RIKUZENTAKATA, Japan — The day Masahiro Osada’s Chinese restaurant reopened, the mayor showed up for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. A local TV station covered the event on its evening news. Osada spoke of the courage it took to resume business in a tsunami-devastated town whose recovery remains in doubt as skeptical residents move elsewhere.
“I am hoping for a chain reaction of courage,” Osada said.
By now, the towns along Japan’s northeastern coast have drafted their reconstruction plans, with color-coded maps showing new commercial zones, public parks and residential communities on higher ground. Osada bet on this vision, taking out a $38,000 loan to buy restaurant supplies even though he was $210,000 in debt. Starting this past Tuesday, he began serving noodle dishes in a white prefabricated building put up by the central government.
But in the hardest-hit towns, including Rikuzentakata, many fear the rebuilding won’t work, that the economy will never be rekindled and “that life 15 years from now will be even worse,” said Tutomu Nakai, director of the city’s chamber of commerce.
Even before the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the sliver of fishing and agricultural towns along this shoreline ranked as perhaps Japan’s most imperiled region, accounting for just 2.5 percent of the country’s economy. With its population graying and its young people taking off for larger cities, Tohoku’s coastal areas had become a patchwork of shriveling small businesses, with fishermen and farmers doing jobs they’d hand down to nobody.
After the disaster, though, brittle local economies simply shattered. In Rikuzentakata, the tsunami leveled four of every five buildings, including the Chinese restaurant Osada’s father opened 25 years ago. About 92 percent of the town’s business owners lost their possessions, and one-third said they wouldn’t try to rebuild. About eight months later, the town’s train station is still rubble and its downtown a dust bowl. The town’s tax revenue is zero.
The destruction is so vast that officials here estimate it will take three years just to repair infrastructure and five more years to develop an economy. Mayor Futoshi Toba says he’ll be working out of a trailer for eight years.
But according to reconstruction experts, Rikuzentakata’s long-term recovery also depends on early progress — a hook on which to hang hopes. The longer the town resembles a dust bowl, the more incentive investors and business owners have to take their money elsewhere.
“I worry about Rikuzentakata,” said Junichi Hirota, a member of the Reconstruction Design Council, which advises the government on rebuilding. “To be honest, it’s a 50-50 chance that Rikuzentakata can recover.”
Restoring lost past
As the Japanese government envisions it, the main decisions about reconstruction should come from the stricken towns themselves. The rebuilding of this coastline, then, depends less on one grand plan than on a hundred little plans, each as conservative or ambitious as the people behind them. In the ravaged fishing port of Kesennuma, 11 miles south of Rikuzentakata, officials hope incentives can help attract information technology companies and auto manufacturers. The town has put a hold on new construction, wanting time to plan “a new smart city,” Mayor Shigeru Sugawara said.
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