“I have lost my fear of death.”
Th ree minutes by car. Th at’s all the time it would take to drive home and warn his wife Kumi. Th e telephone system was overloaded so he would have to drive there himself. Futoshi Toba could be back at City Hall in barely ten minutes. But what if something else happened while he was gone? They had just felt a massive earthquake. Now the weather bureau had issued a tsunami warning. Mayor Toba wrestled with his conscience. He had only a month earlier taken offi ce in Rikuzentakata, a small city of 24,000 people on the east coast of Japan. His responsibility weighed on him. If he left now, no one would have the authority to make decisions. And besides, he’d hear about it later. Others at City Hall were probably going through the same thing, he thought to himself, and they were all staying here. He tried to remain calm. In the end, he did not get in his car.
More than three weeks later, on April 5, Toba’s phone rang: A female body that looked like his wife had been found. Unlike the other survivors, in all that time Toba had never gone through the rows of the dead piling up in the provisional morgue. Instead, he had thrown himself into his work, slept next to his desk in the improvised command center, and tried to take care of the needs of other survivors in that devastated city. One out of every ten residents was dead or missing. “Maybe I was a good mayor, but what kind of husband was I?” he asked himself.
A Wall of Water 16 Meters High
He had last spoken to Kumi on the telephone in the early afternoon of March 11, 2011. Th ey had talked about going out to a restaurant that evening with their sons. Th en at 2:46 pm, earthquakes hitting 9.0 on the Richter scale shook large parts of Japan. Toba heard the tsunami warning on his car radio in the parking lot in front of City Hall. The tidal wave was expected to reach a height of three meters. That’s high but the tsunami barrier wall was 5.5 meters. “We may get our feet wet but the water shouldn’t get above our knees,” everyone thought at the time. In fact, however, a wall of water that towered 16 meters high at the coast was already racing toward Rikuzentakata.
One man at City Hall, who was on the roof watching the sea through binoculars, was the first one to scream: “The tsunami is coming over the wall!” Black waves flowed into the flatlands around the mouth of the river, heading inexorably toward the heart of the small city. They ripped down the protective forest of 70,000 pine trees, leaving only a few still standing, washed away houses like they were toys, and left a large rice wine factory in rubble. Waves of destruction spanning a width of eight kilometers drove into the interior of the countryside.
The disaster on the east coast of Japan took the lives of almost 18,000 people, and almost one in ten people in Rikuzentakata. That day, a few minutes or even seconds could mean life or death. Like for Futoshi Toba and his wife Kumi. He knew his sons Taiga and Kanato were safe at their elementary school that sat on a hill, but Kumi was home in their three-story house. She would probably first help the elderly and children in the neighborhood like she had been trained to do in disaster relief exercises, Toba thought. First assemble, then take a head count, and then leave together. “I never stopped hoping that she had made it,” Toba says.
Guidelines and Gut Feelings
Mayor Toba himself barely survived. Just at the last minute he managed to get to the roof of the four-story City Hall. The building was old but it was built of reinforced concrete. “When I looked around for our house, I saw that all the houses there had just been smashed,” Toba says. “My gut feeling then was that I should have protected my family. The fact that I didn’t has haunted me,” Toba says. “But somewhere along the line I realized that, in the end, it was probably unavoidable.”
In fact, he should have called an emergency meeting right after the earthquake, like the disaster guidelines call for. But given the approaching tsunami, Toba went with his intuition and ignored the well-meaning advice of a colleague, saving lives by doing so. “The lesson we have drawn from this is that, while it’s important to have guidelines, you always have to listen to what you’re feeling at the moment too. It is certainly important to consider other opinions, but not too much. Otherwise, you’ll kill your own gut feeling.”
The young mayor quickly made a name for himself as someone who was not afraid to call a spade a spade. While some praised Toba’s willingness to make decisions and his ideas for reconstruction, others criticized what they viewed as his unilateral style. “If I don’t make decisions, this city will never move forward,” Toba says. He was recently reelected.
Decisive Politician – Hesitant Family Man
The family man Futoshi Toba has little in common with that decisive politician. He even quarreled with himself for weeks about when and how to tell his sons that their mother had died. He tried as long as he could to postpone the inevitable. It was only after the cremation, the evening before the funeral on May 21, 2011, that Toba took aside his eldest son. Twelve-year-old Taiga reacted calmly. “But I didn’t know how to tell his younger brother, Kanato,” Toba recalls. “So I didn’t say anything at all, not the next morning either.” As they got into the car, the ten-year-old asked again and again: “Where are we going?” Toba was silent. When they arrived shortly thereafter, Kanato saw the urn and the picture of his mother. He cried for three days.
The three moved into a new home in May 2012. “It is high up on the mountain,” Toba says. “Sometimes bears come out of the woods there.” Each morning he gets up at five o’clock to prepare “bento,” lunch for school, for the oldest son. “It’s hard to always think of something for his lunch,” Toba says with a laugh. The boys are now full of life again. “I have lost my fear of death since the tsunami,” Toba says. He does worry, though, that his sons would be orphaned if anything should happen to him too. That’s why he is taking better care of himself and has quit smoking. “We have only one life,” Toba says. “You never know what will happen.”