Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Among the ghosts of the dead massacre in fishing nets

OTSUCHICHO - the ocean and mud were used four days to satisfy the hunger of the tsunami. But now that the elements are summarizing a familiar location, the land and the water overflowing life on Friday demanded by Japan. Five hundred kilometers along the northeast coast today is the day of the dead. Thousands of corpses, the remains of the nation and the world had hoped to never have to fix, come to our shores transformed into deserts dirty and the waves of the surf picked up.

Every cove hidden files and piles of bodies, abandoned by the current. On the surface of the Pacific, along a stretch of one kilometer from the mainland, an incalculable number of corpses floating between boats and bits of broken trees. The fishermen survived Otsuchicho in the prefecture of Iwate, recover them with nets.

Hoisting them on board with his arms, swollen and blue, and many recognize from scraps of clothing the family lost. Between here and Minami-Sanrikucho in the prefecture of Miyagi, 30 thousand missing persons. In the six prefectures more overwhelmed by the wave, you do not have contact with other 40 thousand inhabitants.

Hundreds of places are still isolated and not served by the defense forces of Japan. The homeless are more than half a million. Thirty buildings swept away, those 50 thousand unsafe. Six hundred towns and villages are no longer connected by roads and hills of 140 hips were shrunken by landslides moved from 200 violent aftershocks.

Even today, the earth continues to shake, bounce the survivors of terror and the initial rescue operations are repeatedly interrupted by the alarm of new tsunami. Parents and children, trapped in the same room, they wake up collection centers in dozens of kilometers away. I deserve to die old and curse the fate that saved them.

The children are shaken by nightmares. They say dreaming of the ocean that pulls them away and are attacked by sudden tears. On the island of Honshu, the heart of the country, the apocalypse, with faith away from the government in Tokyo, then take the actual appearance of a massacre. The helicopters fly over dozens of towns in search of anyone that moves.

But under the city no longer exist and the endless lagoon, which merges with the countryside devastated, it appears indistinguishable mush of houses, boats, cars, bodies, trees, masts and everyday things. These findings of normal days are not enough to give back to the profile of the familiar landscape.

The asphalt is gone, together with the people and any sign of life. Erected only resist tangle of tracks, bridges, veneers and industrial carcasses. The Northeast of Japan has changed in a horizontal world, gray, with shaven vegetation, which roam the rare survivors and rescuers of one million.

They dig with their hands still, to find an object, or a reference with which to orient. On some areas snow, the rain is coming and the expanse of carcasses are to be consolidated with the mud, forming an impenetrable swamp. Who is not dead or gone, fought with the fear of radiation. The eight floors of City Hall in Sendai, spared by the tsunami to a few meters, have been transformed in-patient and hospital.

Hundreds of wounded were lying on the ground. FIATA and anyone who is aware fixed the children gathered in a room. Two doctors distribute doses of potassium iodide, delivered so far on a motorcycle, which should help to protect the thyroid by nuclear poisons. The central Fukushima is 90 miles to the south and the displaced do not think that is where the strength of the ocean will come that of the atom.

The lack of electricity, water, food and gasoline turns cold every night in a test that not all pass. In places not reached by rescue people start to wonder what he expects to send men and vehicles able to avert another catastrophe, which was equivalent to a surrender. We need time to get definitive evidence of an event that is more catastrophic imagination.

In the city of Iwate prefecture Onagawacho, Rikuzen-Takata, Tone, Sumitacho, Iwaizumicho Kunohemura and are buried in mud. About 86 000 inhabitants, a few thousand people reported to be alive. The rescue teams have noted with horror that only a few hundred people reached the dormitories set up in Ishinomaki, Onagawa, Tagajo, and Kesennuma Sauriku, considered the epicenter of the tsunami.

It was an area with three hundred thousand residents: it was canceled and has no idea where the population is over. Hitherto, it was convinced that Yamadamachi, 19 000 inhabitants, had been partly spared. The city was four kilometers from the coast. Coming from the beach but you can see only a pile of rubble, over which is laid a merchant ship tilted on its side.

Takumi Sasaki was born here but lives in Tokyo and is now the only human who wanders through the wreckage. To search for the parents is putting a backpack on his shoulders and he walked 130 km in three days. Going up the prefecture of Miyagi Ogatsu also missing, about ten kilometers from Sendai, and there is no trace of Xintomei and Nobiru.

On the sand that covers them are lined up 363 bodies, wrapped in blue bags, while on the shore of Higashi-Matsushima in one morning 247 corpses have surfaced, such as shells abandoned. Compartment can be wandering along hundreds of kilometers of coast in search of human absences and maybe Japan is expected to be most urgent tests and even harder.

But until you have a complete picture of the disaster, moral and emotional at this point before the demographic and economic control its consequences will prove to be an illusion. In the first three days of the places destroyed were empty and dead space. Now starting to spring up camps and centers for the displaced, while fitness centers and stations are transformed into hospitals, the problems of the living are needed.

Thousands of survivors, for example, need a bath and they fear a public health emergency. Are no longer content to make do within the buildings collapsed and refuse the offer of plastic bags. Natsumi Hirayama Wataricho reach after three hours of cycling and a tanker of volunteers get two bottles of water for the whole family.

In the impressive mass of the survivors, some do not takes off her shoes broke out Friday and the pain of memories that they should be expelled, like an infection. The pain for those who did not did prevail on the relief of visitors. "I got in the car just seconds before the wave swallowed me - says Makoto Mizenoya, Shinton teacher - and I heard behind me the steps of my parents.

They were old, slow: I saw them drowning each other's arms." This is confirmed by the doctors: Friday the sieve between young and old has been relentless. Matter of seconds, who could not rely on speed, or half the engine, there's more. Crucial also was the fear. "On the bridge behind the airport Natori - tells Matsuhashi - fifty people were watching the river that swept the houses to the ocean.

I yelled to go away, instead taking photographs. It was terrible: the masts were broken and the bodies are precipitated hung in the mud with pieces of concrete. " What remains of this amazing mix of dead and missing to live without emotions, rendered forever useless in the heaps of what had made generations of projects, are the endless rows of sheets of paper hanging on the walls of the structures of the first rescue.

In the prefectures of Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima, lists of names, divided into categories of individuals suspected or actual, are hundreds of thousands. They cover each building are intact and the epitaph of an unsurpassed national drama that no one even dares to explore. "Losing friends and family - said Hiroshi Suzuki, a professor at the University of Sendai - is a personal trauma that change the character.

Attending the collapse of a company that is considered invincible, a whole, of the most advanced nation's symbol of modernity overall, it can mark the terminus of a generation and a model of development. " Just before the night on what remains of Otsuchi are parachuted bundles of envelopes full of fish, blankets, dust masks and medicines.

People are hungry, wet felt a chill, fearing contamination, someone yells in vain for the names of its four days, but no one scrambled to make the first choice. One for family cases and the approaches taken to the minimum. Namie, Fukushima A man aged 64 is hoisted by the winch on a helicopter, after four days on a roof of wood, reduced to a raft adrift in the Pacific.

It is the announcement of the national will not abandon these people and the military begin to clear at least the main streets of the destroyed areas. The population, and between Nodamura Okumamachi has, however, leading only one question: how can it be reborn, like you can remove mountains of debris, how long will it take to rebuild, where will the funds, who will live long enough to fit on one thing own.

Japan is the day of the dead, there is a temptation to yield to discouragement, but Natsumi Iwata and Masaki Kawanami have not changed the program. They were married twenty years and today. Are Ofunato and Friday have lost grandparents, parents and siblings. They were alone, but after four days with his hands in the tsunami have gone to change.

Coming around the campfire where hundreds of survivors seeking the warmth of the fire. I am wedding dress, smile and give her a kiss. These are awakened from their thoughts instead of crying and applauding. Love is stronger than life and this is a marriage Honshu night before the funeral.

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