Shigeki Kamata is a 31-year-old high school math teacher. Thin and immeasurably kind, Kamata is a passionate devotee of classical music and devout violin player.
Though he lives in Tokyo, Kamata is from the Sendai, a city on the northeastern coast of Japan’s largest, and centrally located island, Honshu. The city was devastated by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that occurred on March 11, 2011.
When the earthquake struck, Kamata was in Tokyo, using his Twitter account. In his words, it was “the strongest quake I have ever had in my life.”
“Everything was swinging back and forth in very slow pace for about one minute. It was hard to stand still,” he continued. “It felt just like I was trying to stand on a deck of a ship in storm. And this is the story in Tokyo, which is about 200 miles away from the most damaged region.”
In the immediate aftermath of the quake and tsunami, Kamata’s first thought was simple. He had to get in touch with his mother, who lives in Sendai, and his sister, who lives with her husband and children in Shiroshi, jut outside of Sendai.
“The first contact was rather easy. I could talk to my mother by cell phone on the 10th try. So it was about 30 minutes after the quake.”
During that first conversation, Kamata and his mother spoke of the devastation on the ground in Sendai.
“According to my mother, the quake was OK. It did not destroy the house. The tsunami was not,” he said. “It was stronger than anyone had expected.”
Neighborhoods with one and half miles of his mother’s home were completely destroyed, the homes dismantled or swept out to sea by the tremendous power of the tsunami. One local resident, 60 year old Hiromitsu Shinkawa, was found on the roof his floating house nearly ten miles from the coast.
Back in Tokyo, Kamata spoke with his mother one more time in the aftermath of the quake, not long after their first conversation. Then, he endured two days with nary a word from either his mother or sister.
“The second call was right after the first one. The third one was two days later,” he said. “I heard the phone lines were jammed like a traffic jam. Everyone was trying to find out if their family or friends are OK. The phone lines were not capable enough to deal with this many calls at once.”
After two days of no contact, Kamata made a decision. He would drive from Tokyo to Sendai to find his mother and sister. He left Tokyo at 3:00pm on March 13 with a trunk full of food and water.
“I heard that all the lifelines -- electricity, water and gas -- was shut. That meant most of the stores would be closed. So I thought there would be shortage of food after a few days,” he explained.
Just before he left the Japanese capital, Kamata received a text message from his brother-in-law’s phone. The battery on his sister’s cell phone had died, and there was nowhere to charge it in the wake of the devastation.
“I received the text message from my sister that said they all moved to my sister's house in Shiroishi city, south from Sendai. So I drove there,” Kamata explained.
“About an hour after the quake, it became almost impossible to call anybody in Tohoku region. So until I got to Shiroishi all the communication between my sister and me was done by text messages.”
To reach his family, Kamata traveled on National Route 4, the longest ordinary highway in the country. The road spans a 462-mile swath of Honshu. The government reserved Tōhoku Expressway, a high-speed thoroughfare that runs parallel to National Route 4, to all traffic save emergency vehicles and the personal cars of members of the Japanese National Safety Forces.
At intervals throughout his northward journey, Kamata spotted sections of National Route 4 that had clearly been ravaged by the earthquake, scars in the road that spoke of the portentous event. Yet, in keeping with classic Japanese efficiently, the road had already been repaired.
Bypassing the center of Sendai, Shigeki drove straight to Shiroishi to find his family. He spent a handful of days at his sister’s house, reconnecting with his family and finally dealing with the disaster in his own terms.
“I still can not believe that is actually true,” he said. Yet along with his disbelief is a measure of anger. Kamata broke his perennially genteel manner when talk of the radiation fears from the nuclear plants in Fukushima arose.
Kamata is “pissed about the situation of the nuclear power plant."
"We cannot move to the ‘getting better’ phase because of that,” he said.
“The interviews done by the spokesmen of the government and TEPCO, the electric company in charge of the power plant, on TV did not provide us a list of options of what we should do such as whether we should evacuate further,” Kamata explained.
“They only talk about what is going on now, and do not tell us what are the possible outcome of the current situation and what is the worst case scenario. They’re being ridiculously optimistic…and near sighted.”
Though he believes that the Japanese government and TEPCO are not handling the situation well, Kamata has been able to find solace in an unlikely source.
“The internet has been very useful. Right after the quake, the timeline in my Twitter account moved very quickly and told me the magnitude, the center of the earthquake, possibility of tsunami, etc. I would have been very scared if I had not the Internet access.”
Will Japan be able to move on from this disaster?
“I think the current atmosphere in Japan is similar to the one after the World War Two,” he said.
Kamata expressed a belief that, once the Japanese government deals realistically with the problems in Fukushima and addresses the fears of its citizens, the country would move on and begin the process of healing. When the nuclear fears are settled, Kamata feels, there will hope for the future.
