Over one year ago, an incredibly strong earthquake and tsunami caused tremendous damage within the country of Japan. As a response to this humanitarian crisis, Gensler sent a team of designers to the Tohoku area to help with the recovery effort. Dan Winey has been blogging about the experience. You can read part one of this blog series here.
It seemed appropriate that we were traveling to the tsunami area very close to the one year anniversary of the disaster. The three hour drive up to the area was through wooded, hilly areas, so one never really caught a glimpse of the devastation. It wasn’t until we got very close to our destination that I realized the extent of the damage and destruction.
The visual impact was overwhelming. The city was completely destroyed. A hospital remained with the bottom six floors gone, and the disaster alert building was gutted to the top floor. It was as if a huge site had been cleared for construction of a new city. All that was left were roads, electrical wires that had been recently installed by the military, and the remaining foundations of buildings.
Our guides told us that everyone in the hospital perished except for the staff and some patients that were well enough to be taken to the roof of the building. They had no choice but to leave the other patients in their rooms where the wave ultimately swept they away. On one of the large canopies of the building, a fishing boat came to rest where it has remained since the wave receded.
We spend the next few hours walking through the area. Most of us walked alone, trying to grasp, and in some way recreate and understand, what had happened. We stopped at the shrines that had pictures and personal belongings left by family members and loved ones who survived the ordeal. We walked up to high ground and listened to stories about the heroics of the mayor, police and city officials, most of whom died in the disaster.
It is really difficult to describe the sense of helplessness that one feels when confronted with a disaster of this magnitude. What struck me the most was that it was winter, it was bitter cold, and it was difficult to imagine the aftermath of the disaster--no home, no heat, no food, no water and very minimal medical support. The television and YouTube images will never come close to describing what actually happened.
The Inn on the HillLater that afternoon we made our way to a small inn where the accommodations were basic. This small inn happened to be perched on the top of a large hill and was one of the few buildings that survived.
Everyone slept in common rooms with the exception of me. I am not sure why I didn’t share the dormitory rooms, but I am sure that someone felt that I would be uncomfortable doing so. While I very much appreciated the gesture, I felt that it was unnecessary. And, given the day’s events, I felt that it was a luxury that seemed very much inconsistent with what had happened there….it made the gesture even more heartfelt.
Gensler employees built a fishing hut to help with the recovery efforts in one village.
The “Fisherman”Early in the evening, we had our first chance to meet everyone who was involved with our project. We sat around and discussed the fishing hut's design and how it would be constructed. The fisherman of the village joined us and described how the disaster impacted their families and their homes. This small fishing village was home to about eighteen families, all of which had seen their livelihoods completely disrupted.
We talked about the immediate aftermath of the event and asked how they coped. What was most interesting was that one of the fishermen was technologically savvy and quickly organized the village using Twitter as a means of communication. This allowed the villagers to leverage their resources and get help to those who needed it the most.
They continue to discuss issues and build consensus in real time using Twitter--it is the tool that now facilitates their entire governance structure A year later, Twitter remains the primarily communication tool of the entire village.
We also learned that the fisherman don’t actually “fish.” They are seaweed farmers. Every year they plant their crops in the ocean and harvest them after the seaweed had grown to the appropriate size. The tsunami destroyed not only their boats, but also their “farmland,”which consisted of long nets strung out across the bay to hold the small pieces of seaweed.
Their ability to produce enough food and income for their families was lost in the tsunami, and we were there to help reconstruct this aspect of their lives.
The next day we toured what remained of the village. Everything was destroyed except for a few buildings on high ground. The fisherman led us on a hike up into the hills overlooking the ocean where they were considering reconstructing their village.
We walked down to the ocean front and looked at the site where we would construct the new fishing hut. Originally the fisherman thought that they would use the remaining foundation of a building that had been destroyed, but most of those foundations were too badly damaged so a new site was selected.
The fishing hut signifies, in many ways, the rebirth of the village. It is a place where the fisherman will gather and prepare the nets for the ocean. It is essentially a large covered work area, a communal place for all of the fisherman and villagers to gather. It is a place to begin the process of restoring their livelihoods.
The fishing hut is a simple structure, made with a prefabricated system of wood columns and a wood joist with galvanized connectors. The system is quite Japanese: elegant and sophisticated yet simple. I always marvel at the ability of the Japanese designers and engineers to take complex problems and distill them down to their simplest form and solution.
Our Tokyo staff wanted to have something on the building that signified our commitment to making the project a reality. Originally the idea was to put a simple red “G” weathervane on the top of the building. That seemed a little mundane, so someone decided to make the “G” into a red Gensler chicken. That seemed to capture the sense of pride and commitment we felt when we talked to the fisherman about the project. It also portrayed a sense that no matter how difficult the circumstances, one can find goodness and humor.
On our trip back we decided to take the coastal route. We traveled almost 200 kilometers through small villages, towns and larger cities. The devastation was relentless. When I watched news coverage of the tsunami, I got the sense that the damage was somewhat localized. It wasn’t. Town after town and village after village were completely wiped out. The damage is measured by the height of the wave. At the epicenter it was over six stories high and as you move away the damage decreases proportionally. The towns at the perimeter of the tsunami saw damage to the first floors of the buildings. It was very odd to go through towns where two to three floors were completely gone.
Needless to say, I have never visited a disaster area and this trip provided me with a perspective that I will always remember. I now understand how unprepared we all for something of this scale and magnitude, and I've learned about the perseverance needed to move on and rebuild. But what I will remember more than anything else is how rebuilding a fishing hut in a small village meant so much to so many.
Gensler's work in Fukushima was featured on a Japanese television program. Watch the video from that program here.
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Dan Winey is a member of Gensler’s Board of Directors and the Regional Managing Principal of our Northwest region. Our offices in Shanghai and Beijing were launched under Dan’s purview, and he’s been a key member of our Shanghai Tower team from initial project win through construction. Contact him at dan_winey@gensler.com. |