ISHINOMAKI, Miyagi Prefecture--Rising almost three stories high and snaking 3 kilometers along the coastline, a seawall fortress guarding the Ogatsu district here today restricts views of the sea.

The seawall is so massive and overwhelming that standing next to it blocks all sense of the ocean on the other side.

But instead of offering peace of mind to residents, Yorio Takahashi, 53, said the protective structure dealt a death blow to his beloved seaside community. 

“Ogatsu was killed by the seawall,” the former longtime resident said bitterly of the gray concrete structure.

Takahashi survived the towering tsunami 10 years ago when it swept away most of the houses in Ogatsu, including his own.

The district was engulfed by waves more than 10 meters high when the magnitude-9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake struck off the coast of the Tohoku region on March 11, 2011, unleashing the tsunami.

At some locations, watermarks showed that the waves rose as high as 21 meters.

Eighty percent of the houses and other buildings in Ogatsu were destroyed and 243 residents, slightly over 5 percent of the district’s pre-tsunami population, were killed or remain missing.

Residents today are no longer allowed to live in the low-lying areas along the coast, now designated as a hazardous zone.

But Takahashi said the real loss of his ancestral community of Ogatsu came several years after the tsunami disaster when the enormous seawall was erected, fully funded by the central government.

Takahashi left the fishing community in spring 2019. He now lives in Iwaki in neighboring Fukushima Prefecture.

Takahashi, a third-generation craftsman making ink stones, a specialty of Ogatsu, was a local leader when his community was trying to recover from the catastrophe. He opposed building a massive tsunami wall, a sentiment shared by most residents.

He became deputy chairman of a council set up jointly by residents and local officials to hash out rebuilding plans. The council submitted an 11-point report to the Ishinomaki city government in July 2011, laying out their priorities for reconstruction.

The first was to elevate land to where residents could relocate to. The second was not to erect a high tsunami wall, a project that they feared, due to its sheer scale, could delay the rebuilding of houses and other necessary infrastructure in the community.

Two months later, however, the Miyagi prefectural government announced a plan to construct a 9.7-meter seawall in Ogatsu, a structure more than twice as high as the one ravaged by the tsunami. Prefectural officials said the road running along the shoreline must be protected by a higher wall.

The Ishinomaki city government initially objected to the plan, but later gave in as the prefectural government was adamant about it.

Dismayed, Takahashi quit the council to form a separate group of residents to demand that the new wall should be no higher than the previous one.

But their voices were ignored. Construction of the new wall started in 2016.

FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY

Takahashi believes erecting a colossal structure is a mistaken initiative in defending against tsunami, along with damaging local fisheries and the view of the coastal scenery.

Waves of a scale similar to the surge in 2011 are expected to overwhelm the structure anyway.

Many experts have also repeatedly pointed out that such a huge wall provides residents with a false sense of security, thus dulling their sense of danger and instinct to evacuate immediately.

Fishermen feared that the time-consuming project would hurt the ecology of Ogatsu Bay, resulting in polluted seawater and lowering catches of marine products.

Many also expressed concerns about the towering wall ruining the seaside vista, hurting tourism.

Takahashi said what should be learned from the calamity is to ensure that people do not store valued items near the shore and pass down lessons from the tsunami to future generations.

After the 2011 tsunami, the central government put together a five-year “intensive recovery program” through 2016 to pay for reconstruction in six prefectures, including the hardest-hit Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima.

The period was later extended because many projects in the stricken communities were stalled due to labor shortages at construction sites.

The construction of new tsunami walls and other coastal facilities took place at 621 sites, totaling 432 km in length. As of the end of September, 75 percent of the projects were complete. The rest are expected to be finished this month.

Some 1.4 trillion yen ($13 billion) had been injected in such undertakings by March 2020.

In formulating countermeasures against high waves, the central government’s Central Disaster Management Council assumed two types of tsunami: L1, which may occur once every several decades to 100 years and several decades; and L2, which can strike once every several hundred years.

In defense against an L1, a seawall is presumed to safeguard the lives and properties of residents. In the case of an L2, residents must evacuate because waves would surge above the seawall and rage beyond. 

The Miyagi prefectural government pushed construction of seawalls meant to deal with the “maximum” scale of the L1 category.

“If we don’t build seawalls now, we will never be able to get them built in the future,” Governor Yoshihiro Murai said.

Many prefectures in the countryside have limited resources. To most local authorities, the central government’s initiative to fully cover the construction costs if seawalls are completed within a certain time frame are an opportunity that cannot be missed.

The tsunami took a particularly heavy toll on Miyagi Prefecture, compared with Iwate Prefecture.

While the number of deaths and unaccounted for stood at 6,256 in Iwate Prefecture, it was 11,785 in Miyagi Prefecture. In Iwate, 19,508 houses and buildings were destroyed, while the figure for Miyagi reached 83,005.

Haruo Wakabayashi, who was in charge of infrastructure projects at the Iwate prefectural government, said prefectural officials had initially sought to respect local residents’ intentions in rebuilding efforts.

But he admitted that they could not afford to ignore the fact that funds from the central government would not be made available if their plans did not follow its guidelines.

Of the 621 seawall and other coastal projects, changes in the height and locations were made to 197.

But lowering the seawall’s height in Ogatsu was not approved because it was situated close to the center of the community.

The day Takahashi decided to leave his community for good came when he went out to sea to fish, a hobby of his since boyhood.

“Mountain ranges with shining streams flowing down them was a sight I, as a young boy, used to peer at from the sea,” he said. “But all I could see that day were grotesque high walls.”

Takahashi occasionally returns to Ogatsu because his 80-year-old mother still lives there.

“Otatsu is now merely a place where my mother lives,” he said. “My hometown has been lost in the man-made disaster.”

Katsuhide Yokoyama, a professor of environmental hydraulics at Tokyo Metropolitan University, who has visited many seawall construction sites in the Tohoku region, said most of the stricken communities accepted the specifications of the proposed walls as recommended by local authorities.

But two communities chose not to build a seawall at all.

One is Kerobe, a fishing community in Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture.

REJECTING SEAWALL SAVED COMMUNITIES

When the tsunami struck, 25 of 68 houses in Kerobe were either partially or totally destroyed. Almost all the 64 boats that the local fishermen owned were lost. One resident was killed.

When a seawall project was announced, the Kerobe district, which had no such infrastructure even before the 2011 tsunami, embraced it, according to Shigetoshi Shimomura, 71, a community leader at the time.

But fishermen became increasingly wary when they learned the prefectural government was considering erecting a 14.5-meter wall that would block the view of the sea.

With more misgivings voiced, the prefectural government in the end approved the community’s decision to relocate to higher ground and establish escape routes without constructing a tsunami wall. That helped convince evacuees who had taken refuge elsewhere to return to Kerobe.

“I am not sure they would have come back if the wall had been erected,” Shimomura said.

The other community that turned down the proposal was Mone, a fishing community in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture.

Of Mone’s 52 houses, 44 were washed away. Residents decided in spring 2012 to move to higher ground and opt out of the building of a 9.9-meter tall seawall proposed by local authorities.

Even before the tsunami, residents in Mone were environmentally conscious as their community served as a hub for conservation efforts spearheaded by university researchers and activists.

Those communities are both small and the residents’ associations demonstrated strong leadership, a factor crucial to formulating a consensus, Yokoyama said.

“The conventional thinking is that we have to choose either disaster preparedness or the environment,” he said. “But we may be able to achieve both as the two communities are intending to do.”

(This article was written by Minori Kawaguchi and Eiichiro Suganuma.)