The Voice of Fukushima: A Cry from the Heart - Ground Zero 02: Tsunami and Worse

Unaware that the M 9.0 megaquake of March 11, 2011 was just the beginning of it all Yogan Baum narrowly escapes the ensuing tsunami. Wandering around his little village in search of his wife he slowly realizes the really, really bad news is still to come.
Early next morning the north-flying Chinooks overhead tell their own story. By nine o'clock, reunited to his wife, the flight from Fukushima is on. Japan is on the brink and the whole world is watching Fukushima Dai-ichi.
An odyssey of three days on the road which leads to various insights but no conclusion is salvaged by an angry voice. And soon two out of two hundred on flight ANA 1516 see the overcrowded but otherwise desolate Fukushima Airport fall back below them like the smoldering deck of a doomed aircraft carrier while snacks are already being served.

"What brought you here?" is a question Yogan Baum was asked hundreds of times over the years. "Well," he used to say, "the train, mainly,": which is not untrue. After a weeklong ride on the famed Moscow Peking Express of 1984, he rolled through China some more, went up in the air for the second time in his life, reached Hong Kong, and took to the air again. He saw Philippine palm trees out of an oval window, and there he was in Japan. The immigration officer looked into his wallet, then at his naivety, in despair and stamped his passport: "Welcome to Japan!"
The friendly Narita information girl, "moshi moshi," charmed him and the green scented tatami in his hotel room made him feel at home instantly. He had arrived.
What made Yogan leave his own country, then? Was it a love of traveling? When he was a child, he spent many happy hours exploring maps. He loved the deep brown highlands of South America and, before all else, Tibet. Not Japan. Later on, India was his dream destination – something made him veer off course, and so he did not reach Bombay but Iwaki, Japan, instead. Was it Tony Scott and Hozan Yamamoto's "Music for Zen Meditation and Other Joys" that hooked him? The magic of the Shakuhachi he could not resist. It conjured up pictures of a rural hillside in autumn, wind rustling in leaves and mist rising from the valley. Yogan felt at peace. He felt at ease in the eerily spine chilling strains of these strange sounds.
Did he find that hillside, then? That peace? As for that hillside, Yogan hasn-t found it yet. Could it be his present state of being in limbo, between loss and hope, will lead him towards the light he once had a glimpse of, in a lost world far, far west of here?
Not a hillside in autumn – a family was what he found in Japan! A wife. Children. A whole, new, unexpected, wonderful life! He worked hard and learned to be a husband and a father. Their life in the small fishing port of Yotsukura, Iwaki City, was as happy as could be. People were good to them, and they tried their best to be responsible. All foreigners are outsiders, yes, but being on the outside of things has its advantages, too. Opening his soul to the near vastness of the Pacific Ocean and the night stars high above gave him space to breathe: there was nothing much he missed.
Life changed dramatically on and after March 11, 2011. Fortunately, Yogan and his wife Mariko were spared in many ways. The megaquake did not brea...