in this coastal town in northeast Japan, barely outracing the super tsunami unleashed by Japan's strongest earthquake. They spent a cold night there before a helicopter plucked them to safety.

Their neighbor Hayato Murakami, 73, scampered up a hill not far from his home just as the onrushing waters of the gargantuan wave washed over where he had been standing.

Many elderly people are among the 25,600 dead or missing in Japan's double disaster, including at least 1,800 people in Rikuzentakata. But many if not most of the survivors seen huddled on their tatami mats in the town's temporary shelters are also old. And that is one of the more remarkable features of the astonishing events of March 11.

These elderly survivors, most of them on medication, lame and infirm, drew upon some inner reserve of strength to run up hills and rooftops, scramble atop cars, or cling to debris in the swirling tsunami waters to save themselves.

Now a town whose population has been in decline for years, abandoned by many of its young who have migrated to the big city lights to find work, has gotten even older. Many of those killed here were vitally needed workers. With the city almost totally devastated, more of the young will leave.

"The economy here was not good to begin with, and now we have nothing left," said 35-year-old Tetsuaki Konno, who worked for a local food processor destroyed by the tsunami. "If I have no job, then I am troubled, so I may have to leave. It's not like I have that much attachment to this city."

More than a third of Rikuzentakata's population was 65 and over, compared with nearly a quarter in Japan as a whole, which itself has become the fastest ageing country in the world. What to do with shattered coastal towns such as Rikuzentakata will be one of the key issues of the rebuilding effort, and a test of how Japan will handle its ageing challenges.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano made that point in an intereview with Reuters on Thursday. The huge national effort needed to overcome what Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan has called Japan's biggest crisis since the end of World War Two could help Japan tackle the deep-rooted problems of a fast-ageing society and an economy facing stiff competition from global rivals.

"The energy needed to overcome the quake disaster and nuclear accident will be overwhelmingly greater than that needed to overcome those sorts of problems," he said. "In the process, we may take a big first step toward finding out how to resolve such problems as those of an ageing society with a low birthrate.

"Those who are left will have to rebuild their lives after losing almost everything, and doing that could, in a sense, become a model for how to ... create communities and social welfare systems in areas not hit by this disaster," he said.

Schools and hospitals that have been turned into temporary shelters are full of senior survivors. Almost all of them fled with nothing but the clothes they were wearing and seem unable to contemplate a problematic future. They remain in a state of stunned disbelief over what happened.

For two terrifying minutes starting at 2:46 p.m. on Friday of March 11, the magnitude 9.0 earthquake shook homes and buildings, and ruptured streets in this town of 23,000 people. Many knew a tsunami was bound to come and they began running from their houses.

Rikuzentakata has long been used to tsunamis and conducts annual drills for them. Just last year, a tsunami triggered by Chile's earthquake caused some damage here. The town, which boasts one of the most beautiful beaches in northeast Japan and touted as having one of the country's 100 best views, had built high seawalls to thwart them, among the many infrastructure projects Japan had undertaken over the past two decades to lift the economy out of its doldrums.

But the dark waves the size of a three-storey house, which followed the quake 20 minutes later, roared in from Hirota Bay and bulldozed right through the barrier and on through the town until they smacked into the hills several kilometers beyond, atop which the survivors watched in horror.

"There have been tsunamis before but they were just a little bit," Yamada said from her new home at a middle school shelter in the ruined town. "The tsunami was black and I saw people on cars and an old couple get swept away right in front of me."

"SEA ALPS"

This area of Northeast Japan is mountainous near the coast, and the coastline itself largely consists of jagged cliffs and rock pillars dubbed "The Sea Alps".

Rikuzentakata is the exception. Its long flat beach, lined with tall pine trees and sporting a resort hotel, was the pride of the town -- and did nothing to impede the tsunami

Futoshi Toba, 46, who only became the mayor of Rikuzentakata last month, lost his wife to the killer waves, but he's barely had a moment to mourn her. He listens patiently as a steady stream of supplicants comes to him with their requests at the temporary city hall he has set up in a school lunch catering center, one of the few buildings left standing.

About 80 of the 230 employees working at City Hall are dead or missing after the tsunami ploughed through the building. A fifth of the fire brigade perished even as they ferried children and the elderly to safety.

"From my point of view, many of them could have held important roles in our city," the mayor says. "We do not have enough manpower now, and the city is not functioning."

A number of high school students are also among the dead and missing. A younger generation desperately needed to help reverse Rikuzentakata's long slow decline has been decimated.

The mayor had plans before all this happened to lure back the young who go to Sendai - the main city in this area --or even Tokyo for university and never come back.

"We used to have a beach," he shrugs. "In this region where the coastline is saw-toothed, here the coastline was straight for 2 kms and pine trees were growing, which is very rare, so many people visited from the inland. I wanted to rebuild tourism, as well as the local seafood industry, with the help of many young people. But now the situation is like this."

Fishing was important here, including scallops and abalone. Oyster beds were cultivated in Hirota Bay. The industry, in fact, was just recovering from last year's tsunami, the mayor says. "I can't tell you how many people would want to do this again."

Construction of temporary housing has already begun in Rikuzentakata. Toba says the townspeople want to stay together and rebuild the town, which is now a vast field of rubble. But it will be many months at least before permanent housing can be built for the displaced, and some fear they will be forced to settle elsewhere.

Even before this disaster the government had begun merging small towns that have been gradually hollowing out for years, though it may come under pressure to keep the disaster-struck ones intact.

"There will be a political and emotional response demanding rebuilding of most of the affected villages, even though it may not make social and economic sense to do so," said Michael Auslin, a Japan expert at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington think-tank.