Gaijinphoto Magazine:

As always, once we get into March, I begin to anticipate the coming of the cherry blossom (sakura). The best laid plans were made for a little vacation to Kyoto and the favorite spots around Tokyo for catching and snapping the epic splendor of our favorite flower. What we did not anticipate, as all contended people never do, was an outside force that would affect our lives along with the lives of millions of people around the globe.

Travel photography is my stock and trade. Photojournalism is not. So when I found myself amidst the devastation visited upon Iwate Prefecture by the Great Eastern Japan Quake of March 11th 2011, rather than being around the fading of the plum blossoms as an intro to the cherry blossoms, as is my tradition, as it is for so many Japanese, I, like they, was at a loss for what to think and feel.

It is perhaps and over-used cliche to regard the sakura as representing new beginnings. But this year that was given new meaning as those who survived the ravages of the tsunami turned to this little flower as a symbol of their survival, of their struggles, of their nation, of their hopes.

Those of us working long hours to try to bring a slight measure of relief to our Japanese family, were consumed with the task at hand, too focussed on the present to contemplate the future. It was the normal ground-hog day of military operations that push the simple pleasures of life aside as if doing so had some purpose - brought us closer to those who really felt the brunt of the disaster.

But amidst all of the recent pain and suffering, and death and concern over the future of our Japan, something amazing happened. The flowers came anyway. Despite calls from the governor of Tokyo, who advised against flower viewing as a sign of respect to the people of Tohoku - the flowers arrived. And they were seen. And deep inside we kept a little secret to ourselves - that we were glad they came, that we were glad they woke us from our somnambulist shuffle - and even dared think that, even though the people of Tohoku were still suffering, that we could take a moment to notice the sakura and be thankful for them. And then the people of Tohoku told us themselves that it was OK for us to celebrate the sakura if we wanted to and that we should buy their sake and other products in doing so, so that we could do something tangible to help them heal...and to heal ourselves in the process.

So we did do just that, not the way we normally do, but in a way that has us hoping that the rest of the year is going to be better than its first few months. And some of us might even be so bold to think that next time the sakura bloom, it will be a time when the Japanese can reflect how far they have come since the last time they got ready to take time out spend time with our favorite flower.

Words do not come easily at moments like these. As I looked upon the ruins of what once was Rikuzen Takada in Iwate Prefecture, I thought of the words of the Japanese poet Basho, who referring to another era in Japanese history wrote,

The whole country devastated

only mountains and rivers remain.

In springtime, at the ruined castle,

the grass is always green.

We went to Iwate to see the devastation first hand, with representatives from the UN, World Food Program and USAID, and to see what else needed to be done to alleviate the suffering of the local population. We sat at a simple table, amongst stacked relief supplies and my mind wandered as I had a, "what the hell am I doing in this dream," moment, reading in Japanese the word "braziers" on one of the relief supply boxes. I suppose that is when I realized that the local people I was sitting with had lost everything in the maelstrom.

I have seen documentaries of great human tragedies, the holocaust, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the rape of Nanking, but I had never witnessed the wake of one of a scale that exceeds those, if not in numbers of dead and missing certainly in physical devastation. The human mind does not have answers for such things; certainly not the modern American mind that finds itself obsessed with the mundane, the trivial, that sweats the small stuff until momentarily jolted by reality like when the kids have to go to the hospital.

But what does one do when one loses everything? All of their possessions, their pets, their family, their memories, their dignity. How does one begin to contemplate the idea of a hospital full of patients, many of them elderly and bed ridden, lying in their beds as the great wave rushes towards them, while doctors and nurses frantically try to move them to the fourth floor, but the power is out so the elevators don't work, then the wave hits taking out three floors of patients, doctors, nurses, visitors, leaving only 15 or 16 people alive, out of hundreds, to make it to the roof and begin their new life, doomed to have this recurring nightmare until they die.

We think in terms of absolutes, that is the human way. And most of us live in that black and white world, missing the very important, subtle hues that make life worth living as well as giving us the respect for life that only horrific events stimulate the perception of.

As I looked at the relief effort from my distant perch, I thought in terms of those killed, those who survived, those evacuated, those fed, those clothed, those in shelters - until I could comfort myself that the numbers of those being "helped" was sufficient to set my one-dimensional mind at ease. But up close and personal to the issue, perspectives are drastically different, visceral, razor sharp and discomforting.

I never imagined that in the ruins of something like this, normal human, and particularly Japanese psychology would take hold and dictate their foul, heartbreaking terms. Like the people whose houses survived, sitting at home without power, perhaps missing a relative, or two, or three, hungry and cold - as Iwate has a harsh winter climate - too ashamed to go to a shelter to get food, for fear of incurring the scorn of those living in the shelter who had lost everything. A post-apocolyptic paradigm fit for MAD MAX, but not for modern, comfortable Japan.

There are those who deal in this currency more than I. True riverboat gamblers of tragedy and mercy. To those men and women I tip my hat. This is not my stock and trade. In some weird way I am more comfortable planning to kill people than I am trying to save them, and in the process of trying to help a small amount of them have arrived at more questions than if I were trying to destroy them, in the name of my country of all things. I would have to say that this has shaken me to a degree I did not anticipate. Then I think, "who am I to claim to be shaken?" Any man that is able to walk away from a tragedy and be unaffected by its ravages is by definition not a victim of it. But the human animal is a weird animal, and the curse of consciousness afflicts our lucidity, throwing us off course, making us turn in on ourselves in solemn contemplation. Some people turn to religion to explain it. I choose to think of it as inexplicable, because I judge myself unable to add reason to it, and unable to trust the judgement of my fellow man who knows no better.

Then when we seem at our darkest moment, a stranger offers a simple kindness that is so profound, it shakes us back to our senses as if it were a tsunami of the soul. At the end of my visit to Rikuzen Takada, a once-beautiful town, I was offered by their ever-beautiful, enduring people, a gift of their local sweets - literally from the hands of people who had lost everything. Despite my protestations that I could not, in the circumstances, accept any such thing from a folk so aggrieved, they told me that these sweets were the one thing they had plenty of and were a specialty of their town that they were eager to show off. So I relented and accepted. And as we drove away in our car and I contemplated the sweet clutched in my hand, I decided it was right that I should eat it. So I did. I have never eaten anything so delicious.