Letter from Sendai

I was in London three weeks ago when I woke up to hear a commentary on the quake on the radio. There was an uncanny week of hearing familiar British news reporters like Jon Snow talk about districts of Tohoku that I actually knew of, while being unable to really discover what had happened to the city itself. There was also a very odd moment of discovery to learn (form the London Evening Standard) there are apparently only 14 British nationals living in this city of 1 million people; can that be right? I'm back in Sendai now, and cannot speak about the immediate shock, or the blackouts and communication breakdown that happened that first weekend. Happily, everyone at my work is accounted for. To have not witnessed what your neighbours and colleagues have experienced is a peculiar and uncomfortable status in itself, but for now it might suffice to record a few observations of Sendai. The western and central parts of the city are intact, give or take the odd building under wraps and, most conspicuously, the railway station, which seems to have partially collapsed and so closed down the main rail links. Otherwise the main  difference is in terms of shopping, and in such a consumer driven society as this, the shortages of food and energy seem striking, even if they do not amount (in Sendai at least) to an acute danger. There are longer than usual queues for rather empty shelves; bread and dairy products are especially scarce. Petrol is limited for drivers and there is no gas at all in my side of the city which makes my flat a chilly, cold water living space. Most shops are closed or only partially open, especially the ubiquitous kombini which have mostly packed up. People are up and about and going about their business. The biggest difference for me is the total absence of any students from the campus, as they have been advised to stay away for the next few weeks, and what a forlorn place it then looks. And then again, from the ninth floor of my campus building, with its view of the Sendai coast, there is a greyness on the shore where you expect to see the reflection of the city...
  Today is of course the first day of the working year and the media are presenting suitable resolutions about what is to be done in the coming months.Young men and women have appeared on NHK pledging to  help rebuild Tohoku. I, who am not a citizen of Japan, genuinely admire such a sentiment to make this wonderful but impoverished part of the country a decent place to live in rather than let it go into a mournful decline. The difficulty, and fractiousness, of this will no doubt become clearer shortly. At least one English blogger in Sendai has speculated about a positive change in human consciousness resulting from this catastrophe. I'm less sure about such religious answers, but perhaps an event like this can bring people to recognise each other as, at the very least, citizens who share a well-being in common.