OBACHAN'S SCRIBBLES

It has been eleven years since that dark, cold morning. Today, for the first time in the eleven years, I didn’t go to the park to light a candle on the morning of January 17th. It is not that I finally forgot about the Great Hanshin Awaji Earthquake. Honestly, after moving back to Kochi, it got harder every year for me to feel the emotional distance between the people in Kochi – who did not actually experience “that morning” – and me at the candle-light memorial service in Chuo Koen. So I decided to send a prayer alone in my room from this year on.

Just a few minutes before 5:46 AM this morning, I lit a candle. This “can badge” was something they made (for a fundraising purpose, I guess) in Hyogo pref. a few years after the earthquake. I felt like taking it out this morning. Also I bought a white sweet pea like I did every year for my personal ritual.

Some of you readers might have noticed that I haven’t updated my “A Frozen Clock” blog for about a year after a few entries. Of course it is NOT because I finished writing everything I wanted to. I just couldn’t go on. Writing about the initial fears was not so difficult. But what hurt me the most in that earthquake was "people factors," and it was much harder to put them into words. In that chaos after that earthquake, I experienced real anger or rage for the first time in my life, and ten or eleven years is not enough to erase it. No, I don’t think that kind of anger can ever be “erased” like it didn’t happen at all —it can only be “processed” so that I can move forward from there, and that was the biggest reason why I started that blog.

We are expecting a major earthquake and tsunami to hit Kochi in the near future. It is said that most of the residential areas will sink under the water, leaving the top of Kochi castle only showing above the water at least for certain period of time. That’s part of the reason why I’m trying to introduce our life in Kochi on my blogs this way… I want to leave it in the cyberspace before it is destroyed. By the same token, I wanted to leave in the cyberspace a description of a woman’s ugly struggles to “process” the anger…because I thought some people might feel related to it. It’s harder than I had thought, but I guess I’ll probably work on it little by little. After all, I’m trying to see the task as the reason why I survived that earthquake while so many – too many – people with more talents, bright futures, dreams and hopes just had to die around me then.

When I was interviewed by a local media person at the candle-light service in Kochi a few years back, the word spontaneously came from inside was “I don’t want to see the same thing ever again.” But what do I want to see changed? What can be changed anyway? Maybe I’m not the only one who spent the eleven years haunted by these questions...

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Added Jan. 20, 2006 11:39 AM

Please take a look at all these candles. (Scroll down and see all of them, please. The Chinese characters written on the bamboo tubes mean things like "life," "hope," "remrembrance" and "bond between people." Sorry, my translation may not be conveying the true meaning of the original Japanese words...)
My candle is a part of them.

I was trained in Western psychology, and I would like to tell the whole world that we are not lighting candles every year on January 17th just because we are all stuck in a certain point of grief process. To me, we are lighting the candles for the sake of a continuum that is very future-oriented.

I can’t speak for everybody, but I light a candle to affirm ourselves. I light a candle to remember and accept how scared, brave, heroic, sad, coward, ugly, self-centered, immature, loving, generous and angry --- just how human we were. I light a candle to remember that we did survive in the past, and will survive in the future, too, and keep telling the world that we can. I light a candle to remember the lesson we had to learn through such a great loss. I light a candle to support all the efforts to go on the grief process, and share the courage and strength to let it take as long as it needs to take. I light a candle to support and care about the people dealing with the issues that get harder as time goes by. Those include things from talking about unresolved issues from the earthquake to getting financial supports for earthquake-related projects. I light a candle to trust that we can remember and make things better in the future. I light a candle to remind myself how precious life is and ask myself how fully I'm living my life. I light a candle for hope and to be able to keep hoping.

If the candles were blown out, we will light them again. And again and again. Even if people stop having those memorial events in various places, we’ll keep lighting the candles IN OUR HEARTS.