Old woman in northeastern Japan hopes to keep singing time-honored song in new environment (1)

 

[Tsunami-hit areas in northeastern Japan region revisited] 3rd of 3-part series

October 6, 2023

Old woman in northeastern Japan hopes to keep singing time-honored song in new environment (1)

The 97-year-old woman living in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, northeastern Japan, saw a dreadful scene on the seashore just after the earthquake-triggered tsunami in March 2011, but the living environment around her house has changed to the better with a new coastline protection system introduced. 

Toyono Suzuki sometimes receives a call from a Shinto shrine priest and the two have a happy time discussing local people's group aimed at reviving a time-honored song.

Their relationship started several months after the disaster, when the shrine priest, Takahiro Yamana, visited her upon hearing she had well inherited the song, the Song of God Anba-sama. (The reader may be recommended to refer to the related articles contributed to this blog site on March 8 and March 9, 2012.) 

Yamana then hoped to revive the song in order to help local people overcome the grieves after the disaster. His proposal paved the way for concerned people to inaugurate a group for activities to revive the song in the local community.

The woman's house is located in Usuiso, which hosts a popular bathing resort facing the Pacific. She lives with her eldest son, a former fisherman, as in the days before the disaster. 

Her son runs a guest house which provides a variety of seafood cuisines to tourists. Toyono lives a calm life with her son's family, but she has an exciting time when Yamana comes to visit her.

"I was 85 years old at the time of the disaster. So, I has turned 97 this year, with 12 years since then," she told the priest. "When I was young, friends often told me, 'You have a good voice'," she said. The priest in turn said, "Yes. You should keep singing till you turn 100." 

Toyono's husband was a Pacific War veteran. He also survived the disaster, but died a few years after that.

The number of sea bathers visiting Usuiso Beach has decreased in recent years, but the environment surrounding the area has become much safer to residents and visitors. 

<Multiple protection approach provides better guard to residents in coastal areas> 

The living area in Usuiso is protected with breakwater green belts built just behind the conventional bulwarks on the coastline.

The living zone and the anti-disaster green belt are separated, with land in between used for roads or as farm land, or left vacant. 

The multiple protection approach gives the regions involved an environmentally friendly setting for residents to live and at the same time, to do their business, while making their livelihood even safer to natural disasters in terms of hardware and software.

The green belt which protects Usuiso from sea disasters is about 3 kilometers long. The neighboring Toyoma community is also protected with a similar green belt. 

"The anti-disaster green belt for this community extends 2.2 kilometers," said a senior Toyoma community leader. The green belt for Usuiso was complete in 2018 and that for Toyoma, south of Usuiso, in 2019.  

A maximum about 20 seaside inns had been operated once in Usuiso, but the guest house run by Toyono's son, named "Suzukame," is the sole one now.

Toyono's house was located behind Toyoma Junior High School and its gym. This is why her house and several houses nearby remained intact, though the school building and many other houses in Usuiso were inundated or washed away. 

Toyoma Junior High was located in the southern part of Usuiso. The two communities of Usuiso and Toyoma, next door to each other, form a single school district. 

The Usuiso community, with a population of some 760, was hit by a tsunami with a height of 8.51 meters, and about 110 people were left dead or missing. The number of victims in Toyoma came to 85. 

"I had lived a hard life as a seaman" before becoming a community council head in Toyoma, said Tokuo Suzuki. 

"We had been trying to be well prepared for disasters," he said.  "So, we started driving around in the community just after the tsunami warning repeatedly urging residents to evacuate quickly to safer places," Suzuki recalled. He was the head of the community council from 2010 to 2013.

The population in Toyoma fell to less than 400 in 2016, five years after the tsunami, from about 2,100 before the disaster, but the number has recovered to around 500, as the community has made various efforts to invite prospective new residents, mainly child-raising families, to relocate.