SURVIVING THE KUMAMOTO EARTH QUAKE

I met Ken san nearly thirty-five years ago on a raspberry farm in the Yarra Valley. He was a young Japanese tourist on a mission, he wanted to experience everything Australia had to offer whilst he had his twelve month work holiday visa. He rode a bicycle from Perth to Sydney and then he bought a 90 cc Honda motorcycle and did it all over again. By the time he came to the berry farm he was a survivor able to sleep out under the stars in the Nullarbor desert living off rice and roadkill that was fresh enough to eat. 

After we worked together on the berry farm I went to stay with Ken san in Tokyo in the mid 1980s. At that time he was driving trucks and delivering pickles in Tokyo. Everyday we drove around the back streets and pulled up for lunch in some quiet street somewhere. One day we drove down a street and there was Mt Fuji in the distance.

The next time I say Ken san he had married and was living back in Fukuoka and working for a construction company. Unfortunately his marriage didn't work out and he was now a single father looking after three kids. He got a job in an old people's home. Fast forward thirty five years and Ken san's children have all moved out of home the youngest moving to Nagoya to become  policeman. 

Earlier this year there was an earthquake that devastated the region where Ken san lives. When I finally spoke to Ken san on his mobile phone nearly two months had passed since the quake. The shinkansen tracks had finally reopened and  made plans to visit.

Riding the shinkansen I looked out the window and noticed that in every rice field the train went past past had boards advertising 727 COSMETICS. The closer the train got to Kumamoto the thicker the clouds got... Kurume looked like a ghost town. There were cars in the car parks but mo people in the streets. Maybe they had been driven underground by the rain. The rice fields that hadn't been planted yet looked like enormous glass mirrors reflecting the thick grey heavy clouds above. They looked like the organic equivalents of the solar panel farms that had appeared everywhere.

Closer to Kumamoto the announcements in the train were made in Korean and Chinese as well as Japanese and English. Arriving at the station I set out to find a public phone. I had seen the blue sheets on the rooves of houses that indicated earthquake damage. The rain, however, had stopped. Ken san picked up the phone and told me to come to Higo Ozu. I would need to find platform zero. I thought he had misheard the instruction at first but when I asked at the gate, sure enough, there was not a only a Platform Zero A but also a Platform Zero B around the corner. I had missed the train leaving from Zero A but another one was leaving from Zero B shortly.

On the news I had seen how foreigners had been among the many people volunteering to clean up after the Kumamoto earthquake. They had all been welcome to help. That was several months ago now and despite the continuous after shocks there was more concern about the impact of the heavy rains with the arrival of the rainy season. The rivers were all swollen and there were numerous land slides that added to the misery. The trip by train was short but the train as full of high school students on their way home. Ken san was waiting at the terminus at the other end in the truck he had lived in after the earthquake. In the village where he lived a number of people had died when their homes collapsed on top of them. He stopped to show me the houses that had collapsed on themselves. All that was left were the rooves sitting on the ground. The volunteers had cleaned up the rubbish but the houses had been left where they were.

Ken san's house was very close to the worst of the damage. The earthquake had traveled in a straight line destroying houses and roads in a hundred metre width. Boulders had been thrown on to the road and in some places the roads had sank up to two metres. Ken san's roof had lost some tiles and the contents of his house had been thrown around and much of it was unusable. After two months he was able to move back in after the water and electricity had been reconnected but the roof still needed fixing. The blue sheet didn't offer much protection against the rain. There were still people living in their cars at the local junior high school where a temporary bath house had been set up by the self-defence forces.

Next ,morning when I woke up Ken had already gone to work. I woke up when an after shock shook the house. After some procrastination I decided it would be better to move down to the bus stop where Ken san had told me to wait. A temporary bus stop had been set up in front of a road block. Ken san told me that the bus would do a u-turn and then come back and pick me up, These days Ken san left his truck at home, he preferred to ride to work. There were lots of people out walking their dogs. One woman came up to me and said I had just missed the bus but I explained that I was waiting for the later bus. She said she hoped that it didn't rain. Ken san had some time off on the weekend so he was planning to follow me back to Osaka a day later.