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In the last moments of the Second World War, a few days after Hiroshima and just hours before Nagasaki, a Canadian airman named Robert Hampton Gray was shot down over Onagawa, a small town at the northeast limit of Japan’s main island, Honshu.
Decades later, a monument to Gray was erected there—the only such honor for a foreign combatant on Japanese soil and perhaps Onagawa’s only claim to fame outside the country. Even domestically, the town was mostly unknown until the ocean rolled over it on March 11, 2011.
Located where thickly forested mountains drop into the Pacific and submerged river valleys form a landscape of deep bays and narrow inlets, Onagawa is a relatively new port, founded in 1926, incorporating older fishing hamlets. For centuries, human settlers have been feeding off two fertile ocean currents that converge just offshore, carrying saury and silver salmon practically into their mouths. Less than 50 miles out, there is also a volatile section of seismic fault plane in the trench between the Pacific and Okhotsk plates.
In 1896 a major earthquake displaced seawater through the contours of the surrounding terrain, pushing waves inland and upward to the surrounding slopes. It happened again in 1933, seven years after Onagawa was established.
In both cases, devastated towns and villages were reconstructed at slightly higher elevations, and memorial stones were carved to warn future generations not to build so close to the waterline. But in minato machi, Japanese harbor towns, residents consider themselves people of the sea, and have always been inclined to return. And mountainous volcanic islands don’t leave developers much land to work with, except for low-lying coastal plains.
On May 22, 1960, an earthquake near Valdivia, Chile—still the most powerful ever recorded—sent destructive waves across the Pacific. When they reached northeast Japan the next day, they rose to heights of almost twenty feet, swamping Onagawa.
Town officials who lived through the “Chile tsunami” based disaster planning on that event, and assumed that twenty feet was about as high as tsunami waves would ever get. Breakwaters, seawalls, and evacuation shelters were configured accordingly.
But the earthquake that occurred in the offshore fault plane at 2:46 pm on March 11, 2011, was the most powerful in Japanese history. And the waves that followed 40 minutes later were the largest to strike this coast in more than a thousand years.
There were four or five waves, according to some witnesses, but just one, according to others—a possible effect of separate waves piling up and over each other. They rose to heights of 50, 60, 65 feet, depending on which post-tsunami survey you read. They drowned and dragged away almost 10 percent of Onagawa’s population—close to a thousand people—and destroyed more than 80 percent of its buildings. Tsutomu Yamanaka of the on-site relief agency Japan Platform described Onagawa as “the most damaged town on the coast.”
I went for the first time to Onagawa five weeks later. By then, the disaster was already dropping off the international news agenda. Reactor fires and failures at the crippled, flooded Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant had not sent radiation clouds across the Pacific, though it turned out that initial fears of meltdown were valid. Across the world, the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami of 2011 is now remembered by the name “Fukushima.”
Some 70 miles northeast of Fukushima and 30 miles closer to the epicenter, Onagawa had its own nuclear power plant. Its three reactors were “remarkably undamaged,” according to a study by the International Atomic Energy Agency. But the main port was effectively wiped off the map that afternoon, along with any number of smaller fishing villages. I wanted to see this for myself—a place in the modern world that had suddenly passed from existence. Like Pompeii, or, more fancifully, Atlantis.
Photo: Stephen Phelan
