Well, thank you for having me, Foundry. I'm James Willo Delano. I've been based in Tokyo,
Japan for the past 19 years, and I also might say recently, you might not want to invite
me to your country because I seem to have find myself in places and disasters come.
I was in Burma when Cyclone Nargis hid. I was in Yogyakarta recently when Mount Marappi
erupted, and this disaster came to find me. But on a very serious note, this is a very
personal thing because I have skin in the game. I have a Japanese family, and it's a
country that is very close to my heart, and I happened to be in Italy actually when the
earthquake struck and started making arrangements to come to make my way up to Tohoku, the region
of Japan, even before I came back to Japan with some friends of mine who some of you
might know, Jean Chung Noriko Hayashi, and this series will be in steps because that's
exactly how it happened. The first will be the aftermath, and then I live there and I
shoot film, and I work in the dark room, so I'd have to stop, but I'd have to process
what I did, and then think about as a resident of Japan, what is the next issue that's affecting
us, and go back up to Tohoku and shoot some more. So I'll go ahead and start that, and
I'll try to keep it brief, but add a little bit of personal information to let you know
what it was like at the time being there. So I'll let you start. So the immediate aftermath
was surreality. It really was. This ship, you figure it had to be at least 10 meters
of water, and this is about a kilometer from the sea to get it to float through this area.
So what we did actually at the time is we had to go over to the other side of the island
of Honshu and make our way up because everyone was worried, rightly so, about Fukushima.
The day we went up, Fukushima, one of the reactors, actually exploded. Go ahead. That
ship, by the way, is still there, and this is Rikizen Takata, and the entire city is
gone. Anyone who is sane will never live there again. It was wiped out completely. This woman
is just like all of us were in complete shock at what we were seeing. This is in a clinic
in Otsuichi, a little bit further north along the coast. It was the first town we went to.
Japanese people are strong, and I knew this before the disaster, but I thought I might
see people crack, or I might see anger, which is nothing I've ever seen in that country.
I didn't see any of it. No one cracked. Everyone was gracious. They thanked me for coming,
and he's taking care of his daughter brushing her teeth. It's about 8 degrees centigrade
in the 40s, Fahrenheit, and we all have wet feet, no electricity except for a generator.
Heat is from kerosene stoves, and the old people and the young children really, really
were suffering at this particular point. Just kind of wandering around. It snowed. I came
back from Italy. I was in sneakers. I got rubber boots the next day because we were
walking around in the snow like this. I don't know what happened to this little boy. Again,
this is about two or three kilometers from the sea. We were following the GA tie, which
are the self-defense forces, as they were looking for bodies, and I saw this photograph
peeking out of the snow. This is the one weak point after the disaster. Everyone stopped,
and everyone prayed for the souls of those who were missing. At one point, that's the
immediate aftermath. At one point, I was with Noriko Hayashi, and she's Japanese, obviously,
and she talked about, we were standing in front of a tugboat that was deposited above.
There was a Japanese house right next to a river we were standing next to, and two Japanese
cherry trees, sakura, they call them. It's a symbol of transience, of life, of youth.
I thought, I've got to come back here when these cherry trees blossom, if they blossom.
This is part of it. The fish has been there for six weeks. The wave in Ofunato went through
a fish canning factory, but those are cherry blossoms littering the ground. This is back
to Otsuchi in the beginning. The Japanese are really private people, and it was kind
of hard to take photographs of them, because you can see the pain on their faces, having
that privacy stripped away. This is, again, the immediate aftermath, and the beauty of
a snowstorm, and then the wicked aftermath of the tsunami. This one just blows me away,
because this is a three-story high tsunami wall. It has a road on the bottom, a road
on the top. It was supposed to be insurmountable. The wave went over the top of that, and toppled
it over. We don't know for sure, but I hope the people who are living behind it had time
to get out. It was interesting. Japan's a pretty organized country, but the supply
lines broke down. This is actually about an hour away from the coast, and they had no
food. Empty shelves. We were getting worried about getting water. When we went down, we
had to stay about an hour out. There was no gasoline, so we hired a taxi to use propane,
so we had fuel to go in and out. We packed cans of gasoline to get up there, but we
had enough to go in and out, but we didn't have enough to go back to Tokyo. We parked
our car, hired a taxi, and then, about day three, there was no food or water, so it was
getting a little bit hectic trying to find food. This is, again, Rikizen Takata, dusk.
You are about a kilometer and a half from the sea. There is nothing left of the town.
This is where you start seeing buildings, and you can see that the debris is on the
second floor. I saw debris on the top of the third floor of buildings, and you just kind
of stand there and you think, you know, if I was here, there's no way I would have survived.
It just was the power of the wave. This is a special image, and in fact, I went back
in the summer to make sure that tree was still alive. This is Ofunotto. This is not so far
from the story I told you. I really hope that they treat this tree especially because it
should not be alive, and there it is. It's a wonderful, beautiful thing, and life has
a way of getting back. Then the next chapter was Fukushima and the nuclear disaster. What
it means to us now living in Tokyo is our food comes. Locally grown food is a great
idea unless your locally grown area is near Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. These
are policemen who are on their way in right at the 20-kilometer line. There's a 7-eleven
there, so I would pop into the radiation zone. I need something to come out to the 7-eleven,
and that's the way it was in Japan. It was normalcy versus twilight zone. This is on
the, so that was the northern extent. This is on the southern side of the 20-kilometer
zone. It was a Japan Football Association used to practice at J Village. Now it's closed
off. We blundered in there accidentally. One of my students, I don't know if he's still
here, I was with a friend of his from Philippines, Bahag, just said Bahag, hang a right. We went
in there. We weren't supposed to be there, and I said, get out of the car and photograph
everything you can as fast as you can because we don't know how long we're going to last.
This is a bus that drives workers in to work in Fukushima Daiichi, and those sheets are
supposed to protect the bus from radiation, which is rather delusional. They lost a whole
lot of farmland. This is a salinated field inside the nuclear no entry zone, looking
like the Sahara. That's last year's harvest. Ironically, native grasses came back, but
nobody's going to be growing crops here for maybe our lifetime.
This is a rather dramatic crumbling of a road, but frankly, I would say 95% of the damage
with tsunami, 5% was earthquake damage. Earthquakes, it would be total disasters in other countries
if the Japanese buildings fairly well, so they can survive. We would have three or four aftershocks
a night the first week. It was absolutely unbelievable. I thought I was used to earthquakes.
Now we have, it's down to about one every two weeks. This guy's a worker. This is when
I was scrambling around, and the cordon of security was kind of coming in. He's getting
ready to work in Fukushima Daiichi. That's one brave man right there. I've met and spoken
with many of them, and they are not doing that well, but they're very stoic people.
Stress, if it's not the radiation gets them, it's stress just being in there working every
day. This is the line. This is where I would hop in. There was a Shinto shrine, nice little
Japanese cedar forest, and I would go there and look at my watch and hang out for 15 minutes
and say, if the police don't come in 15 minutes, I'll hop in and I'll go, and then it was a
kind of a mad dash to the first houses, and then I was in, able to record. A lot of pets
were abandoned. I'm sure you've seen photographs of cows and everything. I never had enough
food for the dogs. I felt bad about that, but still a lot of animals in there. I guess
if they survive this long, they're probably going to survive. This once again is Ofunato.
It's almost as if, this is six weeks after the disaster, it's almost as if they had plowed
it like snow. The roads were clear, but the debris was all there. Now what you will see
are just empty fields of concrete slab foundations. There is a hotel downtown that's open, but
there's no way I would be staying in it. I think it's just absolutely crazy.
Then in the autumn after the disaster, the debris became an issue, and you've got PCBs
and all kinds of carcinogenics. They still use asbestos in Japan. So what are they going
to do with 30 years of garbage that they have immediately dumped on their doorsteps? These
are all tatami mats that you sit on inside. They kind of collated and divided it. No cities
want to take this debris. This debris is not radioactive, but no one wants to take it because
they're afraid it's radioactive. So it looks kind of like hack and sack in New York. Huge
mountains of debris on artificial islands and peninsulas. This is Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture
now so far from Sendai. And fishing in Ishinomaki next to that mountain of trash. They're starting
to have like Smoky Mountain Philippines. They're having methane spontaneous combustion fires
that are becoming a problem as well. So all kinds of new and fun things for the Japanese
governments to deal with all at once. Triple disaster. These are trucks waiting to dump
debris. That previous mountain, for example, there are a lot of mountains like that, and
those are only temporary. Then they put them in trucks like these and bring it to the permanent
dump. This is supposed to decontaminate to keep down the bacteria and keep down the dust.
Does it work? I kind of probably think not, but I have to respect them for trying. Ishinomaki
again. This is one of the most disturbing photos because on the left you see the 20
kilometer gate. So on the other side, no one can go. Here's this cow. I went to this barn.
This again, this is the place I would wait and see if the police came. And in the entire
time I went in, up until the one year point, because they've actually moved the gates back
since, there was always an animal in there. There were actually three cows and three calves
at this time. And as of May 2011, her milk was saleable on the market. That's freaky.
So they do label the origin of food, but once you go out and get a bowl of ramen in a restaurant,
it's all out the window because they don't label where the food comes from. I feel for
the farmers. I mean, they really had a hard time before all this happened, but I don't
want to eat that beef from that animal. This is at the year point. This is Ofunato where
that big ship was. The ship is actually still there, but it's in another location. The earth
went down almost one meter. So every high tide, here's the tide bubbling up through
the sewage system. So they're either going to have to invite the Dutch in and build locks
of some sort, or they're going to have to abandon. This is 250 kilometers of coast that
this has happened to. And it is private property. So the government respects that, and it's
a huge problem. What are we going to do with this land? This is an interesting issue. For
months, I was talking to anybody who would listen to me. Why did the radiation deposit
in such a neat line to the northwest when three reactors exploded? Because when couldn't
possibly be blowing in the same exact direction three days in a row, or three, you know, the
three particular days? Well, what happened is all of that radiation to hit the ground
was from one reactor exploding. So it could have been three times as worse, and it could
have actually been blowing on a rainy day down through Tokyo, and then I wouldn't be
talking to you as a resident of Tokyo. So this is outside the 20-kilometer zone. It's
more reactive, radioactive than most places in the zone. I went here for a couple of hours
and there's snow on the ground, but I did not want to be there, as beautiful as it is.
Tsushima and Itate-Mura, it's in the extended zone. You can go there, but you can't stay
overnight, and there's electricity. And you would go to, there would be, like, the stop
lights working and no car has passed for two months. So I went in here, and I saw some
dog tracks, maybe some rabbits, but nothing else, and it is picture postcard beautiful.
Nothing terrible could happen in a place like this, and it has. This is, was a nationally
famous pine forest, Takata Matsubayashi, and maybe you saw there was one pine tree that
lived, and there were, I don't know, like 10,000, and it eventually died from the salt.
This is the same forest. As I mentioned, the soil went down a meter and then the sea undercut
these stumps of the pine trees. So it kind of gave them an alien jellyfish look, but
I thought it sets a lot about what passed through this place. This is what you'll see
today. Just big, empty spaces. It looks like they haven't done anything, but the roads
are there, the electricity's back, but nobody's going to live there anytime soon. That's it.
Thank you.
