Like tens of thousands of people who lost everything in the tsunami that pulverized Japan’s north-eastern coast two years ago, 83-year-old Hide Sato is living in one-room temporary housing, and longing for a home of her own.
Chances are she will be waiting at least a few more years.
The dozens of temporary housing camps built for tsunami survivors were meant to be used for just two years. Now, officials are saying it could be six to 10 years before all are resettled.
Japan’s progress in rebuilding from the mountain of water that thundered over coastal sea walls, sweeping entire communities away and killing nearly 19,000 people, is mainly measured in barren foundations and empty spaces. Clearing of forests on higher ground to make space for relocation of survivors has barely begun.
In Sato’s city, Rikuzentakata, nothing permanent has been rebuilt, though in late February it finally broke ground on its first post-disaster public housing project: about half of the homes to be rebuilt will be public housing many families can scarcely afford to rebuild after losing everything.
Sato, a spirited octogenarian who constantly laughs and jokes while explaining how she makes the best of things, likens the situation to the devastation after Japan’s defeat in World War II. Rikuzentakata’s 20,000-some residents ought to just to take matters into their own hands, she said.
“This is our town and so we need to rebuild it using our own efforts. I feel we shouldn’t be relying on the government to do it,” said Sato, who gets by on a stipend of about $400 a month and sleeps on sturdy cardboard boxes to insulate herself from the cold floor of 30-square-meter living space.
“We have to do what we are capable of doing, a step at a time,” she said.
In dozens of towns, from the tiny fishing enclave of Ryoishi to the big industrial port of Ishinomaki and beyond to the coast of Fukushima, where some areas remain off-limits due to radiation from the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, the tsunami zones remain bleak wastelands.
Scattered along the coast are huge piles of rubble and stacks of smashed scooters and cars. Reconstruction has lagged behind recoveries from earlier disasters, such as the 1995 earthquake that killed more than 6,400 people in western Japan’s Kobe-Osaka region, because it is complicated by the imperative to move residents out of areas prone to tsunami that can swell several stories high.
Delays in approvals for cutting forests atop the mountains that will be used for relocation, refusals to allow businesses to rebuild on former farmland devastated by the tsunami, uncertainties over property ownership are among the obstacles in the path of towns that want to rebuild.