Since Fukushima by Wago Ryoichi, translated by Jody Halebsky & Takahashi Ayako (Vagabond Press)

Wago Ryoichi is from Fukushima City in Fukushima Prefecture in Japan. He is a poet and also taught Japanese literature at a high school in Minami Soma, a city located just thirty kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. 

His book, Since Fukushima, is not just a book of poetry. The catastrophe changed his way of thinking. Since March 2011, his poetry focuses on the devastation and ecological disaster caused by 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, known in Japan as 3-11 or the Great East Japan Earthquake. 

The earthquake had a magnitude of 9.0 and the epicenter was about 80 miles east of Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture’s largest city. The quake triggered a tsunami that measured over forty feet in some areas of the Tohoku region. The hardest hit areas were Miyagi, Iwate, and Fukushima Prefectures. A fifty-foot tsunami wave hit the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant causing a nuclear meltdown. It is one of the worst nuclear accidents in history.

Pebbles of Poetry Part 1 and Party were compiled from Wago’s tweets on his Twitter account he started posting five days after the quake. He tweeted his feelings, his thoughts, and what he saw. His first sets of tweets were from March 16, 2001 from 4:23 am to March 17, 12:24 am. His second set of tweets were from March 27 from 10:00pm to 10:44pm. 

At the time of the disaster, he was still conflicted. Should he evacuate with his wife and children, could he abandon his home and his parents. Wago tried persuading his parents to leave but they refused so he also decided to stay in Fukushima. His wife and his children had evacuated to a safer zone. 

The event not only changed his way of thinking, it changed his style of writing. His poems not only focus on the human toll of the disaster, but the destruction and the ruination of the land, the pets and livestock that were left behind, and also about the people who decided to remain, such as he and his parents. 

There are poems that are told from the perspective of a cow abandoned by its farmer, a poem about how contaminated soil was dug up, placed in plastic bags, only to be reburied in the same ground. 

Following the series of poems, there is a conversation with American poet and teacher Brenda Hillman and Wago Ryoichi discussing Activism and Poetry. The interview was conducted at Hillman's home by the translators of the book, Ayako Takahashi and Judy Halebsky.

The two poets discuss the role of poetry in activism and also in teaching. Wago says, “Much of what I learned through teaching connects directly to writing poetry”. On the other hand, Hillman says she writes her poetry in a “very strange dream world”. She says, “The world inside and the world of my brain and imagination are very separate from the outer practical world”. 

Hellman says most of her poems are very political so she sees teaching as “a bridge between these inner metaphoric states of the poet, and the outside world which is sometimes very numb to poetry and art”. 

It’s a very interesting discussion on how natural disasters can be taught through the use of poetry. I was living in Japan at the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake and I watched the breaking news on television and constantly checked updates on Twitter. Although I was living in Tokyo at the time, the disaster affected the entire country. One of my friends mentioned that people I’ve never met were willing to pay for my plane ticket home to the U.S. However, I can relate more to Wago as Japan is my adopted home and there was no way I was going to abandon my new home or leave my wife alone in the country. ~Ernie Hoyt