Great Tohoku Kanto Earthquake Tsunami

Hello Friends, this is Dr.Adventure! Sit back and I’ll tell you the tale of my journey to the land of The Rising Sun.
I began at the airport loaded with tools and superhero armor and not too much besides. The plane ride was lovely, I had a nap, was well fed and was relatively unmolested.
As per my most recent communiqué with our agents in Tokyo I took the train to minnowa station. After circling the station several times looking for my pickup (I knew they might expect me to go somewhere strange when I got to the station) I realized they were either hiding very well or had left. I finally found steady internet to get their message that they had left and where to find them. As I got to the second station I realized they were probably out celebrating and I went off in search for a noodle bar when all of a sudden I bumped into them on the street! They were off to get tattoos.
After a night in tokyo and a day exploring harijuku I took the midnight bus to kesennuma. I Arrived at 6 and was picked up by Teejay, who was still onsite waiting to make the handoff for the van.
I learned to drive a stick-shift that day and got the lay of the land and was introduced to our local contacts. Downtown Kesennuma was obliterated, a chunk of the city about a half mile by a mile and change had been mostly swept away. Pretty much all of it was under about 5 feet of water right after the tsunami but it had receded and some places were back in biz.
The parts of the city that survived were back to their day to day. the rest was a wasteland of flipped over houses, demolished industrial buildings, giant crane-trucks bent in half and boats a in the middle of the road…So Lots a work.
Mission 1:Kessenuma Ichiban Fish Market: Super-training the Secret Mayor
Day one brought Tee jay and I to the Kesennuma ichiban Fish Market, where fish are unloaded from the ships and sold and shipped off. It was one of the few structures in the downtown left standing and was already repaired and open for business (although the fishing boats weren’t for a few days).
Now, so you know, this place is one of the largest markets like this in all of Japan, the largest market for its type of fish, and probably the biggest business in Kesennuma, not the place you go down the block to get fixins for a fish fry. We had come to help scrub oil of the big rectangular buckets they use to unload the boats.
We met with a group of volunteers that were scrubbing the buckets with these broom handled brushes, then passed them down to get steel wool scrubbed and finished off with a toothbrush. They stacked a pile of buckets about 7 ft tall and said “you wash these” and handed me four brushes. I said “what am I supposed to do with all of these?” and they said to use two brushes at a time. And I did. I put two buckets down and a brush in each hand and started working.
All of a sudden this guy in bright orange overalls jumps off a forklift and yells “AHH, More POWER!!!” and I invite him to join in. He grabs two brushes and we start racing (without half-assing it). I asked him how he was doing and he turns to me and says “I GET it, KICK HARDER!!!!”. After he finished scrubbing I asked him if he was volunteering and he told me he had a business in kesennuma, When I asked him which one he looked confused and told me the same thing so I was definitely missing something. He saw this and told me to follow me outside. He pointed to the Sign on the fish market and said “MY business, in Kesennuma”
This guy was probably the richest dude in town, and obviously, the Secret Mayor!!!! Also, totally awesome, as we were cleaning he spent the day driving forklifts very, very fast. And yelling. after cleaning every bucket there we were done for the day.
Mission 2:Sobe House: Japan Old-school squad go!!
Tee jay had left the night before and iI was on my own for the duration of my stay. (I got to spend my evenings doing training in the woods and reading).
I spent a solid day scrubbing out a sobe noodle house with a crew of lovely old dudes that collectively spoke 4 words of english. I spent several hours scrubbing a once flooded (to the ceiling) bathroom till it sparkled.
Mission 3: Kesennuma Action Team #1:Jazz
After meeting with the Kesennuma volunteer center coordinators, I was sent off to shovel out dried tsunami muck from a strip-mall store. all the stores were either closed or boned except one that was seemingly unaffected, but ill get to that. While shoveling (with two shovels at once) I met the members of Kesennuma Action Team#1! led by Tac Sakuramata, they had come out from tokyo in a party bus to help reconstruction. Champions. We were done before lunch.
Lunch, by the way, was very interesting, it was at the seemingly untouched Jazz bar and restaurant next door. This place was FULL, top to bottom, with cross-cultural old school rocknroll knickknacks. The owner was apparently an aikido master, like the kind that can rip your brain out or throw you through a wall with a flick of the wrist. He showed us video of the tsunami and made great curry. Turns out his place had been flooded to the ceiling and he’d cleaned EVERYTHING. Like probably 1000+ knickknacks. the only damage: his otherwise still perfect vintage Elvis matches wouldn’t light. As I was leaving I gave him an American flag pencil, and as he shook my hand he looked me square in the eye and paused, then he tried to do some aikido move! I slipped right out of it and he realized I wasn’t some gaijin jerk, I’m made of Rockn’Roll.
Mission 4: Kesennuma Action Team #1:Oshima
I was invited to go with K.A.T#1 to Oshima island, which is a 20 minute ferry ride from the bay in Kesennuma. We went out to do demo and cleanup at a traditional Japanese house that was over 100 years old! We spent the day tearing up the floor with crowbars, picking up broken class, unloading bizarre  old collectibles and sorting a small hill of garbage. I say ‘hill’ because I’ve seen garbage Mountains, 80ft tall and growing, and that take up 8 city blocks. This was a hill at oshima, only about as tall as a house. We found a rusted Bullet from a howitzer, got lots of snacks from the owners and I got a lesson in traditional japanese construction, entirely in japanese. we got to walk the shore and see where the 15ft cement tide-breaks had cracked and fallen into the water. On our way back to the mainland, The K.A.T. #1 presented some potted flowers to the ferry-boat people, as a gift and a thanks to Oshima island.
Mission 5: Super Science Class
One of my primary objectives on this trip was to teach a class for the local kids, something to shake them out of the trauma of the tsunami and the destruction and upheaval around them. Kids really have the worst of it in situations like this, they don’t have as many tools to help them cope and there’s not as much that they can do to help so they’re stuck watching. I went with tanaka-san, one of our contacts, to a local school in kesennuma to teach a science class to some primary school kids. I walked in dressed in my full-on super hero gear and the kids all started going bonkers! There were 2 other volunteers from the volunteer center and a couple other fellas that were working outreach at the school plus teachers to help with the class. A bit of overkill but they got as much out of it as the kids I think.
We made rainbow colored slime and I showed them how to make static electricity with balloons, which always turns into 20 minutes of playing with balloons and laughing. Then we made volcanoes! It was a spectacular class, the kids loved every second. When we were done they started coming up to me to have me sign autographs for about half an hour. As we were leaving one of the teachers told Tanaka-san that this was the first time since the tsunami that all of the kids had been so happy, laughing and running about as kids should. The mission was a success!
Mission 6: Exploring Rikuzentakata
My Last day of volunteer work started with sitting in on a class on stamp carving at a local nursing home. The class was taught by Tamon, one of the volunteers and a former physics teacher. It was a  lot of fun and seemed like it was a nice change of pace for the residents. When we were done Tamon and I took the trip to Rikuzentakata, the next town over, which had been completely decimated by the tsunami. I do mean completely, probably 90% of the town had simply been washed away. the few buildings left standing were blasted out or mostly rubble. We went to explore the hospital there, which was one of the few structures left. Apparently during the tsunami warning they had moved their patients up to the third floor…unfortunately the wave came up to the fifth. That’s about 60ft tall, and it must have been a couple Miles wide and went inland for several miles more. Staggering.
We went up to the roof and found where people had been camped out for the night after the disaster, but it looked like only a few people had been there, no where near the few hundred people that were probably in the hospital that day. On the roof we found a message, it said that since the hospital was probably going to be torn down, people should go and play there. We spent the rest of the afternoon driving around the devastation, this city had been scoured to the ground. Despite all this people were there, in cranes and trucks and hardhats getting to work sifting the wreckage and cleaning up. There may never be a town there again but people are working to make sure the area becomes usable for something, sooner or later.

My last day I got the campsite and such squared away then headed to for Tokyo. I got to Tokyo the day before my flight and as soon as I got to the hostel I got in contact with my backup that had just arrived, Wriston (who has been out for a month now!), and gave him his briefing and sent him on his way. I spent the rest of the day exploring Asakusa, the oldschool shrines and such that were part of Edo before it became Tokyo. Very cool. The next day I began the long hike back to the US of A!
This was an amazing experience for me and I think a lot of good was done. I’m not worried about Kesennuma, there’s a great team there and the Secret Mayor is a badass, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.