Contributor: Sylvia Ross

After the March 11, 2011, earthquake rocked Japan and the subsequent tsunami wiped out entire towns along the country's northeast coast, Mercy Corps responded immediately by providing emergency supplies, transportation to essential services, and vouches for survivors to take care of their needs.

Along with partner Peace Winds Japan, our work quickly transitioned to psychosocial supports for children and adults, as well as longterm economic recovery projects that will continue for years to come. Twelve months later, reminders of the tragedy are everywhere — but so is an incredible resilience and hope to rebuild the future.

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If you have ever eaten a traditional Japanese meal, chances are you’ve had a taste of wakame seaweed. Harvested in early spring, it is most often served in soups and salads. Japan’s Sanriku coast is world-renowned for harvesting some of the highest quality wakame in the world, likely due to its cold, clear ocean waters, which provide the ideal habitat for the popular crop.

However, after the tsunami swept over the towns along the Sanriku coast last March, the entire wakame industry came to a screeching halt. Equipment was washed away, fishermen and processing staff lost, and the crucial income disappeared.

For people in the town of Minamisanriku and its surrounding areas in northeast Japan, wakame not only provides a source of immense pride, but also crucial jobs and a significant part of the local seafood-based economy. Wakame processing, an intricate and specialized process, is generally women’s work, while harvesting is up to the fishermen. Processing this crop requires not only skill, but also specialized expensive equipment – not easily replaced by tsunami survivors left without jobs and homes.

Recognizing the importance of this crop, Mercy Corps set out to jumpstart the stalled wakame industry in Minamisanriku. Thanks to a generous donation from Walmart, Mercy Corps provided the necessary equipment in time for the harvesting season to begin. Now, thick ropes held by giant black buoys are once again floating in the Sanriku waters and massive steel processing tubs stand at the ready along the coastline. And approximately 400 women are back to work while fisherman head out to bring in the harvest.

During the spring harvesting season, fishermen head out each morning at dawn. For the ease of production, the seaweed is actually planted into thick, white ropes that are dropped into the waters and held up by buoys. There, the weeds grow for approximately three months before they are fully grown and ready for harvest.

Two hours of pulling seaweed yields about 20 bushel-sized tubs of fresh brown seaweed. Once back on shore, the fishermen turn the seaweed over to the processors, who set up their equipment right there in port, mere feet away from the water, and spend the day following specific protocol to create a culinary delicacy. Often, they work in freezing temperatures, as they hover around the steam produced by the boiling water.

First, the thick spiral shaped “mekabu” — the tastiest part near the root — is separated from the long streaming leaf. After it’s briefly boiled, where it turns green, it’s plunged into circulating fresh seawater to cool off and then gingerly wrung out to dry and combined with a salt mixture in what looks like an industrial-sized clothes dryer. Finally, the wakame is air-dried for a few days and then packaged for sale.

The Onodara family has been harvesting and processing seaweed for decades; in fact, three generations work together on the dock. Mr. Onodara and his wife harvest wakame and bring it ashore, where his 87-year-old mother and 28-year-old daughter join in to process the crop.

The Onodaras lost “everything” in the tsunami. And they mean that literally — house, car, all possessions, jobs. While telling the family’s story, Mr. Onodara pointed out that he did manage to find his fishing boat on the side of a nearby mountain a few weeks after the tsunami hit.

In the 40 years that he has been harvesting wakame, Mr. Onodara told us, this year’s harvest is one of the best he has seen both in quality and quantity. “It is mother nature’s way of giving something back after all that had been taken in the tsunami,” he suggested philosophically.

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To say that the fishing industry defines northeastern Japan is an understatement. In this part of the country, people are either fishermen, are married to fishermen, or are seaweed processors, fish merchants and other seafood producers. The ocean, and what is provides, is simply a way of life — and the lifeblood of the local economy. But one year ago, the ocean enveloped the area and destroyed boats, ravaged hatcheries, and sucked fish markets out to sea, devastating entire communities.

Determined to make the largest impact with donors' contributions, Mercy Corps invested in rebuilding a key salmon hatchery in the town of Minamisanriku. For decades salmon hatcheries here and along the Sanriku coast have maintained healthy populations in the Pacific waters off northeast Japan.

The hatchery process begins in early autumn when spawning salmon start their run up Sanriku rivers. There, the fish are met by fishermen who harvest the eggs and cultivate juvenile populations in long, narrow tanks filled by fresh-water aquifers from the nearby stream. The tiny salmon live in these tanks for approximately six months, before they get released back into the ocean waters. Four years and many hundreds of miles later, more than half of those same salmon return to where they were spawned, ready for catch.

During the 2011 fishing season, some seven months after the tsunami, the salmon returns were quite poor, likely because the tsunami altered the ocean floor so profoundly that the fish were unable to find their way back. It's likely that the following two salmon seasons will yield similarly low catch numbers in Minamisanriku, while other fishing communities in Japan will see larger-than-normal populations return.

But with new equipment — everything from tanks to vehicles to fishing nets — provided through fundraising and a generous donation by Xylem Watermark, Minamisanriku’s hatchery was back up and running in time to harvest eggs last fall, and they are expecting to release nearly five million baby salmon this spring; this will keep the four-year cycle going without a significant gap in returns in 2016.

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Today my heart sang. After days of seeing destruction and rubble, I got to visit the tiniest tsunami survivors at a day care in Kesennuma, Japan. After it was destroyed in the tsunami, the day care was recently restarted with Mercy Corps' help .

I walked into a sun-filled, colorful room and right away felt like I could stay there all day. Eleven adorable babies, from five months to three years old, were happily playing and coloring, as they sat in their tiny chairs, their chubby fingers swirling crayons on paper. Missing my own (similarly-aged) kids so much, I just wanted to sit there and soak in the cuteness.

Today, most of these children live in temporary housing, and some lost a parent in the tsunami; the owner of the original day care is still missing. Determined to bring back this invaluable service for the working parents in Kesennuma, seven of the original 15 employees pooled their money and received a start-up grant from Mercy Corps, through its partner organization Planet Finance.

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As luck would have it, I happen to be visiting the northeastern region of Japan during a record cold spell. In the seven days since I arrived, it has not been above freezing yet. In fact, the temperature hovers around a cool 20 degrees (F).

Every day a few more inches of snow cover yesterday's batch and each day, for a little while, the sun manages to peek out. The roads in this very mountainous region are completely covered with snow. Even though it is not their norm, the locals seem completely unfazed as they jet around in their tiny cars. The snow also covers all the tsunami wreckage — the leftover foundations where houses used to sit, the exposed beams remaining from office buildings, the chewed-up cars and boats here and there. Everything has an eerily peaceful white layer over it.

The people I talk to about the weather refer to the snow last year, after the tsunami. In fact, one day after the tsunami hit, snow began falling somewhat unexpectedly. It made the already dire conditions almost impossible. People were still drenched from the cold ocean water when the temperatures started plummeting and snow falling.

A year later, these current conditions have also made it difficult for us to visit some of Mercy Corps' work.

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