All's Well. I was on the Mountain.

First off: I'm fine. Completely. Didn't know there'd been an earthquake until it exploded all over my Facebook just after 14:50 on Friday afternoon. I didn't feel a thing, and when I turned to my co-worker at the Board of Education to tell her that there'd been a big earthquake down in Iwate-ken, she seemed completely unperturbed. I left work at three like I was supposed to, rode a bus into Yoichi (mostly along the Sea of Japan coast), and then jumped another bus inland to Kutchan where I'd be meeting Mark, Alistair, and Ross for some nightboarding at Hirafu.


The view from a bus in Hokkaido at pretty much the exact time that the world was falling down.

If it hadn't been for my phone, I never would have gotten any indication that anything was amiss in other parts of Japan.

It was that uneventful here. When I spoke to Mark, he told me that he hadn't felt it, either, over in Iwanai. Ross and Alistair had felt it on the mountain, near Kutchan, but they had no idea about the scale of the craziness that was going on down south.



A normal, snowy Hirafu, with a normal Kutchan beyond.


Alistair and Mark on the mountain, Friday night.





The moon over Hirafu.

Nor did I, really--despite everyone freaking on facebook--until we got home to Alistair's place in Kutchan that night, turned on the TV and booted up BBC's live, online coverage of the event.

That was when I sent ANOTHER email to a whole bunch of people. I'd already clearly posted on Facebook that I was high and dry, but when I saw the images that were being broadcast to the rest of the world from Japan, I felt I should really send another assurance. They were apocalyptic like little else I'd ever seen in my life.

Worst of all, and I think the most salient thing I will draw from all of this experience, was how the media was presenting them. There was very little, if any, indication of where they were coming from. Despite the video they were showing coming directly from Japanese news stations, and despite the names of the locations being shown being clearly marked in kanji (Japanese characters) in the upper, right-hand corner of the video footage, the anchors gave no indication of where the footage was coming from, resorting to calling it "north-eastern Japan."

"North-eastern Japan." The phrase that has caused the families of me and all the other Hokkaido ALTs such undue distress. The island of Hokkaido is about as north and as east as you can get in the island nation of Japan, but up here we were largely untouched by the disaster (although a very large part of the island felt very substantial earthquakes and is still feeling aftershocks).
_______________

That's all I'd written immediately after this all went down, and I know that when I was thinking about writing this out, it was meant to contain a lot more rage: rage for people who up and left this place when they were in no danger, turning their backs on the thousands of Japanese who, unfortunately, had no other country they could run to; rage for news agencies that lapped the blood from the sea-thrown stones of this disaster like that blood was the finest of opiates and they could't wait for another fix; rage, eventually and unbelievably, for the way that all of the benefits for Japan exploded all over facebook, fracturing and diverting attention from a single important directive:

HELP.

But now it's more than a month later, and some of that rage seems to have ebbed away...though I still seem to be saving a fiery little pocket of it for one Hokkaido ALT who jumped ship not 48 hours after the earthquake and tsunami, despite being located more than 500km from the nuclear reactor at Fukushima and living in a town that was completely and utterly landlocked. He claimed he was putting his own safety ahead of his responsibilities to his town and its students, a justification that seems to ring hollow as the rest of us over here in Hokkaido (some of whom live along a coastline, and some of whom live far closer to Fukushima than he did) have never had to budge. But enough of that for now.

This is about how I went on with my weekend while part of this country was falling apart: How I took in clear views of white and black and blue from the tops of mountains while other people sat huddled around their televisions. I think being absent from the world for those first 24 hours did great things for my sanity, and I only realized them when I returned to civilization and got sucked into the drama feed on Facebook, refreshing that shit constantly like some kind of morbid crisis junky. When I head back to the photos I took that weekend, it feels kind of like they took place underwater or in some alternate reality.

No, like I said, the crisis hasn't affected us here physically, but, even though I've been able to go on with my life unhindered, I feel it must have had some unexpected psychological drain on me, and that becomes clear when I look at the pictures of the Laggises (Legacy?) laughing, or of Mark and I eating powder, or of how clear the world was from the top of Mount Isola at Rusutsu on that Saturday afternoon that we spent in the trees. It's a cliché, and I hate it, but there was something innocent about that day that doesn't seem to sync up with what we're living now.

Me and Mark. Just as much stupid shit as ever.

The view from Rusutsu

2010-2011 Mountain Days 17 & 18