Breathing easier

Dal student Morgan Young will never admonish her dad if he says he feels lazy.

Morgan’s father Lorne Spry has been working as a teacher in Japan since 1993. He lives with his wife, Mari, and 14-year-old son Shoh, in Sendai, the Japanese city closest to the earthquake’s epicentre.

A Vancouver native, Mr. Spry was home that afternoon, Friday, March 11, procrastinating on going for a bike ride which would have taken him along the mouth of a Natoria River, which flows from Sendai Bay into the Pacific Ocean.

'Outright laziness'

“The place to which I was intending to ride was completely destroyed,” he wrote in an email last Tuesday to his daughter, friends and family to let them know he and his family were safe. (See the email below.) “My outright laziness may have been my best trait that day.”

After three days of waiting for word and trying to stay away from the images coming out of Japan, the news that they were safe came as relief to Ms. Young, only to be replaced with new worries, brought on by the potential nuclear catastrophe of the stricken Fukushima power plant.

“It was pretty unbearable waiting for word,” says Ms. Young, a fourth-year costume studies student who threw herself into her school work, spending all hours at the studio. “I can’t actually describe what it was like ... you’re really curious. You want to find out more, but you have to stop yourself because it’s so overwhelming.”

The earthquake and tsunami decimated Sendai, a city of one million people, which continues to be rocked by aftershocks. Many people are in living in refuge centres and there are shortages of everything—food, medications, fuel. The recovery of bodies is ongoing.

It wasn’t until last Thursday that Mr. Spry and his family, who lived in a neighbourhood just beyond the tsunami's reach, were able to board chartered buses out of areas at risk from the nuclear plant and make their way to Tokyo. They arrived, exhausted but upbeat, in Vancouver last night. “It’s going to be a long healing process for them and for all of Japan,” says Ms. Young.

An appeal to give

She’s breathing easier to know they are out of harm’s way. And she wonders if the catastrophe had struck Canadian shores how we would have coped.

“It’s been surreal, this past week,” she says. “I’ve had moments of being panicked and then being really sure they’d be okay. It makes me think about my family, how much they mean to me, and these other relationships I have, how much support and love I’ve received over the past week.”

Ms. Young asks people to reach out to the people of Japan by making donations to the Red Cross. “I’ve been urging people to try to donate, even $5. So many people are in need of aid.”

"So ... we are safe"

In an email that Lorne Spry was able to send out five days after the earthquake, he describes how life suddenly and dramatically changed in Japan. This is an edited version.

Dear My Frantic Family and Concerned Friends Around the World ... and Especially My Daughter, Morgan:

I am unable to write to each of you in turn, and some of you are anxious for some news. So this is my way of getting to each of you in an express way. I am only just able to get back on line and do it.

So ... we are safe — Mari, Shoh and I. Shoh was at school. I was in my room doing e-mail and procrastinating a training run on a vintage bicycle I had finished the week before. (More on that good fortune in a bit). Mari was downstairs in the living room.

All quakes start about the same. A tremor ... more ... and then it either shudders and fades ... or the noise starts. This time the shuddering got ever more intense and the roaring just amplified. Everything went crazy.

I managed to grip the walls of the staircase as everything upstairs flew around the room. The noise was so loud that I was yelling at Mari. I noticed the fridge dancing around the kitchen like a cartoon animation. A lot of quakes are over in 30 seconds but this one just went on and on ... louder and louder. I was almost convinced that the house would remain standing.

When it was over, I went out into the street. The aftershocks started — and they are still going on. Even as I write now.

The quake involved a large chunk of the Pacific plate — 500 kilometres long and 200 kilometres wide. The epicentre was out at sea, more or less opposite Sendai. But, the worst hits from the resulting tsunami were up north. But Sendai and adjacent communities were not left alone.

The place to which I was intending to ride was completely destroyed. I may have been safe up on the dike, next to the river — I don't know. I usually turn around short of the sea because the good road ends before the mouth of the Natori River. The attached pictures will give you an idea of the power and destructive force. My outright laziness may have been my best trait that day.

I got on my Yamaha and went towards Shoh's middle school and checked out some neighbours and a day care centre [hoikusho] where we have friends. Everyone was OK. Shoh was with a lot of other students in sports clothes sitting in the school yard. I was not sure what all was going on, but he was safe.

I headed for home and there was a thunderstorm that dumped snow so fiercely that it choked the spark in the engine and killed the vision in my visor.

The aftershocks continued and they continue as I write this. Every quake starts the same. The tremor ... more ... then the shudders. And if it continues and amplifies — the noise ... then the roar. Every time this happens, and there has been hundreds of them — unprecedented in memory here — you are wondering if this is another giant quake. Every time it happens you get a great shot of adrenaline shooting into your guts. At least I do.

Shoh is the least bothered. His parents are not feeling too hot — sleeplessness, nausea. Far of becoming radiated and glowing in the dark from some outmoded brood of nuclear reactors down south. I will freely admit to being duly unnerved.

But, we are among the lucky ones. We and our home are intact. Can you imagine feeling all this stuff after being washed around in a tsunami, losing everything, and taking shelter in a place that is short of everything from fuel to food and diapers? Tens of thousands of people are without their medication, and there is concern for serious viral infections. The infrastructure all up and down the coast is shattered. Sendai is practically sealed off, as are all the Pacific coastal communities north of us.

Fleets of helicopters have been chop-chopping their way to missions far and wide — and closer to home to just a few kilometres away — to where I was planning to ride if I had not lingered over e-mail. Two hundred people died there for sure. But a 100 were still missing yesterday.

Many people in Sendai are in refuge centres — including some friends — so I have just heard. Just hours ago our power went back on. But many tens of thousands in this city of one million have been without water, heat or electric power for days. And these "lucky" ones may be living in a 12 story apartment building. As modern as they may be, their residents may find them uninhabitable.

There are line-ups lasting hours for everything. Gasoline has been unavailable due to the lack of electricity for the pumps. Kerosene that space-heats most of our homes is virtually unavailable. I hectored a guy to sell me the last few litres we will get for some time. The city gas is off for at least a month — so it's cold showers or sponge baths for the duration and no one will be at home on the range.

Nevertheless, no complaints. The shattered cities, the loss of life and colossal destruction are humbling. One man said to me today in his twangy Oz, "It seemed so strange the other day ... it was so sunny, and there were children playing in the park and people talking in the street, yet a few kilometres away there was all this death!"

I cannot even imagine how long it will be before life in these charming coastal fishing villages returns to normal. It is easy to say "never" or at least for decades. But, this has not proved to be the case in other great disasters in Japan.

It will be some time before normalcy returns to Sendai, but I am hoping for sooner than later. Right now the focus is on essentials such as the power grid and getting the arterials reopened to supply the region. The details must wait.

The roof of some platforms in Sendai station are collapsed. Only local trains are running. The freight yards near our house are idle. The subway runs four or so stations short of its length. The new branch lines under construction may get a much delayed opening.

According to one source, the main bridge going into the northern part of the city (Izumi Chuo) is heavily damaged. Lots of roads have cracks, heaves, fissures etc. Because of fuel shortages, there seem to be few buses and no taxis. I drove downtown today and it was nearly empty in comparison to a normal day. Sendai International Airport was flooded by the tsunami and is now being used as a helicopter base at the exclusion of civilian carriers.

People who are wanting to leave the city and get out of the country are having to resort to a long, roundabout journey. First, they must go east through the mountains to Yamagata. And then south to Nigatta. From there the Shinkansen (Bullet Train) can take them to Tokyo. Another leg gets them to Narita and the airplanes out. This is a bus journey, unless you have your own private fuel stocks. One source said that there was line-up of 800 people waiting to board.

The behaviour of the Japanese people has been exemplary. I've seen no pushing or shoving or nasty behaviour. In recent hours, television has shown us much of the resilience and resolution of this nation, even in the most grievous circumstance. Foreign television may focus on the wreckage and never pan a lens on a large modern city which is under duress, but nevertheless intact — albeit with busted bridges and unusable train platforms. The intact parts have broken bits that add up to a lot. And yet, even the up-close CNN newstainment and bulletins of fresh disaster cannot describe the scale and poignancy of this disaster.

The three of us have a rice cooker, an electric frying pan and some electric heat. Let's hope that is not taken away. The control rods are in, the reactors are shut down, and skeleton crews (no pun intended) are fighting to cool of the residual heat in reactors that have run short of purified coolant. The sea water that is being used boils of as steam and produces a lot of H2. This has caused pressure in the containment buildings, and I believe not one but two have lost their heads. This has released some radioactivity [hoshasen] that may in the end prove to be not harmful to health.

But there is uncertainty. And as a result, there has been vast concern and a massive evacuation of a 20 mile radius from the plant. This is some distance away from us, but not enough for comfort. My mother in-law is not very concerned, even though she and my brother-in-law's family live in Fukushima City. Perhaps being bombed in Nagoya as a child puts such crises in another light. The prevailing winds have blown a lot of the nasty isotopes out to sea.

According to my wife, prime minister Kan paid an angry visit to the site to give Tokyo Electric a bit of stick. Here is a country that was on top of the world 20 years ago, and since then has come in third place as a contender in the race of capitalism with non-ending deflation and a flat lining economy. Much of Asia cannot be impressed at exploding nukes. Already, Vietnam has placed a quarantine protocol on Japanese food imports that may show up as radioactive.

I was in extreme high anxiety over all this nuke stuff until the local phone connections finally cleared and I got to talk to friends who had done some research. Friends with electric power and Internet connections. This situation is not Chernobyl — not yet anyway. Chernobyl vaporized its fuel. That is very likely not going to happen this time, but China syndrome — at least in my feeble opinion — could, but probably won't.

BIG aftershock just now. More adrenaline. Can't help it. Now it feels like we are rolling about on the sea. When I lived in Kanagawa, a friend on the floor above me used to vomit when this happened.

So that is where I will leave you. My very warmest regards to all of you,

Lorne