Restoration in the Noto Peninsula

On January 1^st this year, the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture was struck by a very strong earthquake. I have already written quite a bit about this (check the tag), and the restoration efforts are, naturally, still in progress. On August 26^th, Jinja Shinpō published an interview with the priests who are currently chairing the local jinja associations for the three worst affected areas in the peninsula.

The Ishikawa Prefectural Jinjachō has also published a summary of the confirmed damage to the physical structures of jinja, as of July 31^st.  There are 1867 jinja in the prefecture, and 1206 of them sustained at least some damage in the earthquake. However, this was not evenly spread. The three worst-affected areas were Wajima, Fugëshi, and Suzu, in the north of the peninsula: in Wajima, 196 of 206 jinja suffered some damage, in Fugëshi 124 of 128, and in Suzu, 104 of 106. The summary also gives the kind of damage, and based on this Wajima and Suzu seem to have suffered the most: in Suzu, 20 jinja had their main sanctuaries damaged beyond repair, while in Wajima this happened at 57. (Only five were damaged that badly in Fugëshi.) Similar numbers suffered damage that is reparable in theory, but could be beyond the resources of the local areas. In addition, Fugëshi has two jinja that the priests have still not been able to check on, and Wajima has five.

This makes the scale of the devastation clear. This is an area that was already suffering from aging and depopulation, and the disaster will hasten that. Revd Takayama, the chair of Suzu area, said that his main jinja originally had a hundred ujiko households, which had dropped to eighty due to depopulation, and has now dropped to twenty as people evacuate — and ten of those remaining are in temporary accommodation. All of this will make recovery even more difficult.

The three priests all talked about their sense of needing to restart the daily matsuri for the kami, and to rescue as many of the items kept in the sanctuaries as possible. They did not talk about the goshintai, but they did say that, although the ritual implements could be replaced, that was not true of the items that had been given as offerings for the kami. Even if they had enough money to buy something similar, that would not be a replacement for such things. They also mentioned that the rooms were littered with broken glass, so that they had to wear shoes while cleaning them up — and that this made them feel guilty.

In most cases, it seems that they have not been able to hold the larger, community matsuri yet. The necessary items for some were destroyed in the earthquake, and in other cases too many people have moved away to manage it. There are some signs of people wanting to restart in some areas, but the underlying demographics are a serious problem. As one put it, “How likely is someone in his 80s or 90s to rebuild a destroyed house and move back? If there’s no-one young in the family, it’s going to be really difficult”. Another priest estimated that the disaster will speed up the depopulation that was already happening by twenty or thirty years.

There were also stories showing that things are not all happy cooperation after natural disasters in Japan. People were seen looting the ruins, taking scrap metal and so on, and one priest commented that if the thieves looked confident, people assumed they were volunteers. There were also issues there: people would bring food, but not take away the leftovers, or give clothes without concern for whether they were wanted. The biggest issue, however, was the shortage of volunteers. Places that did not get attention on the national news were simply not getting any volunteer support. By the end of July, there were still areas where no work had started on clearing the rubble.

While the priests did look for the positive, the strong impression I got was that things were still very difficult in the area, and not just for jinja. I suppose that is only to be expected, but I do have to wonder whether we (as in, Japan) could do better.