Even as I stand in line for the grocery store, it's hard to feel like there are food shortages. In the small mom-and-pop veggie shops across the road, there aren't lines, and barely even any people rummaging around inside. If anyone near me was starving, surely there wouldn't be apples and oranges sitting untouched.
There's a lot of people wearing face masks, which has been interpreted by many in an ignorant media as being caused by fears of the invisible threat: radiation. Of course this is absurd. While many wear masks in the vicinity of the coast to protect against disease and gas fumes, the masks in this line are to protect against a much more real threat: hay fever. As if to underscore my point, the man standing in front of me has been sneezing non-stop since I started this paragraph.
'Bigger problems than Fukushima.' That, along with 'gambarou touhoku' seems to be the order of the day. We're all just trying to rebuild our disrupted lives into mostly what they looked like before. In the vacant lot across from my apartment, where a large sports facility and shopping center were on track to be built, the gas company has set up a temporary Nagamachi HQ. The natural gas is scheduled to be back online in most of the city by next week, which will be the last of the utilities to return. We've all been taking reluctant sponge baths, and will be happy to be able to take real Japanese baths again. Real showers. Effectively unlimited hot water.
One major problem, especially for foreigners still left in the city, is a lack of work. One friend had been teaching English to pay the bills, but now one of his schools has decided just to go bankrupt. Many of his students there had been from the tsunami-ravaged coast: Ishinomaki, Shiogama. They don't have homes anymore, and learning English is nowhere near a priority. Even some of my students are taking breaks, and I'm not sure when they'll return. I'm working something like four hours this week, and didn't work at all last week. I need at least fifteen to be able to stay in the country.
I think April will be the first month that shows what the new normal will be. Most shops are reopening this week or next, and most of the schools which held their graduations this week—bizarre, but perhaps emotionally-necessary ceremonies—will start again in April. The plant in Fukushima is reattaching power cables, although they're still projecting at least ten days of hard work to get things under control. Most of the foreigners who had fled are returning, first to Tokyo and now to TÅhoku. If things are going to be OK, we'll know it in April.
The grocery store just opened. I got here twenty minutes before, and by the speed the line is moving, I'll be in in another twenty. A forty minute line for groceriesshould have seemed unthinkable, untenable a month ago. But now it's just not so bad. Even the guy in front of me has stopped sneezing. Things are getting better.
