When the 9.o magnitude earthquake hit Japan, I was in Singapore completely unaware of the significance of this event and the upcoming chain of disasters soon to follow the earthquake.
As a third culture kid brought up in such a multicultural society like Singapore, I often distinguished myself from others and developed my identity through my home country, Japan. I always yearned for Japan and imagined Japan as my ‘perfect’ home country. Perhaps that construction of a ‘perfect’ country within me actually disabled me to see the actual faults and reality of my own country. Thus when the earthquake hit Tohoku, the illusion of my ‘perfect’ country denied the reality of such a vulnerable home country. My brain never properly interpreted the statistics read out endlessly in the news and I still believed that everything would be ‘okay’.
Despite my ignorance regarding the damage of the triple disaster, I could not fail to notice the help and warmth, which everyone and every country provided for Japan. I was deeply hit by every single person who came up to me and asked whether my family and relatives in Japan were all right, and I really appreciated the number of countries, which were willing to send some form of relief aid to Japan.
It was only after one month that I started noticing the scale of the damage that Tohoku had gone through. The effects of the disaster were like ripples, which kept echoing in a larger scale everywhere in the news, which begged for me to notice my wounded country. Among those vast amounts of news, there was one documentary, which was emotionally captive and enabled me to really grasp what the disaster had done to the victims. This documentary’s concept focused on ‘collecting memories’ of the victims of 3.11. It described a form of relief action where people collected the photos of the victims washed away by the tsunami, and returned them to the original owner. I saw many muddy photographs, cleaned as much as possible, arranged neatly in lines so that the victims could come and check whether any of them were fragments of their cherished memories. I still cannot forget the expression of the victims when they found the photos of their loved ones, lost ones or their hometown now ragged and contaminated not only visibly by the earthquake and tsunami, but also invisibly by nuclear radiation. I will not try to describe their expression through words. However, I will note that it was a truly evocative scene, but at the same time ‘How many of the victims are lucky enough to find their memories?’…
Thus my personal thought on this disaster is very emotional. My heart is with every victims of the disaster and especially to those who still cannot go back to their hometown.