Kasagi no O-kuki

"The torii crosspieces from Okuki"

Trying to pick up the blog thread...this post is the Monday after the rest of the group headed south to Tokyo, and I headed north to Hachinohe, not too far from the northern end of "the big island." And it's mostly the tale of the torii.

Torii are the large red gates that look like 'pi' to Westerners.  They're actually part of Shinto shrines, and at least two were washed away in the Great East Japan Earthquake in March of 2011 (and I hope someone will correct me where I've gone astray).  Somehow, they washed up on the Oregon coast two years later.  Through a remarkable chain of events, they ended up in the care of the Portland Japanese Garden, which spent two years discovering where they were from and getting them back.  These kasagi, or crosspieces, are considered sacred objects, and their return was kind of a big deal.  The whole story is here:

https://japanesegarden.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Kasagi-Story-July-Final.pdf

This became one of my quests not too long after deciding I was going to Japan.  Given that I've come to Japan to learn more about their experience with the tsunami, it seemed fitting to visit these torii.  And things seemed to fall into place:  the lady at the hotel tracked down all the train info, I failed to mess that up, and I got to the breakwater the shrine and torii now reside.  Ooooh, but there's a cyclone fence.  Okay, I'll check it out.  Oo, there's a gate, and it's unlocked.  Oh, but there are gulls.  And it's.....nesting season.  Actually, there are medium-aged chicks staggering around everywhere, not quite ready to fly.  That's right: it's fledge week.

Woo, and loud.  And there are a LOT of them.  Just strolling through seemed really unwise, with real risk for stepping on somebody.  Also, honestly, that many yelling birds raises the Hitchcock Factor for me.  Plus, I mean, freaking out a bunch of other critters just to get to a Shinto shrine rather seemed to miss the point of Shinto shrines.  So I shuffled along for, mm, a while, no doubt to the amusement of the fishermen who base their boats all up and down this cove, and made it about halfway to the torii.  Just close enough for a zoom photo of the words 'Portland Japanese Garden' now etched in them.

Phew.  Worth it, if a little roundabout.  I don't know how to do things any other way.

Wrapping Up the PSU Week

The last day of the program, (Saturday, 6/24), was a bit more of a blur than some other days, if maybe only because we spent less time on the bus!  In the morning, we heard from a couple of folks working on replacement housing.  Six years later, there are still 100,000 people in temporary housing!  And the social dynamics are real.  Throw a bunch of fishermen among the farmers, a crowd of folks on government assistance among the still-working...it gets tense.  The big breakthrough was assigning housing by neighborhood, rather than by lottery, which helped keep some group cohesion.  Apparently that was an important factor, although I could imagine it going the other way, too.

After checking out the early construction phase of their new development (adding layers of dirt for a couple years, remember), we visited some of future residents at a local Shinto shrine.  Then, off to the oyster farm!  I gotta tell you, I'm not much of an oyster guy, myself, but getting out on the water, and watching these guys do their thing....an excellent way to wrap up the week.

Well, not totally wrap-up.  There was a group photo or TWELVE that had to happen first....but eventually we were, reluctantly, allowed to leave.  Our hosts were very sweet.

I'm looking forward to getting everyone's thoughts and revisiting with the group, who will be presenting our thoughts at PSU from 3-4:30pm on July 15th (Smith Student Union, #296/8), if you'd like to see the song and dance version ('Tohoku: the musical!').  RSVP here:

https://app.e2ma.net/app2/survey/1743317/213080351/1a3f528a7f/1296518613/40236501/458114517/?v=a

Flyer is here:
https://www.pdx.edu/cps/sites/www.pdx.edu.cps/files/SaveTheDate%20Flyer%20Student%20Presentations%206.29.17.pdf

Hurtling Toward the "Finish"

So, I left off in Rikuzentakata, where mostly we heard from folks talking about surviving or rebuilding from a tsunami.  The Japanese are pretty good at dealing with earthquakes; it was pointed out more than once that, without the tsunami, the damage and loss of life wouldn't have been nearly as severe.  The tsunami was much tougher.

This is one of those times of sorting out the overlap between what they had to offer and what we really need.  Tsunami strategy translates easily to the Oregon coast, but for Portland, it's not as clear.  What other surprise risks do we need to prepare for?  Uhh...if we knew....

We did hear from a firefighter, a cool guy we all said we wanted to go for a beer with.  He worked for 51 straight days because 25% of their staff died helping people.  We all kind of stared.  That's a conflict.  That's THE conflict for NET, but even more for the pros:  do your job fully and pay the price, or hold back and be around to help with the aftermath.  Cruel choices.

I think that's the place our afternoon exercise was coming from:  practice making cruel choices, to see how we react.  Unfortunately for the class, the exercise wasn't probably robust enough to get us to the level of panic.  Larry, who worked ambulances in the Bay Area during Loma Prieta, was completely unfazed, as was Barb, our FEMA reservist.  But even the rest of us were kind of waiting for the stuff to get really horrible.  Felt bad for the lady running it, 'cause her exercise had clearly unhinged previous groups.  She certainly gave us things to think about, especially given her time in the GEJE aftermath, but I think she also learned a bunch from us.

Friday morning we heard more from city planners about reconstruction, and then headed down the coast to Ishinomaki.  Ishinomaki is a city of about 100,000 people, and so more like Portland.  There, we heard from one of the city's disaster managers at the time, a practical man and (understandably) now retired.  He talked a bit about shelters (had identified 16, now 100, all reinforced concrete) where they store supplies, like meals (had 12,000; now 50,000, mostly at government expense).  Except, here's the thing.  If this happens again, they expect 70,000 displaced people, and assume 2 meals/day.  Uh, math concerns....

So, expectations #1 and #2 are that people are bringing food with them, and folks know to do this.  Expectation #3 is that food will arrive from outside by day 4, as it did in 2011.  I don't think any of these apply to Portland, so that's, uh, something to think about.

On a side note, Friday was one of my more memorable birthdays.  Never bused around the coast of Japan  before, plus, after hearing from Ishinomaki's planner, we headed over to the local onsen (natural hot springs bathhouse) for a proper Japanese soak.  Extremely cool, in a 115-degree way...

And to wrap up the day, there was already a barbecue planned, which was its own kind of mayhem.  Lots of sausages (without buns;  the Japanese don't seem to believe in them), eggplant and acorn squash for grilling, and, out of nowhere, a cheese pizza.  I've never been more surprised and thrilled to see a cheese pizza.

Finally, I had mostly kept the birthday thing quiet, but I mentioned it to one of the Japanese ukelele players (it was THAT kind of party), and within 10 seconds, everyone in the band (15 or 20?) was singing happy birthday.  With the expected pause near the end when folks realized they didn't really know who they were singing FOR, but, okay, whatever, and crashing through for the obligatory enthusiastic finish.  Awesome.  I'd recommend it to anyone.

A Boost in Rikuzen-takata

And we thought the seawall project in Usuiso was mammoth.  And it is.  $106 million is a lot of rolled quarters.  But compared to Rikuzen-takata, that's exactly what it is.  It's sofa change.  Steve estimated the dirt required to raise the downtown by 12 meters (38-40 feet) would cost about a billion dollars, assuming downtown was, what? a square mile?  Less?

When we arrived Wednesday evening, our planned tour of some key sites mostly got rained out.  But we did stop at a service area, unusual to our eyes in that it featured grandstand-style seating, looking out over the...I wasn't sure.  Here it is in the rain:

It's about a 4-story concrete structure, and way up on the top, even above those slit windows, on the tiny roof of this thing, two guys survived the tsunami.  Because the water wasn't QUITE that high.  It's one of the scarier things I can think of, suddenly being a mile "offshore" in the middle of the ocean, when the only thing you know you can do on your own behalf is 'stay put.'  And that might not be enough, either.

The other things on our tour would've been the Miracle Tree, the one surviving pine of an original 70,000.  You can see the new seawall in the background:

And we also would've seen the middle school where the teacher decided, given the duration of the earthquake, to lead students to higher ground beyond the designated meeting place.  The designated location was, in fact, overwhelmed, but all the students were safe somewhere else, thanks to someone not following the rules.  Mmm.

So, the leading advice from folks on the coast:  run like hell when the ground stops shaking.  Even after the new seawall, the new tidal gate, the newly-lifted downtown, that's still the takeaway: go outside and git.

Because around here, that's apparently easier said than done.  It didn't help that there had been a handful of false alarms, including just two days earlier.  It sounds like many people blew it off.  I wonder if the Oregon coast would have an equal but opposite reaction, of full-blown panicked dithering, that would amount to essentially the same result.  I'd like to think not, but with mid-summer tourists around?

Next up:  the value of NET training!

Is the Road Supposed To Do That?

So, back to the tale at hand, where I left off on Wednesday, 6/22, with a brief sketch of the morning in Sendai before going back to the coast.

Our presentations Wednesday, and I've talked with Masami about this, were not good.  Some scheduling goofs, sure, and some language stuff, maybe, but no coherent structure, even in the handouts.  For me, it gets back to:  what kind of information do the Japanese have to give, and what kind of information do we Portlanders need?  Obviously, there's no perfect overlap, so our challenge  as participants is to sort the two out.  Personally, I've been trying to look at all of this through a NET lens; some talks have fared better than others.  Our Wednesdays speakers have done intriguing work in the aftermath, but I struggle to find the relevance to Portland.  Labor trends in Northern Japan, no matter how extensive the surveys, just....I'm still working on it.  Someone else in the group may very well be thinking "oh, you know what that reminds me of?"

After a quick lunch, we jumped in our crazy little buslet, our demi-bus, our busette, and motored up to the mountain road to Rikuzen-takata.  I'm putting in a hyphen that isn't normally there, because it makes it clearer to my English-reading eyes where the pronunciation break is.  In case you were wondering.

The trip up to the turnoff was hair-raising, even for me, because the bus's suspension was so shot that, at highway speeds, any lane change or course correction caused the back of the bus to roll madly from side to side, to the VISIBLE consternation of our fellow motorists.  Official protests from within the bus were lodged and received....

Fortunately, the bus behaved better at lower speeds and, once we turned off into the mountains, there was no doubting this road's intention to have us drive at lower speeds. Which gave us a better look at the farms, the forests, the road up ahead/down below...

It's worth noting here how much rice is grown in Japan.  I'd never given it much thought, but apparently Japan is self-sufficient for rice, if not much else.  The paddies are everywhere (EVERYwhere), including stair-stepped up these mountainsides.  I've seen a bit of corn and some clover cover crops, but so far, it has been 98% rice.  It's like driving through Iowa, except I'd expect to see some soy even there.  Here...nope.  Is it possible that it's being imported from Iowa?

This was also the road that will have inspired a post on native/invasive plants in Japan.  There's just no escaping it.  OR knotweed.  I don't want to talk about it right now.

But I will.

So, this is the road with real switchbacks, but also something I'm not sure I've ever seen before:  a corkscrew.  The road descends off a pass, goes out into the valley on its concrete stilty piers, and then drops down under itself to continue down the valley.  It just seemed so random and almost theme-parky, especially where they closed our lane for construction at the very bottom.  I wish I'd had the presence of mind to take a picture, but I don't evem know if that'd capture it.  Too bad Barb slept through it.  Sleeps on buses motoring through hairpin turns:  Barb's pretty hardcore.

As we made it through the mountains to the coast, the rain intensified, making our arrival tour pretty soggy.  But that's more related to other Rikuzen-takata stuff from Thursday.  Stay tuned...

Who are these people, anyway?

Yep, still alive over here!  Busy few days, and some minor plan shifts...

As folks start to ask more questions about the week, I realized I've never really introduced our class.

As near as I can tell, this one-week class was the pilot for future field trips as PSU's Hatfield School of Government develops a community disaster resilience specialization within their masters of public administration (MPA).  The intention is to repeat this trip, for students and not-exactly-students like me, every year.

So, leading the trip were Dr. Masami Nishishiba, department chair and bigwig on community and organizational structure, and Dr. Hiro Ito, professor of economics with a focus on global economics.  Obviously, this is grossly simplifies their interests and talents, so, my apologies. Did I mention they're both awesome?  Josh from Hatfield also joined us as program coordinator/'group photo herder extraordinaire' and badly needs a vacation right about now.  All three were raised in Japan, and all did substantial amounts of translation (both verbal and cultural!).

The 9 of us were:
--me [with some preparedness/NET background and a smattering of other stuff]
--Barb [working on continuity plans for Portland Parks, is a FEMA reservist and professional badass]
--Kate [also working on her masters at PSU, she speaks Japanese, so we bugged her a lot]
--Evan [wrapping up his degree in Japanese Studies; bugged HIM a lot, too]
--Robin [retired from social work, daughter works with Josh;  always ready with a question]
--Larry [nearly retired emergency manager from Medford; always ready with a story, usually about being a paramedic in San Francisco in the '70s...which, uh...that's a different blog]
--Steve [a fellow NET from the next neighborhood over, he's a construction manager for a local contracting firm, also in grad school]
--Rob [an almost-former architect working on his masters, with a really good camera usually in hand and an eye for detail]

In some important ways, this felt like a bit of a supergoup, with everyone chipping in some key insight or expertise.  There was nowhere we went where someone didn't say, "oh, you know what this reminds me of...?"  And everyone got to be that person regularly.  I found that impressive and kind of thrilling.    It was also a group that stayed loose all week [although Mitchy got a little frazzled that last day or so...sorry, guys]. Mostly folks were just fun.  It doesn't always work like that....

A Seawall in Usuiso

It's a breezy day here on the Tohoku coast.  I'm looking out at the ocean from the re-emerging Rikuzen-takata.  One thing I've noticed (among many), is the widespread use of flags.  Tour guides use them to lead their groups,construction sites use them everywhere.  They're usually the long and narrow type, on 6' poles, now common on the Oregon coast and elsewhere.  I gather this type was long-used by Japanese armies, so not really surprising to see them here.  Perhaps more odd that it seems familiar.

I left the telling of things at Monday night, in the coastal city of Ishinomaki.  After a huge Japanese dinner on Monday, featuring such unsuspected delicacies as fried chicken cartilage and daikon root soup, we spent Tuesday touring a new seawall in Usuiso.  Pre-GEJE, it was a popular beach town, with good surfing, a little fishing fleet, and several hundred families.  Six years later, the new, higher levees include a large, newly-forested buffer zone and park, but the 14 surviving houses are still all alone.  Surrounding hills have been flattened to provide fill for the control structures and a flat place for the re-drawn, smaller lots.  Yeah, redrawn.  It's a kind of 'eminent domain' called Land Readjustment that allows the government to redivide people's lots for common structure.  Relatively rare before,  it's now being done all up and down the coast.  I don't think folks are necessarily excited about it, but it is what it is.  The relationship between the Japanese and their federal government is somewhat different...possibly more accepting...than in the States.

Our morning tour with the engineers revealed some of the amazing work that's being done to move and compact each additional foot of soil.  The hillsides all around have gutters and drains, meant to keep them from saturating.  Those drains run right through the new subdivision, picking up overflow from each home's septic tank before entering a common pipe that drains into the ocean.  Apparently, it's common practice in less dense areas to deal with sewer this way.  The cost of connecting all, or any, the remote corners of Japan would certainly be huge.  Better to save sewage treatment for cities.  Who here works for Portland's sewer bureau?  Oh, that'd be me...

During our break, Josh (our program coordinator) and Steve (from Arbor Lodge) and I walked along the seawall, which is now 7 meters high, around 23 feet.  And, while it's impressive and while it's low enough that people behind can look over and SEE a tsunami coming (an important criticism of some other seawalls), we couldn't help but look across the road at the hills and think:  'ooo.  It would suck to  climb those.'  It seems there's still a bit of glibness, some off-handed casualness in the discussion of these large projects.  "Save all that money," the argument goes.  "Just make people go up."  Mmm. Easy to say.

After lunch we heard from a guy on Usuiso's Recovery Committee, who talked about how the recovery was going.  Interesting to hear how the local efforts developed, but, as we left, we stopped at  a shrine to the townspeople who had died.  He followed us, and began telling us about some of the names on the list.  He was remarkably stoic: as a volunteer firefighter, that's kind of par for the course.  But, these are hard stories and mostly about the kids he had known, and, in some cases, had to retrieve from the wreckage.  Suffice it to say, these were the stories we expected to hear on this excursion, but I'll leave it at that for now.

After returning to Sendai for the night, we heard from Tohoku University students and faculty Wednesday morning, before heading off to Rikuzen-takata in the afternoon.  More later...

Off and running

It looks like I checked in last on Monday morning...it's been a fairly busy 3 days.

I left off Monday morning in Sendai, a Portland-sized city up the northern coast.  Our class of 9 spent the day at Tohoku University, one of several schools in Sendai and a leader is disaster planning for Tohoku (this 8 prefecture region) and for Japan.  We've heard quite a lot this week about the Tohoku Recovery (meaning now the 3 affected coastal prefectures) and how difficult it's been.  Japan's planning processes needed to be completely re-written in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE).  It took a year to sketch out what planning now looked like, and another year to finalize plans.  This period of adjustment, while critical for making wise choices, also prolonged people's stay in temporary housing.  Also, as folks settle in their "temporary" housing, going back to  home communities becomes increasingly unlikely.  The story repeats itself everywhere we go:  the kids are in a new school, the fish patty company's old buyers have moved on, there are no jobs in th fixed-up neighborhood.

But without residents, what business would commit to returning? In an extreme example, after six years, the town of Rikuzen-takata's grocery store will re-open next month.  It's a crazy game of chicken-and-egg that the Pacific Northwest really wants to get ahead of.  Inability to keep people around Portland is a thing that gets talked about a lot in some circles.  There's no easy solution, but surely there must be conversations we can have and ways of prioritizing we can agree to in advance.

Yeah.  And that's the light, fluffy stuff.  In the afternoon, we all piled into the bus and drove into Fukushima prefecture.  We were headed to the small town of Iwaki, but took the, uh, scenic route.  Driving through the little village of Namie, you could tell it was deserted.  And then we started seeing roadblocks.  Then some with guards.  Then....are those radiation detectors?  O, yes.  And there, 20 miles off towards the ocean, Fukushima Daiichi ("Reactor #1"), five or six stories of lethal beige.  And how many acres of radioactive waste disposal bags, snuggeled in next to neighboring ricefields?  We lost count.  More to tell on Daiichi, but that's for a powepoint.  Suffice it to say, a very weird, very surreal bus ride.

Up next:  the little seawall project, or 'what does $106 million really get me?'  Don't go anywhere.

Greetings from tomorrow

So, after 2 days in Tokyo, and a BULLET TRAIN to Sendai, it’s time to check in.

Yeah...where to start?  Much of the last couple of days has been coping with jet lag.  Getting to the hotel and changing trains in downtown Tokyo at 5pm on a Friday didn’t help me get to sleep or dinner any sooner, but it sure was entertaining.  Didn’t use the subway, though, so I don’t feel like I’ve fully done ‘Tokyo rush hour.’  But, at hour 19, I was ready to be done for the day.  Finally passed out at 8pm, 22 hours after getting up “that morning” in Portland.  And, after all that, WHEN did i wake up, feeling all refreshed?  Midnight.  I woke up 4 hours later, starving.  That’s the thing about traveling:  you can never get away from yourself.

So, the theme of Saturday and Sunday was mostly jetlag.  Checked out some museums, walked around a lot trying to get my vitamin D and met up with , yesterday Steve and Amelia, from the class, for dinner when they got in that evening.  A sizable bowl of Thai has a nice way putting things aright again.

Sunday, Steve did what I did Saturday and got up insanely early to check out the neighborhood.  While I only managed to find the 7/11 (more common here than Starbucks in Portland), Steve explored the area around the Imperial Gardens/Palace.  Nice.  So, we met up with Robin, and the four of us did another vitamin D day.  MIddle of the day, we caught up with Rob and Larry, and blasted off to Sendai.

Ah, yes, the bullet train.  So clean, such a completely smooth ride, and so frickin’ fast.  Makes Amtrak look like and feel like a damn Radio Flyer wagon.  In an hour and a half, we covered a 6-hour bus ride.  So fast.  Trippy looking out the window...like someone had the 2x playback on the DVD player.

So, now we’re in Sendai, settling in for our week of classes and field trips.

I’ve been musing about my experience in Tokyo, and figuring it was analagous to visiting New York City.  Now I’m going to learn about the rest of Japan, the older, maybe less hurried Japan.  Some anecdotes, though, from the last two days:

--yes, there are a bazillion 7/11s and their cousins in Tokyo
--breakfast in Tokyo was reliably bad, leading one to the aforementioned 7/11s.
--Japanese hotel rooms are something else. This will be its own blog post
--this is a very risk averse society...an ongoing discussion in preparedness circles

And, the blogging process turns out to be far more tedious and cumbersome than I had even expected, so it's time for a clumsy exit to breakfast.  More soon!

T-2 hours and counting...

Hoky smokes, Bullwinkle.  In addition to things like 'eat breakfast, do dishes, and shave,' my morning to-do list includes 'go to Japan.'  Wait, what?  It's not like I didn't see it coming.  I just...it's a little hard to believe that's up next.  Well, next-ish.  I got to the airport in plenty of time.  As in, over two hours in advance.  It seemed wiser to allow plenty of leeway for our goofy little light rail system.  Awww, cute little MAX.  Are you having a hard time with the [insert any kind of weather at all]?  I'm perhaps unreasonably excited about Japan's major-league mass transit, which surely makes MAX look like a game of pickup during 4th-grade recess.

As it happened, though, I caught my train and my connecting train after short jogs, and made it to the airport from Killingsworth in 40 minutes.  Probably a record.  Waited for one couple at security, and walked through x-ray (hands-up....), taking as much time as the TSA strip-tease and redress required.  And that was it.

Blink blink.

Oh.

I'm curious if this is a sign of things to come, or if I've used up all my good travel karma.  Let you know more from the other side of the Pacific....

T-4 days and counting....

Are we there yet?

It seems both fortunate and unfortunate that there's as much going on right now as there is.  On the one hand, I can't do a lot of toe-tapping/impatient clock-watching on the countdown (although, YES, I have packed the bag once already).  On the other hand, running around like a nut does prevent me from getting some of the planning done that I should be doing.  An important lesson on letting things go, perhaps.  Or, The Zen of Visiting Japan...that will almost certainly be a blog title.

But, I AM very excited to go.  I've got my railpass vouchers.  I just bought a bunch of cash from my friend Naomi.  I've been practicing my Japanese on people who have no idea what I'm talking about, which, now that I think about it, is a scene I expect to repeat all over Japan.  I've broken in my new walking shoes (I hope).  All I need to do is finish this 6-page paper for class and I'll be...oh, who am I  kidding?  I have lists of lists of things I still need to do before I'm ready to go.

One thing that still needs polishing is the itinerary.  And since you asked, here's the working draft:

Tokyo [6/16-6/18]
At some point, everyone's passing through Tokyo.  There are 10 of us in the class, plus our two faculty (Dr. Mishishiba and Dr. Ito) plus two coordinators from the office (Josh and Alayna).  I'm getting in Friday afternoon;  Sunday afternoon we're all off to Sendai.

Sendai [6/18-6/21]
Sounds like Sendai is the largest city in Tohoku (the northern portion of the island of Honshu).  Within Tohoku, there are eight prefectures:  we'll be hanging out in Fukushima, Miyagi, and Iwate prefectures.  All are coastal and affected by the tsunami and the earthquake.  Fukushima, of course, also drew the short straw on their nuclear reactor.  In Sendai, we'll be in lectures and doing a bit of touring.

Ishinomaki & Rikuzentakata [6/21-24]
These two coastal towns had their own particular issues with the tsunami.  Rikuzentakata, in the aftermath, is raising its downtown 12 meters.  The entire downtown has been covered with an extra 35-ish feet of soil.  Stay tuned...

Sendai [6/25]
The program returns to Sendai en route to Tokyo for most folks, but for me.....

Hachinohe [6/25-27]
A small coastal city almost to the end of Honshu.  Home to a pair of torii which became linked to Oregon and Portland through the tsunami.  More on this later...

Matsumoto [6/27-28]
A transit day south to Tokyo, then west into the Japan Alps and Matsumoto.

Nagano [6/28]
A day hike up into the mountains, maybe.  This day seems somewhat negotiable....

Kanazawa [6/28-7/1]
A couple days on the Sea of Japan, looking at gardens and checking out hot springs (onsen).  They specialize in seafood, so....we'll see what that actually entails!

Kyoto [7/1-7/4]
Kyoto is the old imperial capital, so the temple and castle-watching here is practically unlimited.  I hope to chill a bit here, but also do a day trip to the fortress at Himeji, and/or a day trip to another nearby onsen.

Tokyo [7/4-7/6]
A couple more days before the flight out.  Recompression/decompression?  Packing of newly-purchased suitcase to check for the flight?  We'll see.....

Why now?

For most people, I assume the idea of the Pacific Northwest getting a big jolt is something of a weird idea.  I may have that wrong.  When I did my first NET (Neighborhood Emergency Team) training in November 2012, the State of Oregon was just about to release the Oregon Resilience Plan.  Many of the writing team had spent time in Fukushima, Miyagi, and Iwate prefectures (the 3 most affected by the tsunami) in the months afterwards, so their perspectives weren't theoretical.  They had actually seen it.  I'd signed up for NET because it just seemed like the responsible thing;  the Resilience Plan outlined just how much work needed/needs to be done.  It's 350 pages of pure sobering buzzkill.  I know you'll want to read it.....(here).

About two years ago, the discussion got another jolt, in the form of a New Yorker article (here) which you may have seen, and a public television program called 'Unprepared'.  Both are pretty spooky, but got a lot of people thinking and talking.  

Since then, and no doubt because of those two releases, our local American Red Cross chapter has been running their 'Prepare Out Loud' campaign.  Their lead presenter, Steve, gives a somewhat hair-raising (if you're into that kind of thing) but also quite funny (actually) talk.  It's very humane, and represents the next phase of the popular discussion:  this shouldn't be paralyzing, so what, exactly, should we do?  

In February of this year, the City Club of Portland, our volunteer policy tank, released their findings on resilience.  They'd focused 9 months of research of four aspects of 'how do we bounce back?'  They made 14 recommendations, which is a LOT, but fewer than they had wanted to make.  It's another impressive read, but quick:  only 84 pages.  I'd recommend the 'reports on tape' version, but the graphs, man.  You'd miss the graphs....

I think I mentioned something about "wonks" in an earlier blog?

Anyway, at this point, I'm essentially riding this wave about preparedness.  I've read the articles, I'm deep into NET, I've heard Steve talk twice, and I've actually joined City Club so I can help push along the recommendations.  A chance conversation at our big annual neighborhood event finally woke me up enough to apply, just as the application window was closing.  The PSU folks were very kind to me.  Visiting Japan had been on my list for years, and, suddenly, after a flurry of a week, I'm on the glide path.  

Next up:  wait, and now I'm back in class?  

What earthquake?

Starting in the mid-80s, geologists began looking into some odd clues around the Pacific Northwest. Clues like ghost forests, these swaths of dead cedar trees along the coast that died for no apparent reason.  Researchers from Oregon State starting taking sediment cores well out into the Pacific and found weird periodic layers of stuff.  Turns out, they were landslides from the continental shelf.  Big ones.

As recently as the '90s, Oregon thought of itself, weirdly, as being non-seismic.  I mean, the Ring of Fire is distinctly ring-ish.  And the Cascade Mountains have to come from somewhere, right?  Well, okay, about 50 miles off the coast, stretching from Cape Mendocino in California to well past Vancouver Island in Canada, lies the Cascadia Subduction Zone.  The CSZ is where the last remnants of the Juan de Fuca plate are being shoved under the (very slow-moving) bus that is the North American plate.  It's a hell of a thing.  Try this at home:  take a 10-mile thick slab of rock, all studded with boulders and whatnot, and push it under another slab of rock, maybe 50 miles thick and even less forgiving than your slab of rock.

No prizes for guessing:  this does not go well.  In other subduction zones, the average time between quakes is 100-200 years.  Here, we let the pressure build up a little bit.  Eventually, though, the North American plate overcomes the friction, snapping up along the edge (out in the ocean) and collapsing all through the center.  According to the offshore cores, the small ("small") earthquakes happen every 300 years or so:  these are in the 8.0-8.4 range.  The BIG earthquakes have an average return interval of around 500 years:  these can go up to 9.2.  The San Andreas is expected to max out around 8.0.

Uhh...

But wait.  There's more.  Those ghost trees....scientists cored them, too.  They think the trees were killed when the land under them suddenly dropped several feet and they were flooded with salt water.  It was sometime around the year 1700, probably in the winter.  You can learn a lot from coring, apparently.

Now, the punchline.  In 1996, a Japanese researcher published a paper about Japan's 'orphan tsunami,' an old report about one weird, 16-foot tall wave that came out of absolutely nowhere, with no warning and no associated earthquake.  It arrived in the middle of the night on January 26, 1700, about 10 hours after a massive earthquake rocked the Pacific Northwest.

So.  Oregon.  NOT non-seismic.  More about being "overdue" in the 'why now?' post.

Why are you doing this?

I left the last post in mysterious place:  Bixby!  What the hell are you doing?  Japan?  And earthquakes?

Before I get into that, because circumnavigating the landscaping is fun, I want to you all to know who you all, my multiple audiences, are.  Obviously, I'm talking to several crowds in Portland, including my NET (Neighborhood Emergency Team) peeps, my City Club peeps, my work peeps, my PSU classmates, my Quaker crowd (no seismic connection, there...), and many other dear friends in town.  

But, many of them already have already been, uh, INTRODUCED to this topic through my ramblings.  So these first few blogs will be review for them.  I'm mostly talking to friends and family east of here.  This matters to you all, too.  AND, I think it will help my blogging in Japan to have established the broader context here.  If you'd like the executive summary ("summary"), I've got a shorter version on the GoFundMe page:  https://www.gofundme.com/Community-Resilience-In-Japan

Circling back to the beginning: why am I doing this thing?  About 4 years ago, I completed my NET training.  NET (called Community Emergency Response Teams or 'CERT' everywhere else in the world) was created to help decentralize emergency response to problems or disasters.  It's a basic instruction that helps citizens help each other, especially if professional aid is expected to be slow in coming.  CERTs have cropped up all over the country, particularly in the wake of big storms (Katrina, Sandy), but also in response to more local incidents:  tornadoes, train derailments, wildfires.  In many places, I get the sense that it's primarily a way to plan ahead.

I love that, of course.  But in Portland, NET has also become something of a vehicle for community resilience.  After a large earthquake, no amount of pre-staged powdered water is going to suffice.  We will rely on each other, and to do that, we need better-stitched social fabric. We need better connected, more humane, less dependent communities.  We actually need this everywhere, in my opinion, not just in Portland.  But this is where I live, and NET sets it up nicely.

So, that's a start to an answer.  My time at NET has led me to explore public health and sanitation, especially within the sewer bureau I work for.  It's led me to the City Club of Portland, whose thoughtful policy analysis and passionate wonk-cred ('like recognizes like') are unmatched in Portland.  And it's led me to explore even further afield, to Japan.

But, next:  what earthquakes?

Reboot

So.  Take 3 on 'Travel Blogging'.....

It's a bit odd, looking at my last post, from a road trip to Albuquerque that apparently ended in the middle somewhere.  By way of excusing myself, I did comment on how annoying it is to blog via smart phone.  And, at the other end of the guilt spectrum, I have already received a bit of smackdown, a dollop of snark, from a co-worker about my failure as a blogger.  My journal-writing is spectacularly inconsistent, so why should my blog be any different?

Annnd, we're moving on.  And at a pretty high rate of speed, too.  Not just because I want to get away from this ridiculous segue, but because I'm moving quickly, giddily almost, towards the Next Big Adventure.  You can almost hear my voice getting more bass from the Doppler shift.  This text color should be increasingly....red?

It's Japan.  On June 15th, I'm catching a non-stop (!!) from Portland to Tokyo, to take a one-week course in the Sendai/Fukushima area, sponsored by Portland State (PSU).  The Japanese, it seems, are intent on communicating their experiences with large earthquakes and tsunamis to the folks who need to hear it:  Portlanders.

For many of you outside the Pacific Northwest, what I've just typed makes no sense whatsoever.  What earthquake?  Why me?  Why now?  What could Portland possibly have to do with Japanese earthquakes?  Over the next few posts, I'll try to explain this piece.

But, before I do:  there's more.  Once that week is up, I'll be wandering Japan for another two weeks.  As I dig into the planning for that part of the trip....well, it's a massive rabbit-hole.  I just spent an hour comparing railpasses.  It's hard to convey how completely stoked this train nut/former travel agent is right now.  Railpasses....for bullet trains.  DUDE.   If only the maglev train would hurry up and get built!  If I do nothing but ride the train back and forth for two weeks, no one should be surprised.

Naturally, there's a lot of posting to be done and almost no time to do it.  I'm in the middle of my spring field season, treating weeds, and the weather has been....difficult.  I find myself once again scrambling and juggling the schedule, but this time with a hard deadline.  Come June 15th, whether the work is done or not, I'm out.  It's both freeing and worrisome.

I'm going to let this sit for the moment, as my (re)introduction.  In the next post, I'll explain what earthquakes have to do with me in Portland, which will, in turn, explain the class.