A Journey to Aid: My Experience in the Aftermath of the 7.6 Noto Peninsula Earthquake in Japan
Japan had a 7.6 Earthquake in the country’s Noto Peninsula.
After the Earthquake, I went to Wajima, the most heavily affected area with the biggest death toll, and just came back from the trip.
Now I’m in Tokyo sitting in a Starbucks. I‘ve decided to sit down and write my experiences and share as much as I can. I know that this is a luxury not available to the people of Wajima right now. They are not in a warm Starbucks with a warm drink, with electricity and internet, or even a running toilet. I know that their stories, not mine, needs to be the most heard. But at this moment, as they focus instead on living, I will focus then on sharing however much I can on my own.
I have 2 friends. One lives in Wajima, and one who’s boyfriend’s family lives in Wajima and who was visiting the family in Wajima at the time of the 7.6 earthquake.
Both of the 2 friends’ homes burned down. Both families are taking shelter in a car and community building.
Experiencing the earthquake in Tokyo
The Noto Peninsula Earthquake hit 4pm on January 1st, 2024.
I was in Tokyo at the time and only felt a little of the shake as Tokyo is far from Noto Peninsula, around a 7 hour drive length. It’s mundane in Japan to feel small shakes, so I thought nothing of it. Then, notifications started popping up on my phone that a 7.6 Earthquake has hit the Noto Peninsula region.
The region is one of my favorite places in Japan. So much that I did a week long road trip around the whole Peninsula, a year and half ago. The reason for the road trip in the first place was that I had a friend who was from Wajima already, and even though I had never gone to Wajima, seeing his Instagram stories about his life in Wajima and him showing me videos of the traditional summer festivals of his hometown made me literally mesmerized by its culture.
It was life changing, visiting Wajima for the first time. What amazed me was that no one asked me where I was from, or if I was “hafu” (mixed in Japanese). This was literally a first time ever experience and that’s why Wajima is a dear place to me personally. I’ve always been an “outsider”, whether I’m in Japan or outside of Japan, I never really had a home or an ethnicity I connected to. And so, I always get questions. I understand. But it’s even stronger in Japan where strangers would ask me what mix of blood I am before saying hello. This tends to be stronger in rural areas of Japan as there isn’t many non-Japanese people in the area compared to big cities like Tokyo.
Wajima is a tiny rural city. So I thought, I would once again be an outsider visiting. Throughout my time in Wajima, I met my friend, some young people, and bunch of old people. No one, not even a single person, asked where I was from. No one asked any questions. They all talked to me about me. I felt like a person, not an exhibit. My heart still remembers this astonishment. I remember asking my friend why this was, because I was literally so shocked that a small rural town in Japan did not give a fuck that I didn’t look fully Japanese or that I was a clear tourist and a visitor. My friend told me that since Wajima is so tiny, with not that many people, they had a long history of intentionally inviting outside visitors to marry their kids off to so that they don’t become interbred. They even had traditional festivals intended to invite outsiders to join, for this purpose. From my understanding, that unique history had made “outsiders” way more mundane than other towns of Japan, and thus my “shocking” experience.
I could write forever and ever about this tiny town of Wajima because even through the little time I spent there, it had become a special place in my life. But I’ll leave it at that!
Going to Wajima
After the notifications about the earthquake started popping up on my phone, I messaged my friend living in Wajima. No response. Then I remembered my other friend was also visiting Wajima for the new years holiday to visit her boyfriend’s family there. I messaged her, and again, no reponse. I also messaged another friend who was vacationing in Kanazawa, the biggest city in the Noto Peninsula, and was told she was fine. Kanazawa, one of the most popular tourist spots in Japan, shook shit tons, but was not affected as heavily.
So, Wajima was the problem.
It’s a fishing village right beside the ocean which could be prone to Tsunami after such a big earthquake. It’s full of older houses not made strong for earthquakes. It’s a town hidden behind mountain ranges which are prone to landslides.
I watched the news: half the city’s buildings tumbled down and caught fire, the 2 meter tsunami that swept the houses on the ocean side, the roads to Wajima blocked due to landslides.
Many hours later, my friend that was visiting her boyfriend’s family responded to me that she was okay, and was escaping back to Tokyo for the time being. I will not share her experiences directly, as they are not mine, but she told me she survived near death experiences from falling concrete, roads cracking, and cars flipping.
January 3rd, I get a message that they are going back to Wajima to see the boyfriend’s family and also to deliver emergency supplies to them. They asked me if I can go with them to help. So with few more friends, and two huge hi-ace trucks full of supplies, we headed to Wajima from Tokyo.
15 hour drive to Wajima
After hours of buying supplies and filling our trucks, we headed out of Tokyo around 5pm. Out destination was first, Kanzawa (the biggest city in Noto Peninsula) because we knew we can’t get to Wajima in one day. We arrived in Kanazawa after driving 500km (310 miles), around 1:30 am.
We decided to spend the night in Kanzawa before heading to Wajima at dawn. Our friend’s friend that lives in Kanzawa invited us to stay in his apartment and we all slept on his couch and floor for a few hours before waking up at 6am to head out. The house friend woke up at 4am to cook rice balls for us to carry and bring to the Wajima people. (These small things is what makes me love Japan.)
The sun came up and we headed to Wajima. The road from Kanzawa to Wajima usually takes an hour or two at max. We knew that many roads were blocked due to landslides, and that it would probably take us 8 hours instead.
And yes, it did take exactly 8 hours. The roads were filled with ambulances, police, fire fighters, and Japan’s army (self defence forces that always comes to aid in natural disasters). I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many emergency vehicles in one day in my life. The road was also…not really a road but more an endless game of swerving slowly between cracked concrete, collapsed houses, cars with flat tires, and huge boulders and trees from landslides. I was amazed that Japanese workers were already filling and fixing the cracked concrete so that traffic could be deligated. I am always, always amazed by Japanese people in case of national emergencies. No one is crying. Everyone, wether you’re a grandma who’s house burned down or a public service professional, is moving and helping each other in the most practical manner.
I want to emphasize here that as much as individual help seems like it’s a good idea, many individuals driving to and back from Wajima just causes immense traffic for the emergency vehicles that are on the front lines of this disaster. We were very aware of this, but my friends were determined to see their parents in Wajima and so we made sure to fill our trucks full of supplies, enough to deem us out of the “individual” category to a “Group” category. What this means is that, “groups” like NPOs and food supply companies are allowed to go because of the amount of “same” products they can carry in one go that makes it easier to distribute. Just imagine, one individual car carrying 5 blankets, clusters of different food items, and some litres of water trying to help. They are instead causing trouble for 1) contributing to road traffic that could jeopardize emergency aid 2) cluster of small items are hard to distribute as you can’t do it in one bulk. So what we did, was we made sure that if we were gonna buy one thing, let’s say cinnamon bread, we were gonna buy 20 boxes of that same thing. We did this for all of our supplies. Also we connected with an actual group that was delivering medical aid to Wajima on the same day and drove together with them.
So, with that we arrived to Wajima.
Arriving in Wajima
The Wajima that I remembered a year and a half ago was gone. I no longer recognized it. With no joke, the closest thing I could relate it to was a movie set. Roads cracked so bad that cars were hinged inside it, buildings fallen 90 degrees side ways, whole elementary school yards filled with green military trucks, rescue dogs barking, military supply airplanes going to and from in the sky…
We drove first to the community centre accepting supplies. We were told to wait as they were unloading military’s supplies. Because of this, we decided to go first to where my friend’s family was staying — a local pre-school building.
The pre-school building was brand new, and survived the quake perfectly though the temple right beside it was half collapsed onto its parking. We parked beside the collapsed temple, and I waited in the car as my friends went to get their parents. It was the first time my friends saw their family since the earthquake as even though my friends were in Wajima at the time of the earthquake, their parents were in different vehicles that stayed in Wajima while my friends came back to Tokyo.
I watched from the car as the mom and dad of my friend came out, and they embraces and cried. When we all got out from the truck and greeted them. It was my first time meeting the parents and their families.
I will never forget the moment we opened the truck to show the parents the supplies we brought — the father crumbled down crying. He looked us in our eyes and repeated “thank you” over and over. For a moment, I think we were all crying. I was reminded that such strong emotions exist between humans. I’m back in Tokyo, and my heart is still full of gratitude for that reminder.
We decided to unload all the supplies to their pre-school building instead of the community centre, so that my friend’s family and all the other families evacuated in the community centre could give it away personally to other locals. It was a long bucket relay and by the end, the whole empty entrance of the pre-school was filled with supplies.
It started raining then, and fearing more landslides on the way back, we decided to leave right away back to Tokyo. With empty trucks, we started out long road back.
Going Home to Tokyo
Going back to Kanazawa took us 10 more hours (usually it is 1,2 hours). The 8 hours to, and 10 hours back from Kanzawa-Wajima is all emergency areas. Wajima is only one of the cities affected, and we passed by many other ones.
The whole way and it’s traffic, there are also no toilets because none of the water is running. All of us learned to pee and poo in so many different ways. One way was pee in a diaper in the car. One way was get out the car during traffic and pee in the trees right beside the road. One way was pee in a bag and put solidifying powder on top of it to solidify the pee (this is the portable toilets we delivered to Wajima and they thanked us heavily for this as they were all just doing toilets in normal bags with none of the powder).
It all infinitely reminded me of how easy having a penis was, because they can pee practically anywhere socially and physically (while me and my female friends had to build a fucking cardboard box to put the bag in and pee on top of it as a makeshift toilet or find a very secret spot outside in the woods during traffic to pee as crime was going up in the region as well, including sexual crimes) and I was also on the first and second days of my period through this whole trip and changing tampons and pads with no toilet for 2 days was a whole crazy hustle on its own. This shit deserves a whole new post, because I can’t even imagine the struggle of women living in the cars or community buildings right now with no toilets and dangers of sexual abuse. I’m literally so devastated by all of this.
Throughout the way we all learned not to drink or eat too much in the car so that our bladders wouldn’t fill up so quickly. One really good thing I learned from the whole trip was this toilet business, though. Before, I had no idea how no running water and no toilets would affect cities to this degree.
Also some of the roads we literally took to Wajima collapsed by landslide by the time we were headed back. So we took a different route going back. It was dangerous, to that level. After a big earthquake, there are always after quakes and even on the day we were there, there were repeated earthquakes around level 3 and sometimes bigger than that. We were fully aware of this, and took emergency food, gasoline, and toilet for ourselves in the car in case we were stuck on the road due to any unexpected natural disaster.
I took 3 of my favorite “omamori” (lucky charms you get at shrines in Japan) with me and thanks to the earth or people or to some kind of god, we all safely got back to Tokyo. This whole thing took 3 days from start to end, and I finally just slept in a bed for the first time since I left Tokyo.
Messages from the Family
I’m back, but I keep thinking of the people still affected in the Noto Peninsula, still without a bath or toilet or electricity. There are many prefectural and individual charity funds that have opened up for this disaster but I found none that is accepting international funds or is English friendly.
I’ve pitched to my Wajima friend to create a gofundme that will accept international help that will go directly to my friend’s family and the community. The first step is survival and food, but later they will need to build back a living from scratch. They will first need money for a house, temporary and later permanently. My friend has already talked to his family about the gofundme idea, and they think it’s a good idea. I will keep everyone updated on this and will ask for your help once ready.
The family messaged my friend today and said some of the electricity is back, and they were able to heat up the instant curry we brought. They also told me we were faster than the military to deliver aid to them, as the military focuses on bigger community buildings first before smaller individual evacuation families. I am forever grateful for our luck that we made it in time for them.
A Thank You Pear
On the way back from Wajima, my friend handed me a bag with a pear in it. Apparently, the father wanted to give me and my Tokyo friends who came to help, something as a gratitude. The father searched his whole house for something but couldn’t find anything to give but one pear.
One pear.
The family literally lost everything — didn't even have their own food — and they still gifted me the only thing they had. It’s sitting on my table now and it reminds me everything about human connection and love. It’s all we got. It’s all we NEED when we lost everything. If we have that special bond between humans, we can make anything possible. Even if we are all strangers.
I think we all have one pear to give. I am thankful for all the love I have relearned these 3 days. Thank you for reading this, if you’ve read up to here. Thank you for making space in your mind and head for this earthquake, even if it is on the other side of the Earth for you. I will keep everyone updated on the funding.
xoxo. Sara
