General Yuzuru Chat

[Yuzurella]

Look at this precious mushroom boy! And I will finally get to see him in a live GPF this year!

[ZuCritter]

12 hours ago, Lily* said:

I think it’s perfectly okay and very lovely, but you might want to add the “happy/congrats” part (おめでとう) because 誕生日 only means birthday. If the space doesn’t allow, you can just replace 誕生日 with おめでとう.

Thank you!

[tafattsbarn]

7 hours ago, rockstaryuzu said:

How would you like to bet that at least some of those clear files are going to turn up as giveaways at SCI? The Japanese ladies are so nice about those kinds of things. 

 

I'm forever greatful to the two kind japanese ladies that approached me after the competitions in Helsinki GP just to hand over some clear-files  I don't know if i looked particularly sad about everything being over or what, because they didn't have to do what they did at all and yet they went out of their way. They made my whole trip there worth it beyond belief, i felt so so happy  It really made me want to do something similar for someone the next time i attend a competition, as to spread the joy they gave me to others! 

[micaelis]

This is a long post, but its one I've been preparing for some time now, doing extensive online research and trying to tie all things together, the object being to somehow grasp what Yuzu's experience of the 3/11 earthquake involved and what effect it had on his life and his skating.  This involved going through more than two hundred YouTube videos dealing with the quake, reading three books about the quake and its aftermath, and doing as much research into Yuzu's life around that time to get me some sense of the event and its effect on him.  Central to my understanding of Yuzu during that time was the lengthy interview by Kenji Miyamoto in which the first half of the third segment dealt with Yuzu's experience of the quake.  The interview was more intense since the interviewer himself had gone through the January, 1995 Kobe earthquake so the two were able to relate together in a way that would probably not have been possible if the interviewer had not had his own experiences to draw on in dealing with Yuzu.

 

I've been hampered, though, in that I neither speak nor read Japanese, but about two months ago I discovered a huge number of videos from Fuji News Network that had been uploaded to YouTube in which the videos all told of the location of the events being seen and the time of their occurrence, but most helpfully the videos had captions in English and even translation of what was being said by individuals in the videos when the words were significant.  Many of those videos, primarily of the tsunamis, I had already seen, but now I was able to relate where they were.  Moreover the FNN videos had numerous vids recorded during the earthquake and, most significantly, had many videos in which their people went out and viewed the destruction in various towns and cities afterwards.  The FNN videos really made this effort possible and I must thank them for putting them on the Internet.  For any nonspeakers of Japanese wanting to get hold of the quake, just put FNN311 as your search terms and that should bring you to them.

 

The first major question I was posing was how the Japanese in general dealt with the quake, not just those in the affected areas, but across the nation.  In exploring I found that a good starting point would be the Kobe earthquake of January 1995.  Registering around magnitude 7, it was the last catastrophic earthquake Japan had experienced before 3/11.  Over six thousand people died in it, making it the first catastrophic (my characterization) quake since 1948, the first to have a death toll over 1000.  Since before 1948 Japan had experienced several quakes claiming lives in the thousands in the earlier 20th Century, including the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which saw the destruction of much of Tokyo and Yokohama and the loss of well over one hundred thousand lives, going for so long (nearly half a century) without a truly massive earthquake was unusual to the Japanese experience.  The significance of Kobe when compared to 3/11 is that they were earthquakes of two very different types.  Lasting only about 20 seconds, its effects on Kobe were enhanced because the quake was relatively close to the surface and centered almost directly beneath the city.  The damage that occurred in Kobe was largely failures of some larger structures and, most pertinently as the cause of the high death toll, the fires that swept through residential areas where so many houses had collapsed.  The time of the quake also was important, as it occurred shortly before six AM when most people were still at home in bed.  Had it occurred six hours later the death toll would most likely have been much lower since most people would have been at work or school.  As far as Japan as a whole is concerned the damage was largely restricted to the Kobe area.  In raw terms the quake was just not that powerful but the proximity of its epicenter to Kobe enhanced what destructive power it had.

 

Yuzu, of course, had no direct memory of the event.  When it occurred he was barely over a month old and Sendai was quite some distance from Kobe.  But he grew up in a Japan where memories of the Kobe quake were fresh and where there would have been much documenting on the media of the quake, its aftermath and the recovery efforts.  By and large, I think, most people in Japan would be thinking that Kobe was the earthquake referred to when there was talk about 'the quake'.

 

All that proceeded to change at 2:46 PM on Friday, March 11, 2011.  It began as a muted shaking but escalated rapidly to major shaking and it just kept shaking.  Now Japanese people are used to earthquakes.  Minor tremors, if not a daily occurrence, do occur often enough that they just take them in stride.  In any case they usually last only a few seconds.  This one didn't.  It kept shaking for at first one minute, and then a second minute and the shaking finally stopped after almost six minutes.  Now what everyone should realize is that the longer an earthquake persists the stronger it is.  Any quake lasting much over four minutes is going to be a magnitude 9, and that indeed was what this one was.

 

For the average Japanese the longevity of that quake made them instantly aware that it was not a business-as-usual quake.  And for the Japanese media it was a notice that they were witnessing the beginning of what would be a very major news story.  And some of that coverage actually began in their own newsrooms.  I saw a couple of videos where one could see what was actually happening in that room as it swayed and bucked and knocked everything over that could be and even some things that shouldn't have toppled.  One of those was in Sendai itself so I was able to see what Yuzu would have been experiencing on the ice at IceRink Sendai at the very same time.  It would not have been a pretty picture and I can very well understand that he was probably fearing for his life as he scrambled off the ice and out the door, fearing the building might come down on him at almost any time.  The building, as we all know, didn't collapse but it did require extensive repairs and thus necessitated Yuzu's finding another rink on which to train.  I will point out, though, that Japan dodged a couple bullets and the outcome could have been much worse if the quake had come at 2:46 AM rather than PM.  That would have meant most would have been awakened from a presumably sound sleep and there would have been initial confusion before realizing the need to head for higher ground.  I think many more thousands would have died had that been the case.  The other was that the tsunamis were coming ashore not long before low tide would have been occurring on Japan's coast.  Had the tsunamis been coming ashore near high tide there destruction might have been even worse.

 

What I felt was most significant watching those videos taken during the quake itself and in the period of time immediately after it was how rapidly the Japanese public adjusted to what, based on the duration of the quake, they knew that lengthy quake meant.  It can be said in one word - tsunami.  Indeed the quake hadn't even finished when there were helicopters heading out to sea to video the mayhem everyone knew was on the way.  And the Japanese in Tokyo, who had felt the tremors though not on the scale that those closer to the epicenter did, did not return to their jobs once the shaking had ended.  Not when there were already strong aftershocks occurring and not when they knew the story was as yet a work in progress.  On their smartphones or gathered around giant public video screens they stood and watched as a Japan's northeastern cities and towns were inundated by tsunamis that were, in some cases, over a hundred feet in height.  Many of those watching may have grown up in those cities or had friends or relatives there.  The anxiety amongst those watching must have been intense, and in Tokyo it was made ever moreso by the fact that the trains were not running and so many in central Tokyo found themselves stranded with no way to get home, particularly as traffic had become gridlocked.

 

Of great interest to me, once I'd put those horrific videos of the tsunamis coming ashore and literally flattening many a small town behind me were the videos taken afterward, usually on the day following, visits conducted by FNN journalists as they surveyed the damage.  The damage itself, if one dismissed the areas of standing water, suggested to me the damage following an F5 tornado, the strongest and rarest, where the winds can exceed 300 miles an hour (500 kph).  The landscape would simply be flattened.  The difference, though, was that those threatened by the tsunamis knew to head for higher ground, and it is from these vantage points that all those videos were made and I could only wonder how great the horror must have been to those onlookers as they saw their homes and neighborhoods reduced to saturated rubble.  That is much different from the experience we have in this part of the world where instead of heading for high ground one heads for low ground with cover overhead and then listens as the sounds of the destruction overhead escalate and then decline.  For those individuals, the destruction is only heard, not seen and the horror comes when emerging from cover and seeing how the world has been totally and ruinously altered in just the matter of a minute or two.  There have been no videos taken from inside an F5 tornado while the videos of the waves coming ashore in northeastern Japan have made the 3/11 disaster the most visually documented natural disaster in human history.

 

I will digress to point out why Japan seemed to have been so unprepared for the event.  Seeing the videos of one seawall after another being overtopped by the incoming waves one wonders how the Japanese had so miscalculated things.  The problem was they were based on faulty science.  Before 3/11 the consensus had been that Japan could not experience an earthquake greater than magnitude 8.4.  As a result, the seawalls and such all had been constructed to handle the tsunamis from such a quake.  They were wrong and had they listened back in 2005 when at a conference a Japanese seismologist by the name of Yasutaka Ikeda presented a paper where he said that calculations were wrong and that Japan could expect at almost any time a Magnitude 9 earthquake and the resultant tsunamis.  The reception of the paper was polite and then nobody thought anything about it after the conference.  Had it been believed, there might have been some additions made to make the sea walls higher.

 

At this point I turn now to Yuzu and the earthquake.  Everyone knows (or should know) how he fled the ice when the quake was occurring and how he and his family spent three nights in an evacuation center (actually a school gymnasium).  He has spoken of that and also he has said how he almost quit skating then.  It wasn't just the difficulty of finding another rink on which to practice, but also he felt guilty that by pursuing his skating he was somehow shirking his responsibility to participate in the recovery.  And that is what he was dealing with.  Yuzu's experience of the earthquake did not end when he and his family were able to return to their home.  It continued and dominated the reality of northeastern Japan and there was no escaping it.  Sendai had not been horribly damaged by the tsunamis although large neighborhoods near the ocean had been obliterated but the central business district was located inland and on higher ground and so had been untouched by the waters.  Sendai has a population of just over a million and out of that million more than a thousand perished.  I imagine there had been some building damage but I would think it was not  widespread.  Japanese building codes, particularly for larger structures, are stringent and have been in place for decades, with major modifications coming after the Kobe quake.

 

In his interview with Kenji Miyamoto, who had once been a competitive ice dancer and later had choreographed for Yuzu, the two were able to relate their two experiences of earthquakes (Kenji's the Kobe quake and Yuzu the 3/11 quake).  Yuzu explained how the experience of the quake had a silver lining for him in that it opened up within him expressive resources that had not been there before the occurrence of the quake and tsunami.  He relates particularly how the charity show benefit that was held in Kobe in April of 2011 was the experience that finally convinced him to continue skating.  I wondered initially why it was held in Kobe rather than Tokyo and then I think I figured out why.  Over fifteen years after the earthquake it was a chance for Japan to see how Kobe had rebuilt itself and I'm sure that that fact was brought out in the broadcast.  It was meant to show those in the affected areas that there was hope, that rebuilding could take place.

 

As for Yuzu becoming so identified with the rebuilding, it was not a role he willingly undertook but as he expressed it, it was something that was thrust upon him.  He had the wisdom not to reject it.  I'm certain that the public actions he'd taken over the years associated with the recovery were an unstated reason why he won the People's Honor Award.  In any case, despite his removal to Toronto, he remained one of the people most associated with those who had experienced the quake but had managed to continue.  His position was highlighted even more with the 2013/14 season, his breakout season where he won gold in the GPF, at Sochi, and the World Championships, the first man to hold all three titles simultaneously since Alexei Yagudin back in 2002.  What really put the spotlight on Yuzu, though, was Japan's experience in the 2014 Olympics, where not only was Yuzu the first Japanese man to win figure skating gold but he was the only Japanese athlete in any sport to come home with gold.  

 

Over the years Yuzu apparently has accepted his symbolic role in the recovery effort.  I think that to a certain extent it has become routine for him.  Basically he does what he can through visits to schools and senior centers and other such places to just give those there an uplift by his very presence.  He has never resorted to the sort of antics of a primo uomo (masculine version of prima donna) and has conducted himself with dignity when the occasion demanded it and with playfulness when the occasion allowed.

 

As for the recovery, even now there are many thousands still in temporary housing.  I've used Google Maps to go and look at the areas denuded by the tsunamis and have seen that many of those areas remain now unoccupied, barren tracts because everybody knows that where the waters came once they can come again.  I understand that in a couple of cases the town is actually being raised up by using debris from the tsunami as landfill to raise the level of the town above any potential future tsunamis.  I have a feeling other places might convert the areas into parks although, just as with those agricultural areas inundated by the tsunamis, there is the problem of removing the salt from the earth in order to grow the kinds of bushes and trees and such one expects in parks.

 

As for Japan, it still struggles to meet the challenges 3/11 posed for it.  Japan had not seen destruction on such a scale since World War II, and even though unlike then it possesses the resources to work toward a full recovery, unlike the situation three quarters of a century ago, the demands of recovery often are coming into conflict with other needs and there's only so much money and so much effort that can be directed towards it.  In that sense Yuzu is an important element, since by his activities of visitations and such and the resultant news coverage there is communicated that there is still much that needs to be done.  Kobe's damage was relatively localized.  3/11's damage was much more widespread although concentrated largely on the coast.  But that affected coastline extends from Ibaraki Prefecture in the south, just north of the Tokyo area, to Honshu's northernmost Aomori Prefecture and also parts of Hokkaido's southeastern coastline.

 

As for the Japanese authorities, the great challenge now is not simply replacing what was lost, since so much of it was irreplaceable, but also putting in the resources that will allow those in the affected areas to create for themselves a new normal, a normal replacing that one that was so brutally taken from them at 2:46 PM on the eleventh of March in 2011.  Yuzu has been able to do that for himself personally, and he has allowed himself to be put forward as an example that others can create for themselves a satisfactory world that does not ignore the events of the past but builds on them to make positive what so many would surrender to as a negative.  He told Kenji how the experience of the quake opened up in him expressive resources he did not realize he possessed and he exists now as a positive example that one can live past tragedy and do it triumphantly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Kat]

1 hour ago, micaelis said:

This is a long post, but its one I've been preparing for some time now, doing extensive online research and trying to tie all things together, the object being to somehow grasp what Yuzu's experience of the 3/11 earthquake involved and what effect it had on his life and his skating.  This involved going through more than two hundred YouTube videos dealing with the quake, reading three books about the quake and its aftermath, and doing as much research into Yuzu's life around that time to get me some sense of the event and its effect on him.  Central to my understanding of Yuzu during that time was the lengthy interview by Kenji Miyamoto in which the first half of the third segment dealt with Yuzu's experience of the quake.  The interview was more intense since the interviewer himself had gone through the January, 1995 Kobe earthquake so the two were able to relate together in a way that would probably not have been possible if the interviewer had not had his own experiences to draw on in dealing with Yuzu.

 

I've been hampered, though, in that I neither speak nor read Japanese, but about two months ago I discovered a huge number of videos from Fuji News Network that had been uploaded to YouTube in which the videos all told of the location of the events being seen and the time of their occurrence, but most helpfully the videos had captions in English and even translation of what was being said by individuals in the videos when the words were significant.  Many of those videos, primarily of the tsunamis, I had already seen, but now I was able to relate where they were.  Moreover the FNN videos had numerous vids recorded during the earthquake and, most significantly, had many videos in which their people went out and viewed the destruction in various towns and cities afterwards.  The FNN videos really made this effort possible and I must thank them for putting them on the Internet.  For any nonspeakers of Japanese wanting to get hold of the quake, just put FNN311 as your search terms and that should bring you to them.

 

The first major question I was posing was how the Japanese in general dealt with the quake, not just those in the affected areas, but across the nation.  In exploring I found that a good starting point would be the Kobe earthquake of January 1995.  Registering around magnitude 7, it was the last catastrophic earthquake Japan had experienced before 3/11.  Over six thousand people died in it, making it the first catastrophic (my characterization) quake since 1948, the first to have a death toll over 1000.  Since before 1948 Japan had experienced several quakes claiming lives in the thousands in the earlier 20th Century, including the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which saw the destruction of much of Tokyo and Yokohama and the loss of well over one hundred thousand lives, going for so long (nearly half a century) without a truly massive earthquake was unusual to the Japanese experience.  The significance of Kobe when compared to 3/11 is that they were earthquakes of two very different types.  Lasting only about 20 seconds, its effects on Kobe were enhanced because the quake was relatively close to the surface and centered almost directly beneath the city.  The damage that occurred in Kobe was largely failures of some larger structures and, most pertinently as the cause of the high death toll, the fires that swept through residential areas where so many houses had collapsed.  The time of the quake also was important, as it occurred shortly before six AM when most people were still at home in bed.  Had it occurred six hours later the death toll would most likely have been much lower since most people would have been at work or school.  As far as Japan as a whole is concerned the damage was largely restricted to the Kobe area.  In raw terms the quake was just not that powerful but the proximity of its epicenter to Kobe enhanced what destructive power it had.

 

Yuzu, of course, had no direct memory of the event.  When it occurred he was barely over a month old and Sendai was quite some distance from Kobe.  But he grew up in a Japan where memories of the Kobe quake were fresh and where there would have been much documenting on the media of the quake, its aftermath and the recovery efforts.  By and large, I think, most people in Japan would be thinking that Kobe was the earthquake referred to when there was talk about 'the quake'.

 

All that proceeded to change at 2:46 PM on Friday, March 11, 2011.  It began as a muted shaking but escalated rapidly to major shaking and it just kept shaking.  Now Japanese people are used to earthquakes.  Minor tremors, if not a daily occurrence, do occur often enough that they just take them in stride.  In any case they usually last only a few seconds.  This one didn't.  It kept shaking for at first one minute, and then a second minute and the shaking finally stopped after almost six minutes.  Now what everyone should realize is that the longer an earthquake persists the stronger it is.  Any quake lasting much over four minutes is going to be a magnitude 9, and that indeed was what this one was.

 

For the average Japanese the longevity of that quake made them instantly aware that it was not a business-as-usual quake.  And for the Japanese media it was a notice that they were witnessing the beginning of what would be a very major news story.  And some of that coverage actually began in their own newsrooms.  I saw a couple of videos where one could see what was actually happening in that room as it swayed and bucked and knocked everything over that could be and even some things that shouldn't have toppled.  One of those was in Sendai itself so I was able to see what Yuzu would have been experiencing on the ice at IceRink Sendai at the very same time.  It would not have been a pretty picture and I can very well understand that he was probably fearing for his life as he scrambled off the ice and out the door, fearing the building might come down on him at almost any time.  The building, as we all know, didn't collapse but it did require extensive repairs and thus necessitated Yuzu's finding another rink on which to train.  I will point out, though, that Japan dodged a couple bullets and the outcome could have been much worse if the quake had come at 2:46 AM rather than PM.  That would have meant most would have been awakened from a presumably sound sleep and there would have been initial confusion before realizing the need to head for higher ground.  I think many more thousands would have died had that been the case.  The other was that the tsunamis were coming ashore not long before low tide would have been occurring on Japan's coast.  Had the tsunamis been coming ashore near high tide there destruction might have been even worse.

 

What I felt was most significant watching those videos taken during the quake itself and in the period of time immediately after it was how rapidly the Japanese public adjusted to what, based on the duration of the quake, they knew that lengthy quake meant.  It can be said in one word - tsunami.  Indeed the quake hadn't even finished when there were helicopters heading out to sea to video the mayhem everyone knew was on the way.  And the Japanese in Tokyo, who had felt the tremors though not on the scale that those closer to the epicenter did, did not return to their jobs once the shaking had ended.  Not when there were already strong aftershocks occurring and not when they knew the story was as yet a work in progress.  On their smartphones or gathered around giant public video screens they stood and watched as a Japan's northeastern cities and towns were inundated by tsunamis that were, in some cases, over a hundred feet in height.  Many of those watching may have grown up in those cities or had friends or relatives there.  The anxiety amongst those watching must have been intense, and in Tokyo it was made ever moreso by the fact that the trains were not running and so many in central Tokyo found themselves stranded with no way to get home, particularly as traffic had become gridlocked.

 

Of great interest to me, once I'd put those horrific videos of the tsunamis coming ashore and literally flattening many a small town behind me were the videos taken afterward, usually on the day following, visits conducted by FNN journalists as they surveyed the damage.  The damage itself, if one dismissed the areas of standing water, suggested to me the damage following an F5 tornado, the strongest and rarest, where the winds can exceed 300 miles an hour (500 kph).  The landscape would simply be flattened.  The difference, though, was that those threatened by the tsunamis knew to head for higher ground, and it is from these vantage points that all those videos were made and I could only wonder how great the horror must have been to those onlookers as they saw their homes and neighborhoods reduced to saturated rubble.  That is much different from the experience we have in this part of the world where instead of heading for high ground one heads for low ground with cover overhead and then listens as the sounds of the destruction overhead escalate and then decline.  For those individuals, the destruction is only heard, not seen and the horror comes when emerging from cover and seeing how the world has been totally and ruinously altered in just the matter of a minute or two.  There have been no videos taken from inside an F5 tornado while the videos of the waves coming ashore in northeastern Japan have made the 3/11 disaster the most visually documented natural disaster in human history.

 

I will digress to point out why Japan seemed to have been so unprepared for the event.  Seeing the videos of one seawall after another being overtopped by the incoming waves one wonders how the Japanese had so miscalculated things.  The problem was they were based on faulty science.  Before 3/11 the consensus had been that Japan could not experience an earthquake greater than magnitude 8.4.  As a result, the seawalls and such all had been constructed to handle the tsunamis from such a quake.  They were wrong and had they listened back in 2005 when at a conference a Japanese seismologist by the name of Yasutaka Ikeda presented a paper where he said that calculations were wrong and that Japan could expect at almost any time a Magnitude 9 earthquake and the resultant tsunamis.  The reception of the paper was polite and then nobody thought anything about it after the conference.  Had it been believed, there might have been some additions made to make the sea walls higher.

 

At this point I turn now to Yuzu and the earthquake.  Everyone knows (or should know) how he fled the ice when the quake was occurring and how he and his family spent three nights in an evacuation center (actually a school gymnasium).  He has spoken of that and also he has said how he almost quick skating then.  It wasn't just the difficulty of finding another rink on which to practice, but also he felt guilty that by pursuing his skating he was somehow shirking his responsibility to participate in the recovery.  And that is what he was dealing with.  Yuzu's experience of the earthquake did not end when he and his family were able to return to their home.  It continued and dominated the reality of northeastern Japan and there was no escaping it.  Sendai had not been horribly damaged by the tsunamis although large neighborhoods near the ocean had been obliterated but the central business district was located inland and on higher ground and so had been untouched by the waters.  Sendai has a population of just over a million and out of that million more than a thousand perished.  I imagine there had been some building damage but I would think it was not  widespread.  Japanese building codes, particularly for larger structures, are stringent and have been in place for decades, with major modifications coming after the Kobe quake.

 

In his interview with Kenji Miyamoto, who had once been a competitive ice dancer and later had choreographed for Yuzu, the two were able to relate their two experiences of earthquakes (Kenji's the Kobe quake and Yuzu the 3/11 quake).  Yuzu explained how the experience of the quake had a silver lining for him in that it opened up within him expressive resources that had not been there before the occurrence of the quake and tsunami.  He relates particularly how the charity show benefit that was held in Kobe in April of 2011 was the experience that finally convinced him to continue skating.  I wondered initially why it was held in Kobe rather than Tokyo and then I think I figured out why.  Over fifteen years after the earthquake it was a chance for Japan to see how Kobe had rebuilt itself and I'm sure that that fact was brought out in the broadcast.  It was meant to show those in the affected areas that there was hope, that rebuilding could take place.

 

As for Yuzu becoming so identified with the rebuilding, it was not a role he willingly undertook but as he expressed it, it was something that was thrust upon him.  He had the wisdom not to reject it.  I'm certain that the public actions he'd taken over the years associated with the recovery were an unstated reason why he won the People's Honor Award.  In any case, despite his removal to Toronto, he remained one of the people most associated with those who had experienced the quake but had managed to continue.  His position was highlighted even more with the 2013/14 season, his breakout season where he won gold in the GPF, at Sochi, and the World Championships, the first man to hold all three titles simultaneously since Alexei Yagudin back in 2002.  What really put the spotlight on Yuzu, though, was Japan's experience in the 2014 Olympics, where not only was Yuzu the first Japanese man to win figure skating gold but he was the only Japanese athlete in any sport to come home with gold.  

 

Over the years Yuzu apparently has accepted his symbolic role in the recovery effort.  I think that to a certain extent it has become routine for him.  Basically he does what he can through visits to schools and senior centers and other such places to just give those there an uplift by his very presence.  He has never resorted to the sort of antics of a primo uomo (masculine version of prima donna) and has conducted himself with dignity when the occasion demanded it and with playfulness when the occasion allowed.

 

As for the recovery, even now there are many thousands still in temporary housing.  I've used Google Maps to go and look at the areas denuded by the tsunamis and have seen that many of those areas remain now unoccupied, barren tracts because everybody knows that where the waters came once they can come again.  I understand that in a couple of cases the town is actually being raised up by using debris from the tsunami as landfill to raise the level of the town above any potential future tsunamis.  I have a feeling other places might convert the areas into parks although, just as with those agricultural areas inundated by the tsunamis, there is the problem of removing the salt from the earth in order to grow the kinds of bushes and trees and such one expects in parks.

 

As for Japan, it still struggles to meet the challenges 3/11 posed for it.  Japan had not seen destruction on such a scale since World War II, and even though unlike then it possesses the resources to work toward a full recovery, unlike the situation three quarters of a century ago, the demands of recovery often are coming into conflict with other needs and there's only so much money and so much effort that can be directed towards it.  In that sense Yuzu is an important element, since by his activities of visitations and such and the resultant news coverage there is communicated that there is still much that needs to be done.  Kobe's damage was relatively localized.  3/11's damage was much more widespread although concentrated largely on the coast.  But that affected coastline extends from Ibaraki Prefecture in the south, just north of the Tokyo area, to Honshu's northernmost Aomori Prefecture and also parts of Hokkaido's southeastern coastline.

 

As for the Japanese authorities, the great challenge now is not simply replacing what was lost, since so much of it was irreplaceable, but also putting in the resources that will allow those in the affected areas to create for themselves a new normal, a normal replacing that one that was so brutally taken from them at 2:46 PM on the eleventh of March in 2011.  Yuzu has been able to do that for himself personally, and he has allowed himself to be put forward as an example that others can create for themselves a satisfactory world that does not ignore the events of the past but builds on them to make positive what so many would surrender to as a negative.  He told Kenji how the experience of the quake opened up in him expressive resources he did not realize he possessed and he exists now as a positive example that one can live past tragedy and do it triumphantly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

That is a brutal, but insightful read, even if not an easy one and I appreciate your work. I was thousands of miles in the USA...but I bawled my eyes out and refused to watch the footage as best I could...but it was everywhere. I have friends that lived along the coast. I was terrified I was watching them die...that I really was seeing so many lives lost in just an instant. Swallowed up by those waves. Unseen, but there. To be frank...I still dont know if all of my contacts along the coast made it out. Some i got back in contact with though, and they were ok. To those I lost contact with...I chose to believe they are alive.

 

To bring it back yo Yuzuru, one friend I reconnected with...we dont speak often, but after the Sochi Olypmics, even though she doesnt like figure skating and isnt a fan of Yuzuru-she told me she liked that he was a survivor. That he gave her a bit of hope somehow...

[rockstaryuzu]

4 hours ago, micaelis said:

This is a long post, but its one I've been preparing for some time now, doing extensive online research and trying to tie all things together, the object being to somehow grasp what Yuzu's experience of the 3/11 earthquake involved and what effect it had on his life and his skating.  This involved going through more than two hundred YouTube videos dealing with the quake, reading three books about the quake and its aftermath, and doing as much research into Yuzu's life around that time to get me some sense of the event and its effect on him.  Central to my understanding of Yuzu during that time was the lengthy interview by Kenji Miyamoto in which the first half of the third segment dealt with Yuzu's experience of the quake.  The interview was more intense since the interviewer himself had gone through the January, 1995 Kobe earthquake so the two were able to relate together in a way that would probably not have been possible if the interviewer had not had his own experiences to draw on in dealing with Yuzu.

 

I've been hampered, though, in that I neither speak nor read Japanese, but about two months ago I discovered a huge number of videos from Fuji News Network that had been uploaded to YouTube in which the videos all told of the location of the events being seen and the time of their occurrence, but most helpfully the videos had captions in English and even translation of what was being said by individuals in the videos when the words were significant.  Many of those videos, primarily of the tsunamis, I had already seen, but now I was able to relate where they were.  Moreover the FNN videos had numerous vids recorded during the earthquake and, most significantly, had many videos in which their people went out and viewed the destruction in various towns and cities afterwards.  The FNN videos really made this effort possible and I must thank them for putting them on the Internet.  For any nonspeakers of Japanese wanting to get hold of the quake, just put FNN311 as your search terms and that should bring you to them.

 

The first major question I was posing was how the Japanese in general dealt with the quake, not just those in the affected areas, but across the nation.  In exploring I found that a good starting point would be the Kobe earthquake of January 1995.  Registering around magnitude 7, it was the last catastrophic earthquake Japan had experienced before 3/11.  Over six thousand people died in it, making it the first catastrophic (my characterization) quake since 1948, the first to have a death toll over 1000.  Since before 1948 Japan had experienced several quakes claiming lives in the thousands in the earlier 20th Century, including the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which saw the destruction of much of Tokyo and Yokohama and the loss of well over one hundred thousand lives, going for so long (nearly half a century) without a truly massive earthquake was unusual to the Japanese experience.  The significance of Kobe when compared to 3/11 is that they were earthquakes of two very different types.  Lasting only about 20 seconds, its effects on Kobe were enhanced because the quake was relatively close to the surface and centered almost directly beneath the city.  The damage that occurred in Kobe was largely failures of some larger structures and, most pertinently as the cause of the high death toll, the fires that swept through residential areas where so many houses had collapsed.  The time of the quake also was important, as it occurred shortly before six AM when most people were still at home in bed.  Had it occurred six hours later the death toll would most likely have been much lower since most people would have been at work or school.  As far as Japan as a whole is concerned the damage was largely restricted to the Kobe area.  In raw terms the quake was just not that powerful but the proximity of its epicenter to Kobe enhanced what destructive power it had.

 

Yuzu, of course, had no direct memory of the event.  When it occurred he was barely over a month old and Sendai was quite some distance from Kobe.  But he grew up in a Japan where memories of the Kobe quake were fresh and where there would have been much documenting on the media of the quake, its aftermath and the recovery efforts.  By and large, I think, most people in Japan would be thinking that Kobe was the earthquake referred to when there was talk about 'the quake'.

 

All that proceeded to change at 2:46 PM on Friday, March 11, 2011.  It began as a muted shaking but escalated rapidly to major shaking and it just kept shaking.  Now Japanese people are used to earthquakes.  Minor tremors, if not a daily occurrence, do occur often enough that they just take them in stride.  In any case they usually last only a few seconds.  This one didn't.  It kept shaking for at first one minute, and then a second minute and the shaking finally stopped after almost six minutes.  Now what everyone should realize is that the longer an earthquake persists the stronger it is.  Any quake lasting much over four minutes is going to be a magnitude 9, and that indeed was what this one was.

 

For the average Japanese the longevity of that quake made them instantly aware that it was not a business-as-usual quake.  And for the Japanese media it was a notice that they were witnessing the beginning of what would be a very major news story.  And some of that coverage actually began in their own newsrooms.  I saw a couple of videos where one could see what was actually happening in that room as it swayed and bucked and knocked everything over that could be and even some things that shouldn't have toppled.  One of those was in Sendai itself so I was able to see what Yuzu would have been experiencing on the ice at IceRink Sendai at the very same time.  It would not have been a pretty picture and I can very well understand that he was probably fearing for his life as he scrambled off the ice and out the door, fearing the building might come down on him at almost any time.  The building, as we all know, didn't collapse but it did require extensive repairs and thus necessitated Yuzu's finding another rink on which to train.  I will point out, though, that Japan dodged a couple bullets and the outcome could have been much worse if the quake had come at 2:46 AM rather than PM.  That would have meant most would have been awakened from a presumably sound sleep and there would have been initial confusion before realizing the need to head for higher ground.  I think many more thousands would have died had that been the case.  The other was that the tsunamis were coming ashore not long before low tide would have been occurring on Japan's coast.  Had the tsunamis been coming ashore near high tide there destruction might have been even worse.

 

What I felt was most significant watching those videos taken during the quake itself and in the period of time immediately after it was how rapidly the Japanese public adjusted to what, based on the duration of the quake, they knew that lengthy quake meant.  It can be said in one word - tsunami.  Indeed the quake hadn't even finished when there were helicopters heading out to sea to video the mayhem everyone knew was on the way.  And the Japanese in Tokyo, who had felt the tremors though not on the scale that those closer to the epicenter did, did not return to their jobs once the shaking had ended.  Not when there were already strong aftershocks occurring and not when they knew the story was as yet a work in progress.  On their smartphones or gathered around giant public video screens they stood and watched as a Japan's northeastern cities and towns were inundated by tsunamis that were, in some cases, over a hundred feet in height.  Many of those watching may have grown up in those cities or had friends or relatives there.  The anxiety amongst those watching must have been intense, and in Tokyo it was made ever moreso by the fact that the trains were not running and so many in central Tokyo found themselves stranded with no way to get home, particularly as traffic had become gridlocked.

 

Of great interest to me, once I'd put those horrific videos of the tsunamis coming ashore and literally flattening many a small town behind me were the videos taken afterward, usually on the day following, visits conducted by FNN journalists as they surveyed the damage.  The damage itself, if one dismissed the areas of standing water, suggested to me the damage following an F5 tornado, the strongest and rarest, where the winds can exceed 300 miles an hour (500 kph).  The landscape would simply be flattened.  The difference, though, was that those threatened by the tsunamis knew to head for higher ground, and it is from these vantage points that all those videos were made and I could only wonder how great the horror must have been to those onlookers as they saw their homes and neighborhoods reduced to saturated rubble.  That is much different from the experience we have in this part of the world where instead of heading for high ground one heads for low ground with cover overhead and then listens as the sounds of the destruction overhead escalate and then decline.  For those individuals, the destruction is only heard, not seen and the horror comes when emerging from cover and seeing how the world has been totally and ruinously altered in just the matter of a minute or two.  There have been no videos taken from inside an F5 tornado while the videos of the waves coming ashore in northeastern Japan have made the 3/11 disaster the most visually documented natural disaster in human history.

 

I will digress to point out why Japan seemed to have been so unprepared for the event.  Seeing the videos of one seawall after another being overtopped by the incoming waves one wonders how the Japanese had so miscalculated things.  The problem was they were based on faulty science.  Before 3/11 the consensus had been that Japan could not experience an earthquake greater than magnitude 8.4.  As a result, the seawalls and such all had been constructed to handle the tsunamis from such a quake.  They were wrong and had they listened back in 2005 when at a conference a Japanese seismologist by the name of Yasutaka Ikeda presented a paper where he said that calculations were wrong and that Japan could expect at almost any time a Magnitude 9 earthquake and the resultant tsunamis.  The reception of the paper was polite and then nobody thought anything about it after the conference.  Had it been believed, there might have been some additions made to make the sea walls higher.

 

At this point I turn now to Yuzu and the earthquake.  Everyone knows (or should know) how he fled the ice when the quake was occurring and how he and his family spent three nights in an evacuation center (actually a school gymnasium).  He has spoken of that and also he has said how he almost quick skating then.  It wasn't just the difficulty of finding another rink on which to practice, but also he felt guilty that by pursuing his skating he was somehow shirking his responsibility to participate in the recovery.  And that is what he was dealing with.  Yuzu's experience of the earthquake did not end when he and his family were able to return to their home.  It continued and dominated the reality of northeastern Japan and there was no escaping it.  Sendai had not been horribly damaged by the tsunamis although large neighborhoods near the ocean had been obliterated but the central business district was located inland and on higher ground and so had been untouched by the waters.  Sendai has a population of just over a million and out of that million more than a thousand perished.  I imagine there had been some building damage but I would think it was not  widespread.  Japanese building codes, particularly for larger structures, are stringent and have been in place for decades, with major modifications coming after the Kobe quake.

 

In his interview with Kenji Miyamoto, who had once been a competitive ice dancer and later had choreographed for Yuzu, the two were able to relate their two experiences of earthquakes (Kenji's the Kobe quake and Yuzu the 3/11 quake).  Yuzu explained how the experience of the quake had a silver lining for him in that it opened up within him expressive resources that had not been there before the occurrence of the quake and tsunami.  He relates particularly how the charity show benefit that was held in Kobe in April of 2011 was the experience that finally convinced him to continue skating.  I wondered initially why it was held in Kobe rather than Tokyo and then I think I figured out why.  Over fifteen years after the earthquake it was a chance for Japan to see how Kobe had rebuilt itself and I'm sure that that fact was brought out in the broadcast.  It was meant to show those in the affected areas that there was hope, that rebuilding could take place.

 

As for Yuzu becoming so identified with the rebuilding, it was not a role he willingly undertook but as he expressed it, it was something that was thrust upon him.  He had the wisdom not to reject it.  I'm certain that the public actions he'd taken over the years associated with the recovery were an unstated reason why he won the People's Honor Award.  In any case, despite his removal to Toronto, he remained one of the people most associated with those who had experienced the quake but had managed to continue.  His position was highlighted even more with the 2013/14 season, his breakout season where he won gold in the GPF, at Sochi, and the World Championships, the first man to hold all three titles simultaneously since Alexei Yagudin back in 2002.  What really put the spotlight on Yuzu, though, was Japan's experience in the 2014 Olympics, where not only was Yuzu the first Japanese man to win figure skating gold but he was the only Japanese athlete in any sport to come home with gold.  

 

Over the years Yuzu apparently has accepted his symbolic role in the recovery effort.  I think that to a certain extent it has become routine for him.  Basically he does what he can through visits to schools and senior centers and other such places to just give those there an uplift by his very presence.  He has never resorted to the sort of antics of a primo uomo (masculine version of prima donna) and has conducted himself with dignity when the occasion demanded it and with playfulness when the occasion allowed.

 

As for the recovery, even now there are many thousands still in temporary housing.  I've used Google Maps to go and look at the areas denuded by the tsunamis and have seen that many of those areas remain now unoccupied, barren tracts because everybody knows that where the waters came once they can come again.  I understand that in a couple of cases the town is actually being raised up by using debris from the tsunami as landfill to raise the level of the town above any potential future tsunamis.  I have a feeling other places might convert the areas into parks although, just as with those agricultural areas inundated by the tsunamis, there is the problem of removing the salt from the earth in order to grow the kinds of bushes and trees and such one expects in parks.

 

As for Japan, it still struggles to meet the challenges 3/11 posed for it.  Japan had not seen destruction on such a scale since World War II, and even though unlike then it possesses the resources to work toward a full recovery, unlike the situation three quarters of a century ago, the demands of recovery often are coming into conflict with other needs and there's only so much money and so much effort that can be directed towards it.  In that sense Yuzu is an important element, since by his activities of visitations and such and the resultant news coverage there is communicated that there is still much that needs to be done.  Kobe's damage was relatively localized.  3/11's damage was much more widespread although concentrated largely on the coast.  But that affected coastline extends from Ibaraki Prefecture in the south, just north of the Tokyo area, to Honshu's northernmost Aomori Prefecture and also parts of Hokkaido's southeastern coastline.

 

As for the Japanese authorities, the great challenge now is not simply replacing what was lost, since so much of it was irreplaceable, but also putting in the resources that will allow those in the affected areas to create for themselves a new normal, a normal replacing that one that was so brutally taken from them at 2:46 PM on the eleventh of March in 2011.  Yuzu has been able to do that for himself personally, and he has allowed himself to be put forward as an example that others can create for themselves a satisfactory world that does not ignore the events of the past but builds on them to make positive what so many would surrender to as a negative.  He told Kenji how the experience of the quake opened up in him expressive resources he did not realize he possessed and he exists now as a positive example that one can live past tragedy and do it triumphantly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wow, @micaelis. You've put so much work into this. One thing I would add is that Yuzu has on more than one occasion expressed his feelings about continuing to skate after 3/11, and, along with that guilt, expressed his sense of duty to do whatever he can to help the recovery efforts. For example, there is the video of him returning to a rebuilt high school shortly after winning his gold at Sochi, where prior to going in, he tells the TV interviewer with him that he's afraid the students will accuse him for leaving, that they will say 'how dare you!' And then he is completely surprised and totally overwhelmed when they welcome him with screams and cheers and are excited to see him.  

 

In fact, it's not until he pays the craft-making grannies he met in that same 2014 visit a second call, in 2018 after PyeongChang, that he seems to start letting go of guilt, because the grannies even tell him 'You don't have to carry that burden. What you're doing gives us hope and makes us happy."  It seems to me that since that particular time, he's carried himself a lot lighter. 

 

 

[Toni]

20 hours ago, Old Cat Lady said:

 

I see it now.  Thanks 

 

For those of you who still want to buy it, here's a link to make it easier

https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B07W95FCWT/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_api_i_26TtDbVEH10XP?fbclid=IwAR2VFThu8-LTFJ_6YTp7Ej9AfACeBlQMebWkyPB-PO_gd6fcJb4eyAfTTu0&language=en_US

 

The language selector is right next to the search bar.

 

btw, anyone want to admit what their Yuzu budget is? or maybe what percentage of their income it is?

 

You're out of your tree, Cat Lady! I will never confess how much I spend on Yuzu... although, I will mention that he gets money for every sale of those Blu-rays (worth every penny), and he gets money for his music boxes, and his calendars, and of course FaOI books, and his first Blu-ray, and all his season photobooks, and... 

 

The good thing about him retiring will be that I can stop giving money to the ISU at competitions, and start giving it to Yuzu himself, by going to see him in FaOI instead...  Can I just throw money at him while he skates?

 

[monchan]

No more clear files. The clear file looks really great thou.

[Old Cat Lady]

51 minutes ago, Toni said:

 

You're out of your tree, Cat Lady! I will never confess how much I spend on Yuzu... although, I will mention that he gets money for every sale of those Blu-rays (worth every penny), and he gets money for his music boxes, and his calendars, and of course FaOI books, and his first Blu-ray, and all his season photobooks, and... 

 

lol, you notice that I didn't admit my budget either ...   It's probably better that I don't think about it.  I started mid-year so I also used up all my vacation days on Yuzu with the intention of even using unpaid days if necessary but luckily my boss is awesome and said I could use sick days in place of vacation.

 

 

51 minutes ago, Toni said:

 

The good thing about him retiring will be that I can stop giving money to the ISU at competitions, and start giving it to Yuzu himself, by going to see him in FaOI instead...  Can I just throw money at him while he skates?

 

 

This reminds me of the Chinese money bouquets that some men use to propose.  Maybe we need to learn how to make those - can you imagine if all those plushies were replaced with wads of cash   ...   giving me ideas for next year

[Dreamer]

I have had to curtail my spending as betwween Sept and March 2020: I have spent way too much.

My husband, supports me, and even encourages me in this spending, because he loves me and knows how much joy Yuzu brings.

For example, Celine Dion is finally coming to my hometown.  $579 cdn for a seat in the 11th row floor or first row, balcony.

I decided not to go because it is in April and I am out of budget.  

[andchipzz]

Regarding the role of a public figure in the trails of national's catastrophe, I just want to say that Yuzuru, despite his own feelings that he did not deserve to take that role, has indeed taken that role admirably. From the beginning, he has been hailed as the Future of Tohoku, hasn't he? He was 15 years old when they made the documentary about HIM as the FUTURE of Tohoku. It just takes them (the media and the local government) a step forward to propel him onto the role of the Star of Hope --> for Tohoku, and then for Japan when he brought the only gold medal home AFTER the most catastrophic event in the modern history of Japan. It is a tremendously difficult role for anybody, but especially for a teenager, that I am very much convinced somehow, that Yuzuru's family themselves are people with well-known and dignified reputation; at the very least the adult in that family must be people who are used to being looked up to by those around them, and they bear with being well-respected family with grace. Because, without those kind of support from the most influential people in his life, there are 100% probability that someone with such a role will definitely cave and burn. Anyway, as a public figure, Yuzuru has chosen to accept that duty, to be the ambassador of regions affected by disasters. He brought awareness about the damages in that area, and moreover, he brought hope for the people of those area too. What he is doing with 24H TV, is not only he performed there to entertain those people, but, he understands his star power. 

When he visited areas affected by the nuclear radiation (cleared up as it is), he is showing the rest of the Japan and the world that it is now safe to be there. When he went to Hokkaido and tasted the local product, he promoted it so his fans will buy it too and therefore he supported the livelihood of the people of disaster area.

I can only hope that someone in my country can take that kind of role, but it seems impossible, because it needs a cooperation between government, media, and the public figure in the most organic way, with someone that is obviously has all the requirements to be a good role model, beside having a star power. 

Do you all remember the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and Earthquake? It affected so many countries and killed 300.000 people, but for me it is almost forgotten. My country is one of the most affected nation with half of the death tolls come from here. But I only seem to be able to connect with it only peripherally, even if one of my aunt lost her baby there. My mother went to that province once this year (2019), and she said that it does not feel like much development happen, and no public figure has risen to the occasion to remind people of it, and especially of the very real potential of such a catastrophic event to happen at any time!

But Yuzuru, he... has successfully makes me feel more connected with the disaster that happen... in Tohoku, Japan, away from me.. 

 

 

[rockstaryuzu]

1 hour ago, Old Cat Lady said:

This reminds me of the Chinese money bouquets that some men use to propose.  Maybe we need to learn how to make those - can you imagine if all those plushies were replaced with wads of cash   ...   giving me ideas for next year

I've always thought it would be cool if, instead of throwing plushies or flowers on the ice, fans could make instant online donations to the skater's charity of choice instead. Basically showering them with cash, but without the actual cash. Could you imagine? The average Pooh is what? 10 - 20 bucks? Imagine a 'Pooh rain' of cash going to the Tohoku rebuilding efforts on Yuzu's behalf every time he finishes a program. 

[rockstaryuzu]

15 minutes ago, andchipzz said:

Do you all remember the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and Earthquake? It affected so many countries and killed 300.000 people, but for me it is almost forgotten. My country is one of the most affected nation with half of the death tolls come from here. But I only seem to be able to connect with it only peripherally, even if one of my aunt lost her baby there. My mother went to that province once this year (2019), and she said that it does not feel like much development happen, and no public figure has risen to the occasion to remind people of it, and especially of the very real potential of such a catastrophic event to happen at any time

If I recall correctly, that area was hit with more earthquakes a couple of years later, no? Your country has suffered a lot.

[rockstaryuzu]

1 hour ago, Dreamer said:

I have had to curtail my spending as betwween Sept and March 2020: I have spent way too much.

My husband, supports me, and even encourages me in this spending, because he loves me and knows how much joy Yuzu brings.

For example, Celine Dion is finally coming to my hometown.  $579 cdn for a seat in the 11th row floor or first row, balcony.

I decided not to go because it is in April and I am out of budget.  

I think it would be safe to say that most of us are YOLO-ing our Yuzu spending. Celine Dion may come and go but Yuzu's only going to skate competitively for so long.

[andchipzz]

1 minute ago, rockstaryuzu said:

If I recall correctly, that area was hit with more earthquakes a couple of years later, no? Your country has suffered a lot.

Well, my country is also situated on the Ring of Fire. The outer Islands are all series of volcanic islands, so it is volcanic eruptions every year in one or two or more mountains here. It is also situated on top of a big geological fault, so a little bit of rupture, then bam! big earthquake. We experienced small tsunami, big tsunami, but we are always awfully unprepared. No to mention, the flooding and landslides...  -_-

It is easy to stop caring and stop having empathy about victims of natural and man-made disasters, especially when it feels like it happens every other day in places not really close to you even if it is still in your nation. In many ways it makes me a little bit conceited? I feel safe where I am in my city, where I never experience catastrophic event here, only small earthquakes.

That is why, when I found about Yuzuru, I keep thinking that it will be good to have someone to take the role as an ambassador of disaster area, like Yuzuru is doing. When a famous figure bring an interest to a disaster area, general public will definitely follow him/her. Unfortunately, we gonna need a very peculiar figure to take that role, someone empathetic rather than sympathetic (because it just feels like a reporter going to disaster area, then).