Elderly Japanese Relive War's Devastation
The New York Times reports:
NATORI, Japan — Hirosato Wako stared at the ruins of his small fishing hamlet: skeletons of shattered buildings, twisted lengths of corrugated steel, corpses with their hands twisted into claws. Only once before had he seen anything like it: World War II.
“I lived through the Sendai air raids,” said Mr. Wako, 75, referring to the Allied bombings of the northeast’s largest city. “But this is much worse.”
For the elderly who live in the villages lining Japan’s northeastern coast, it is a return to a past of privation that their children have never known. As in so much of the Japanese countryside, young people have largely fled, looking for work in the city. The elderly who remained are facing devastation and possible radiation contamination, a challenge equal only to the task this generation faced when its defeated, despairing nation had to rebuild from the rubble of the war.
In this hamlet of Yuriage, the search for survivors was turning into a search for bodies. And most of those bodies were old — too old to have outrun the tsunami.
Yuta Saga, 21, was picking up broken cups after the earthquake when he heard sirens and screams of “Tsunami!” He grabbed his mother by the arm and ran to the junior high school, the tallest building around. Traffic snarled the streets as panicked drivers crashed into one another. He could measure the wave’s advance by the clouds of dust created by collapsing buildings.
When they reached the school, Mr. Saga and his mother found the stairs to the roof clogged with older people who appeared unable to muster the strength to climb them. Some were just sitting or lying on the steps. As the bottom floor filled with fleeing residents, the wave hit.
At first, the doors held. Then water began to pour through the seams and flow into the room. In a panic to reach the roof, younger residents began pushing and yelling, “Hurry!” and “Out of the way!” They climbed over those who were not moving, or elbowed them aside.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Mr. Saga said. “They were even shoving old people out of the way. The old people couldn’t save themselves.”
He added, “People didn’t care about others.”
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