‘Have conviction and finish what you start’: Kotoku Wamura’s words offer us all a moral lesson

Food for Thought by Rev James Currall

At the end of last month the news was full of anxiety about the effects of the magnitude 8.8 Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky earthquake in Russia and especially the tsunami that would follow, right down the Pacific coasts to South America and Australia.

People were being evacuated to higher ground in Japan and the various Pacific island groups. By Thursday it was all forgotten, as the tsunami wave was far less than expected – a collective sigh of relief.

March 11 marks the anniversary of another massive earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku in Japan 14 years ago and the subsequent tsunami that damaged the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex and caused a great deal of devastation in coastal communities up and down Japan’s Pacific coast.

Just eight months later, in November 2011, I was in Japan, as part of a research project. During that visit I was greatly privileged to be able to arrange, through a Japanese colleague and friend, to travel to two coastal communities on the Pacific coast north of Fukushima in Iwate prefecture - Noda and Fudai.

Our party was in fact the first from outside the area to visit, and we were welcomed with enthusiasm, great kindness and gratitude.

Much like the Highlands and our coastal communities in Sutherland and Caithness, the Iwate prefecture often feels forgotten by national politicians, with relatively little investment by comparison with the more prosperous industrial and commercial areas further south.

Travel is relatively slow, and I was struck with how similar some of the roads were to those hereabouts (but no NC500!).

Being there was a truly humbling experience as civic leaders explained to us how much our visit meant to them and their communities, as no journalists or regional or national politicians had been there in the eight months that they had been struggling to recover.

In the tsunami many people lost their livelihoods, destroyed with their boats and nets, and their lives upended by the loss of their homes.

On Friday morning everything was fine and people were looking forward to the weekend and the seaweed harvest on Monday, but by Friday afternoon livelihoods and homes were all swept away.

Noda with a population of a little over 4000 (about three times the size of Golspie or Dornoch) was devastated in the 2011 tsunami, which swept across the low-lying ground, destroying all in its path.

Many houses were destroyed, and 39 people died, but as a result of the tsunami early warning system, almost everyone was able to get to higher ground.

In contrast, Fudai (a fishing village with a population twice the size of Golspie) was spared the devastation brought to other coastal communities thanks to a 51 foot high dam and floodgates in total 673 feet long, built between 1972 and 1984 by Kotoku Wamura, the village’s mayor.

In spite of considerable opposition, he pushed ahead because he didn’t want to see a repeat of the devastating effects of the 1896 or 1933 earthquakes and tsunamis, in which many people died and a large number of homes were destroyed.

For many years the project was derided as a waste of public money, and the mayor was ridiculed for spending so much on it, but public attitudes were quite different when the dam protected the village and the inner cove from the worst of the 2011 tsunami, whose waves reached 55 feet.

The villagers now give thanks at Wamura's grave, and he’s seen as a foresighted hero.

At his retirement, Wamura stood before village employees to bid farewell: "Even if you encounter opposition, have conviction and finish what you start. In the end, people will understand." A moral to us all.

James Currall has recently retired as Episcopal priest in charge of congregations in Sutherland and Easter Ross.

Rev James Currall has recently retired as Episcopal Priest in charge of congregations in Sutherland and Easter Ross.

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