Jon Snow's tsunami diary

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the first images not of earthquake but of a continuous force so powerful that it was impossible to comprehend first the shock then the dawning understanding that in this filthy tide of blackened scene human life was being extinguished on an unimaginable scale in this instant as a reporter I knew I would have to go this is my diary of one of the most challenging assignments I have known I saw these images from the comforter in Airport departure lounge soon I would experience their consequence on the ground in Japan the sheer scale of it doubts filled my head would I cope would I find the words without cliche or hyperbole a morass of speeding wreckage and sudden moments of detail 13 hours later I would land in southern Japan emerging from Osaka on the airport train we had a dilemma now the big question is how to get beyond Tokyo whether we're going to try and take a bullet train which still seems to be working or whether we will try and take cars and anywhere we should actually go I mean at the moment and looking down into the agency reports it looks very much as if the nuclear issue is quite a big one that's supposed to be a leak of some significance from one of the reactors that effect aw we will try and get to the epicenter such as dears because it was the main epicenter was in the scene in the most affected built-up areas and that's really our ambition as we sped northwards preparing to report the story ordinary people all over Japan are already doing our job for us and we were watching them on our laptops Japan the home of the flip phone and the handicapped and because the quake lasted more than four minutes hundreds perhaps thousands of people even amid the fear of imminent injury perhaps death amid swaying skyscrapers filmed and transmitted what was happening to them and when the tsunami followed the quake they filmed that too as with these images shot from a rooftop on the seafront in my echo city could we professionals have stood our ground in such a moment could we have sustained the poise required to film and transmit from a balcony as first cars vans trucks and then your neighbors properties blow past you the same extraordinary decision to film driving along the coastal highway a most vivid insight into what so many must have experienced in their cars cars in which we would find so many had died when once we reached the Salam is wasteland the first explosion that the Fukushima nuclear plant was replaying over and over again on Japanese television it meant our journey onward north of Tokyo by car involved a 50-mile detour around the radiation exclusion zone or in Germany in the modeling area our focus was on reaching the tsunamis aftermath but Fukushima was never far from our minds throughout this assignment daylight on Sunday we arrived in the city of Sendai the scale of what we must engage with becoming clearer by the minute Sendai as the closest city to the epicentre of the huge earthquake again what we can see is never wreckage of earthquake but of tsunami this the remnants of a village carted by the tidal wave from a place five miles away I look out from the motorway embankment that halted the wave the dividing line between chaos and order in the commercial district of the city the water had receded leaving cars at crazy angles wrapped around lampposts farman recovered another body a blue sheet protecting it from public view there were cars that were so many others had been coffins is it right for us to wade out and see the bodies for ourselves suddenly we were confronted with the enormity of individual loss and it's bit there there good morning a woman in her 70s searching for her husband he was tending his paddy field have you seen him have the firemen seen him I wondered was he the man plucked with such care from the wreckage now born in a cortege towards the road this is a country built against the threat of earthquake and tsunami the warnings worked huge numbers did escape to high ground is that news I should report when so many died should I stress in my report how dedicated and ordered these rescuers are who should i anyway dwell simply on the dead by now we were divided into two teams whilst I was amid the wreckage in Sendai my reporter colleague Alex Thompson was thrusting further north even before we left London the name of Minami Sanriku had become synonymous with the scale of the tsunamis power we learned that at the 17,000 people who lived here 10,000 were missing feared dead one resident filmed the town as it was engulfed this was the scene on Sunday when Alex's team was one of the first to reach here the destruction was total we found ourselves making the awesome comparison with the wartime images of Hiroshima a comparison none of us had ever wished to have to make this is miss Enrico from the air but satellite imagery allows us almost instant access to the imprint of disasters like this Sendai before and Sendai after Yaga Bahama Natori at least half a million homes gone along this coast in some ways it's easier for the reporter to deal with the vastness of disaster the deeply personal is harder particularly in Japan a key hero and his son fuji aki don't know if his wife and daughter have survived they've been walking through the destruction for three hours to this rescue center these are scenes we are used to in disaster in Japan they are rare this is not a culture that wears its heart and sleep on Sunday night we broadcast for the first time from the earthquake zone there was no power for our lights car headlights would have to do the time difference meant we were on air at 4 a.m. Monday a couple of hours sleep and we're off again to send eyes brand-new International Airport no planes but trees and cars littering the terminal and a cottage landed at International Arrivals I spotted the architects mall a sprig of spruce as of signaling the end of this latter day Noah's Flood 4 days earlier CCTV footage captured the moment the tsunami swept across the airport inside the terminal passengers filming and gasping the parking lot cleared of vehicles by the force of the water on Friday today all but vanished beneath thousands of tons of debris a clear up operation is already underway for fear the airport will be needed for nuclear evacuation yes the unseen nuclear crisis so secondary to what we can see on the roads surrounding the airport we follow along behind what has now become the biggest mobilization of Japanese forces since the Second World War 100,000 men and women on the move now the waters are down dare I worry about standing on exposed nails when so many people lie beneath this debris here and there a deeply personal fragment of a former life surfaces what story does it tell who gave it who received it under they beneath here - some survivors have begun to venture back to try to find a few personal belongings do you know anybody here who has died or who is missing is a lot a lot I mean dozens I know Julian about sorry anymore Thomas you today Julian we must go that's not that's way more than the dozens really some survivors have begun to venture back to try to find a few personal belongings people walk amongst the ruins of their former lives and salvage what they can from the mud I really want her story but understandably she doesn't want to talk and I must not press at the school the clock still showed the are the quake struck the army stood guard over for blanket covered bodies Japan's government doesn't want bodies film and yet people died surely I must suggest that further up the coast Alex Thompson and his team have made it into Kesennuma here one picture an entire tuna fishing fleet ripped from its moorings cast upon the town tells so many thousands of words a way of life the men who lived it the port in which they did so ended even those who have survived have lost everything this man is searching for the home he's lived in for most of his life itself here as a reporter you see in him the ultimate human connection with ourselves here him and we understand his loss ete kini all at once this wave just came towards us you know mother I've never seen anything like it more from down low like this couldn't outrun it yeah but the ones who didn't bother to go out you might agree they're all missing how many people hmm oh colognes oh so many hundreds none vehicle none thousands back in Sendai as dusk falls we drive back through what once with a coastal suburbs can I as a reporter even begin to do justice to what has happened here translate such wreckage into something that connects with our own existence so many thousands of miles away in Britain I leave the camera lingering on one more victim it's Tuesday day five another explosion reported at Fukushima the nuclear story now vying with the rescue story the news desk in London was becoming increasingly concerned for our safety if things got much worse would be able to evacuate in time to avoid damaging contamination it was getting harder and harder to cover the ground and the story we got as close to Fukushima as we dared this is Mizusawa 40 miles from the leaking nuclear plant virtually no damage but the town is deserted the petrol stations have run dry it's a random town and yet even here there is organisation for rescue and evacuation yet curiously they seem unfazed by the prospect of nuclear radioactivity more concerned with the more immediate issues like lighting fuel and food in missile Sawa's tsunami refuge these women could remember the last time Japan faced the unseen threat of atomic radiation Asuna I've just had surgery on my knees and I can't move my leg I can't climb stairs as easily as other people can people you don't leave putting on an exterior well I know them all I do need television says it isn't safe to eat the vegetables I don't know what I'm going to do I'm 74 and I remember the second world war we had nothing to eat then my goodness yeah look I was hold on not the way my stuff I'm frightened we can't do anything I feel powerless I don't know what is going to happen to us I feel so worried if anywhere here can be said to be the front line then of Hoonah turn is it the bulldozers managed finally to blast their way through to the devastation like so many towns before the account of loss was the same we need repetition to represent scale but I began to wonder whether the viewer could bear much more but there was something different a group of Chinese workers returning to the remnants of their fish processing plant this is a town where an eagles and hawks find anything of value and it was here that we witnessed one of the most surreal moments during our time in Japan every day the town sends a daily 5 o'clock music signal across its public address system to tell children the school day is over so it is this day it's wet instead it was snowing earthquake tsunami and now the survivors must wrestle with the bitterest winter weather our driver shin last here two years ago cannot recognize what he's seen anyone still stranded here he's searching for the most basic of needs dois well to be frank I need a bath and stuff like that but I know it's too much to ask other way it's so cold here we need kerosene and we need petrol by now we're beginning to think about what will arise from this inundation will they seriously repeat the seawall will they simply write off this entire strip of coastal land our teams were exhausted we'd been filming for five days broadcasting to viewers at 4:00 in the morning our time we had been summoned home but driving back to Tokyo I couldn't escape thinking about the human toll people told me it's not the Japanese way to speculate about possible death tolls before numbers can be confirmed in a way we didn't need to know by now the nuclear crisis was somehow overwhelming the evolving human cost of the tsunami nuclear information remained hard to get often late wrong or difficult to understand rarely was it transparent making it doubly hard to report but then with the explosion of the third reactor the authorities were forced into taking unprecedented action the emperor has almost never gone on television now he had to yudice an imam of the aliquot Baal and the Emperor may be concerned the Prime Minister spokesman when I caught up with him still seemed much lesser we've only mentioned one of the plants at Fukushima there's another plant there there's a plant add on Ogawa and the plant had okay we haven't heard any more about them are they completely under control I think you know they are under control and we use look they're under control you know they're and we have not seen any evidence of developments of Troubles leaving for home Japan's military were forlornly still trying to bomb the overheating reactors with seawater just over a week ago this was a situation few could have imagined and judging by the response no one had ever planned for Thursday evening I'm home a viewer now not a reporter the amateur footage still emerging from Japan is compelling this yet one more vignette of heroism jumping out of a taxi was for this man the best decision he ever made the tallest building around was their best hope for survival as got in the water was already gathering around their feet within seconds had become a raging torrent filming all the while as shipping containers and other detritus boo to pass the baby the taxi he had left by now itself floating but while its occupants are now safe many did not make it is a woman on the wall a man up a tree and standing on a car roof a father clings to his two young children Michael Marissa a fire hose has become a rescue rope this canopy a bridge across the water as the snow falls the rescue continues even into the darkness the man it is to finally say it seems the instinct to film to record to transmit e he's almost as strong as the instinct to survive perhaps it is the conceivable threat to us of nuclear fallout that fixes our focus on Fukushima's reactors at least the pictures if not the truth about what's happening a clearer inevitably we focus too on the potential sacrifice made by these volunteer firefighters getting their marching orders before heading off to the plant to help cool the overheating nuclear core a cool guy or Neela we expect a lot of difficulties with a mission we have been given I think there's really a dangerous assignment you up the reputation of Japan and the lives of many people rest on your actions must be back at my desk in London I feel as often before a sense of desertion of leaving a story half told do we have any real idea of what's going on at the Fukushima nuclear plant do we have any sense of the true scale of loss of life in Japan only this morning the Japanese government said 15,000 people had died in one Prefecture alone yet it's also been an incredible privilege to report what has happened to witness the resilience the lack of self pity the courage of the Japanese people countered though with the opacity of information the bureaucracy and above all the lack of candor from the nuclear industry I have a sense that I won't be closing my tsunami diary for quite a while you you

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Channel: Channel 4 News

Views: 104,713

Rating: 4.7733335 out of 5

Keywords: Japan, tsunami, earthquake

Id: gSyfeMAklCs

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Length: 25min 50sec (1550 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 20 2011

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