How one Japanese village defied the tsunami

By TOMOKO A. HOSAKA, Associated Press – Fri May 13, 6:20 am ET

FUDAI, Japan – In the rubble of Japan's northeast coast, one small village stands as tall as ever after the tsunami. No homes were swept away. In fact, they barely got wet.
     Fudai is the village that survived — thanks to a huge wall once deemed a mayor's expensive folly and now vindicated as the community's salvation. The 3,000 residents living between mountains behind a cove owe their lives to a late leader who saw the devastation of an earlier tsunami and made it the priority of his four-decade tenure to defend his people from the next one.
     His 51-foot (15.5-meter) floodgate between mountainsides took a dozen years to build and meant spending more than $30 million in today's dollars.
     "It cost a lot of money. But without it, Fudai would have disappeared," said seaweed fisherman Satoshi Kaneko, 55, whose business has been ruined but who is happy to have his family and home intact.
     The gate project was criticized as wasteful in the 1970s. But the gate and an equally high seawall behind the community's adjacent fishing port protected Fudai from the waves that obliterated so many other towns. . .
     "However you look at it, the effectiveness of the floodgate and seawall was truly impressive," current Fudai Mayor Hiroshi Fukawatari said. . .
     In Fudai, the waves rose as high as 66 feet (20 meters), as water marks show on the floodgate's towers. So some ocean water did flow over but caused minimal damage. The gate broke the tsunami's main thrust. And the community is lucky to have two mountainsides flanking the gate and offering a natural barrier.
     The man credited with saving Fudai is the late Kotaku Wamura, a ten-term mayor whose political reign began in the ashes of World War II and ended in 1987.
Fudai, about 320 miles (510 kilometers) north of Tokyo, depends on the sea. Fishermen boast of the seaweed they harvest. A pretty, white-sand beach lured tourists every summer.
     But Wamura never forgot how quickly the sea could turn. Massive earthquake-triggered tsunamis flattened the northeast coast in 1933 and 1896. In Fudai, the two disasters destroyed hundreds of homes and killed 439 people.
     "When I saw bodies being dug up from the piles of earth, I did not know what to say. I had no words," Wamura wrote of the 1933 tsunami in his book about Fudai, "A 40-Year Fight Against Poverty."
     He vowed it would never happen again.
     In 1967, the town erected a 51-foot (15.5-meter) seawall to shield homes behind the fishing port. But Wamura wasn't finished. He had a bigger project in mind for the cove up the road, where most of the community was located. That area needed a floodgate with panels that could be lifted to allow the Fudai River to empty into the cove and lowered to block tsunamis.
     He insisted the structure be as tall as the seawall.
     The village council initially balked.
     "They weren't necessarily against the idea of floodgates, just the size," said Yuzo Mifune, head of Fudai's resident services and an unofficial floodgate historian. "But Wamura somehow persuaded them that this was the only way to protect lives."
     . . . Even current Mayor Fukawatari, who at the time helped oversee construction, had his doubts.
     "I did wonder whether we needed something this big," he said in an interview at his office.
     The concrete structure spanning 673 feet (205 meters) was completed in 1984.. .
     On March 11, after the 9.0 earthquake hit, workers remotely closed the floodgate's four main panels. Smaller panels on the sides jammed, and a firefighter had to rush down to shut them by hand.
     The tsunami battered the white beach in the cove, leaving behind debris and fallen trees. But behind the floodgate, the village is virtually untouched. . .

For rest of article, see http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110513/ap_on_re_as/as_japan_village_that_survived
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