Most visitors to Sri Lanka know that the island’s coastal belt is among the most dynamic and beautiful in the world. The scenic beaches and bays around the island span a whole host of ecosystems, including wetlands, estuaries, lagoons, sand dunes, salt marshes and mangrove stands. Sunshine bathes much of the island’s 950-mile coastal belt throughout the year and blessed by the warm tropical climate, the shallow waters off the coastline host rich marine habitats including sea grass beds and coral reefs. The velvety, warm sands of the beaches are ideal for sunbathing, strolling, and building sand castles. The shimmering blue waters beyond provide a wide variety of fish stocks, while the reefs offer a beautiful undersea world for snorkelers.
Dotted with picturesque tea plantations, cascading waterfalls, and Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim temples, the hill country also makes an attractive tourist destination, as do the several natural reserves and bird sanctuaries. Archeological evidence shows Sri Lanka’s prehistoric settlements are at least 125,000 years old [1] and its documented history is over 2,500 years old. Ancient cities in the dry zone, within a few hours’ drive from the coast, have numerous historical monuments and artifacts and a large network of interconnected reservoirs. Some of the reservoirs have been renovated and are still in use, and attest to the country’s advanced ancient civilization.
In the first decade of the 21st century, however, this “Resplendent Isle” as the country has long been known, seized the world’s attention not for its natural beauty or the rich cultural history, but for complex disasters. Disasters that leave widespread material, economic, and environmental losses and massive humanitarian crises in their wake, significantly disrupt the functioning of societies, and often exceed the abilities of the stricken countries to cope with the aftermath using their own resources.
The most recent complex disaster the world saw occurred on March 11, 2011 when a 9.1 magnitude earthquake triggered a monstrous tsunami that devastated coastal towns and villages along hundreds of miles of Japan’s Tohoku region, located in Japan’s main island of Honshu. Some six years before, the world had watched in horror as a 9.3 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Sumatra unleashed another massive tsunami that brought widespread destruction to Sri Lanka’s northern, eastern, and southern coastal zones, as well as several other countries.
The tsunami hit Sri Lanka at a time when the country was embroiled in a manmade disaster – a bloody civil war that started in 1983 between the government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a rebel group fighting for a separate state for the country’s minority Tamil community, a war that dragged on for twenty-six year and ended only in 2009. That disaster is well documented by scholars, journalists, and other observers; the focus of this book is the natural disasters that engulfed Sri Lanka and Japan. Here, I will first talk about the nature and scale of Japan’s disaster and then return to Sri Lanka.
Reputed to be remote, beautiful, and steeped in tradition, ‘Tohoku,’ literally means ‘northeast,’ a reference to its location in relation to Japan’s ancient capitals of Nara and Kyoto. The Pacific coast region of the district is roughly divided into the Sanriku coast area, the Sendai Bay area, and the Hamadori area. In 2011, the epicenter of the undersea quake was about 80 km offshore from Sendai city, the largest in the Tohoku district and home to about a million people. The temblor damaged and brought down buildings and knocked out electrical, transport, and communication systems along the Pacific coast. Office workers in Tokyo, about 240 km south, got stranded overnight in the darkened capital. In some places of the Tohoku region, the tsunami washed away entire villages, and fires burnt down much of what remained. A year after the catastrophe, 15, 854 people are known to have died, and 3,155 remain missing. [2]
The deaths and destruction caused by the earthquake and the tsunami were only the beginning of a horrendous chapter in Japan’s centuries-long history. Another disaster followed when, in Fukushima Prefecture, two nuclear power plants, which had shut down as expected in the earthquake, became disabled after the sea flooded the basements in which they were located. In the Fukushima Daiichi plant, diesel generators normally used to power the reactors’ cooling system were killed. In the Fukushima Daini plant, about 11 km away, the ability to control pressure in some of its reactors was lost. The result was a nuclear meltdown, which the country’s then Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, called Japan’s worst disaster since World War II.
Engineers of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO,) owner and operator of the plant, struggled for four days to contain the crisis. But following a third explosion at the Daiichi plant, they called for expert international reinforcement to assist in containing the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. A year after the disaster, the country is still struggling to resolve the nuclear accident, or even to start the rebuilding of homes and other infrastructures in most devastated areas.
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Sri Lanka’s natural disaster struck on December 26, 2004. The day was a public holiday because it was a poya day, [3] and Ciranthi Saluwaduna, an urban professional, awoke early. “It was a beautiful morning. A cool breeze was blowing with a nip in the air, common this time of year in the tropics. The morning sun wasn’t harsh and the day was lit up with just about the right warmth,” Ciranthi recalls in a memoir of that day she never expected to survive. I quote liberally from it in this chapter and the next, to show what a complex disaster looks like, feels like, sounds like, to one who actually experiences it during the impact period and immediately afterwards.
Ciranthi lives in a Colombo suburb and works for a Dutch airline. The previous day two tourists had arrived but their luggage had not. The bags came later and she decided to deliver them to the owners who were now in Unawatuna, a breathtakingly beautiful beach resort in the south. Luggage delivery was not part of her job, but the company’s regular courier had gone home for the holidays and she decided to surprise the couple in the spirit of Christmas. Her twenty-year-old daughter, Nadi, and eighteen-year-old son, Malla, [4] joined her to enjoy a day at the beach. Malla, a newly licensed driver, took the wheel of the family van.
Even before they set out, the 9.3 magnitude earthquake had sent massive tsunami waves racing from Indonesia in east Asia, through Sri Lanka and India in south Asia, all the way to Somalia, a coastal state on the Horn of Africa, bringing varying degrees of destruction to affected countries. But completely unaware of the impending disaster, Ciranthi and her children were cruising down the A2 highway that runs parallel to the sea, with New Age music playing in the background, until they were forced to a halt because vehicles ahead had stalled. They were on a narrow stretch of the road, between the villages of Akurala and Kahawa, about half-an-hour from their destination. There was no on-coming traffic. Looking to her right, Ciranthi saw the sea rushing over the big boulders onto the road carrying tin cans and other debris. She writes, “In an instant, my mind registered the fact that a fortification of some sort had given way and the sea was flowing inland. I told Malla to immediately turn around and head back to Colombo.”
But it was easier said than done; by then there was a line of vehicles behind them. Still, he cleverly maneuvered the van and turned, but it was too late. “Put the windows up. Keep going. Don’t let the vehicle stall in the water!” Ciranthi shouted. But just as the words left her lips, “a huge wave struck the van on the side, spinning it round and round. Malla desperately tried to gain control of it, but the force of the water hurtled us over. Then we struck something (it was the railway tracks) and we felt the van being dragged under. We had been unable to close the windows fully and thick, dark brown water was seeping into the vehicle. The next thing we knew, we were turning turtle, sinking and drowning, trapped inside the van. That was the moment I knew we were going to die.” Still, she and the children remained “strangely calm.”
Suddenly the vehicle jolted and Ciranthi was shocked back into reality. It had hit a huge bush and was now rocking against it like a baby. “I shouted to the children to grab hold of its branches. The vehicle was now rocking more vigorously and then, suddenly, a forceful backwash was dragging the van towards the sea. It seemed the only thing that stopped it were our hands hanging on to the bush. By now, I was crying desperately and so was my daughter. As the water receded, the van tilted and sank right side up in the marsh. Malla shouted for us to get out, but all the doors were jammed. Now, I was almost hysterical and my daughter was weeping and wailing. In the far-off distance I saw a man atop a lamp post and started yelling for help, but no one heard us.”
In the meantime, Malla somehow wriggled out of the vehicle through a half-open window. He helped Nadi out, while shouting for his mother to follow. Ciranthi writes, “I have watched countless movies where actors make climbing out of windows seem very easy, but believe me, it is no easy task to climb upwards and maneuver a large body through a half-open window of a vehicle! But they both struggled and I finally got out. Maybe due to years of crisis management I had the presence of mind to collect documents pertaining to the vehicle, Malla’s passport, and the notes I needed for work. I left behind my handbag and money.”
When they got out into waist-deep water says Ciranthi, “Destruction and mayhem was everywhere! People were wailing, crying, shouting, all at the same time. My eyes registered that the skyline had changed – houses, trees, buildings, were now flat and broken and all over the place. I don’t remember seeing the cars that were ahead and behind of us….I guess we were in some swamp or a huge field because we had to climb upwards and onto the railway track. We followed all the people who headed inland on a footpath, like a herd. Old people, barely able to hobble and gasping for breath, tried to hurry along with us. People with injuries, cut and bleeding, ran along with us. But some parents, weeping and wailing, ran amok looking for little children. A man howled he could not save his child who got washed away while he was holding on to him….”
Sri Lanka was hit by two tsunami waves and what Ciranthi describes above are the heart-rending cries of separation from loved ones and the social disruption, and the economic, infrastructural, and environmental devastation that came in the wake of the first one. The second was far bigger and she and her children just managed to escape it, as we hear in Chapter Two.
Compared to many tsunami survivors whose voices we hear in the following pages, Ciranthi was really fortunate. She and her children survived, her van was insured, and her home, located inland, was completely intact. Still, the fathomless suffering this phenomenal force brought upon thousands of other human beings, and her survival amidst the deaths of thousands of others, engulfed her with what psychologists call ‘survivor guilt.’ So she wrote her story “as a therapy to take out the guilty ghosts lurking in the depths of my mind” and emailed it to friends. A mutual friend sent me a copy and I called Ciranthi asking for an interview. When I met her at her home next morning, one wall of her dining room was lined with boxes of items donated by her Dutch clients for tsunami victims. Ciranthi was helping tsunami refugees now living in a Buddhist temple in Moratuwa, further south from her home. Helping them too was a way of coping with ‘survivor guilt.’
In Japan too, hundreds of people who were on the road when the sea roared in lost their lives. Those who survived did so, like Cirnathi and her children, against all odds. In Surviving the Tsunami, a documentary produced by NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, a woman, Machiko Kikuchi, relates a story remarkably like that of Ciranthi’s. [5] She was at work when the earthquake hit, and immediately drove home to see if it was still standing. Since she was driving she did not hear tsunami warnings, but as she got out of the car, a cyclist rushed by shouting. Machiko got back in the car and had just slammed the door when the ocean swept the car inland. She lived to tell the story because her car was thrust against a building, where it stopped and began sinking. Machiko too escaped through a broken window, climbed over the debris, and then hauled herself onto a building through a window.
Among other survivors who talked about their experiences to NHK, two more remarkable stories are told by two men who were also in their cars when disaster struck. Yoshiki Hasegawa survived because the tsunami deposited his car on a bridge, upside down. Tsuyoshi Sawada got onto the roof of his car as it was carried by the sea because he thought “They’d never find my corpse if I sank in my car….” When the bridge came into sight he started yelling for help. Hasegawa, who had by now crawled out of his car, shouted “Jump!” There was nothing but the open sea beyond the bridge and Sawada says, “Jumping onto the bridge was my only chance. If I made it, I’m saved. If I failed, I’m gone.” Hasegawa pulled him safety when he grabbed the railing of the bridge.
In both countries, more drivers may have survived the tsunami, but died inside their cars because they were not found in time. A newspaper reported that in Rikuzentakata, a Japanese port city in Iwate Prefecture, two survivors found by rescuers were very weak, having suffered badly during the two days they spent trapped in a car that got swept up in the water and then buried in the rubble. [6]
Tsunamis are created by seismic and volcanic activity at tectonic plate boundaries and travel at over 500 kmh in the open sea. As they reach shallow water near the coast the waves slowdown, but depending on topographical and undersea conditions, they gain in height. The walls of water that crashed in some areas of both Sri Lanka and Japan were said to have been 15 meters or higher.
Sri Lanka was the second worst tsunami affected country in 2004. Some 36,000 people lost their lives there and about a million were immediately displaced when the sea left three fourths of the coastal region in shambles. [7] Based on data supplied by twenty government institution, twenty bilateral and multilateral organizations, and eighteen national and international non-governmental organizations, the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) projected it would take three to five years to complete the reconstruction process and to fully restore lost services and livelihoods. The estimated cost was approximately $2.2 billion. The international community committed $2.1 billion. In addition to these funds, the country also received debt relief/moratorium and balance of payments support. [8]
Of Tohoku region’s six prefectures, Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima, were the worst affected. The nature and scale of the disaster was such that the Japanese government estimates it will take 10 years and billions of dollars to rebuild the region. Removing the more than 20 m tons of tsunami debris alone is estimated to cost some Y 680bn ($8.6 b).
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I am a cultural anthropologist of Sri Lankan origin now living in California, and in this book I aim to provide a holistic understanding of the causes, and the short and long-term effects of the tsunami disasters in Sri Lanka and Japan. My central argument is that ‘natural disasters’ are not caused by Mother Nature, that they result from maladaptive human strategies, and that to understand the causes as well as the effects of the tsunami disasters in Japan and Sri Lanka, we must look at the relationship between tradition and modernity; that is, the impact of the western colonial enterprise and globalization on the two countries’ societies, economies, cultures, and environments. [9]
Sri Lanka’s colonial history spans 443 years, under Portuguese, Dutch, and British rulers. All exploited the country’s natural and human resources for their own gains, and in the next chapter I document how the political economy of the British was instrumental in laying the foundation for the tsunami disaster. Japan was never colonized. But from 1543, when the Portuguese first arrived in the country, to well into the 18th century, by which time the British, Dutch, and the Americans also wielded great power in the region, the threat of being conquered was ever present, and western aggression propelled Japan’s entry into the modern industrial age. The impact of the western colonial enterprise on the two countries was so different that by the 21st century, Japan had become the world’s third largest economy and Sri Lanka, a poor developing nation. Still, as we will see in Chapter One, when the social, cultural, political, psychological, environmental, and technological changes wrought by the colonizers in both countries intersected with other factors such as geography, unwise urban planning, poverty, population increase, and post-colonial era global politics and economics, the process made them extremely vulnerable to the disasters waiting to happen.
The images and events documented by Ciranthi and NHK – nature’s sudden and violent assault on thousands of helpless people; the wanton damage and destruction of homes, livelihoods, and infrastructures; the grief, trauma, and terror of losing loved ones, homes, and other possessions; the ravaging of the familiar environment – show vividly some of the multidimensional impacts in the immediate aftermath of complex disasters, impacts that demand relief and recovery efforts begin immediately. The injured must be rescued. The dead must be recovered, identified, and released to relatives, or if unclaimed, must be cremated or buried. Deaths must be certified. Food, clothing, and shelter must be provided to thousands of distraught males and females of all ages. Those who lost loved ones must be cared for as they cope with unrelenting grief.
Of course, ours being an era of instant communication, the disasters became globalized events in no time at all and the UN, other international non-governmental organizations (INGOs,) and even individuals rushed to join the thousands of local people who were trying to clean the debris, recover the dead, bring relief to the survivors in the two countries. Some global groups also came to provide psychological counseling to survivors and some went on to help with the long-term rebuilding of homes, livelihoods, roads, schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure.
But in both countries, people did not wait for international help to start rescue and relief efforts. Japan was well prepared to deal with natural disasters, but the nature and scale of the 2011 catastrophe was beyond anything the country had ever imagined. In 2004, Sri Lanka had no disaster management plan whatsoever. So, how did the two countries deal with the immediate needs, issues, and problems that arose? I look at those efforts in Chapter Two, and we see that for effective relief provision, it is critical that relief providers are knowledgeable about the communities they are trying to serve.
Chapter Three gives voice to several survivors who lost loved ones, as well as to their relatives and the Buddhist priests and psychiatrists who were helping them to make sense of the tragedy that befell them. It also provides descriptions and analyses of the Buddhist funeral rituals of the two societies and as we will see, because Japan follows the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, and Sri Lanka, the Theravada tradition, their ways of looking at life, death, and after life are very different. In this chapter, I also look at the relationship between Buddhist teachings and modern psychological theories of grief and trauma, and explore the usefulness of a counseling method used by western traumatologists who rushed to refugee camps in Sri Lanka within weeks of the disaster.
Chapter Four looks at the social, economic, and psychological impacts of their sudden displacement on people of all ages now living in tents in Sri Lanka and refugee centers in Japan. In both countries, the elderly and the very young need special care. In my homeland, students are worrying about their educational futures and women and girls living in tents are facing sexual harassment. Men and women are clamoring for aid, for permanent homes, and to get back to work, but are authorities paying attention? In both countries, the stressors experienced by IDPs have heightened communal tensions and as incredible as it may sound, in some Sri Lankan families, even the survival of family members has heightened family tensions. In Japan, on the other hand, we see the displaced people taking control of the situation and thus preventing further fragmentation of their families and communities. In the economic front, this chapter provides important insights into challenges that the business culture of Small and Medium Scale Entrepreneurs (SMEs) in developing countries pose for relief agencies trying to jump start the recovery process, and the extent to which the disabling of the manufacturing sector of a developed country impacts the global economy.
Complex disasters also mean that stricken countries are looking at not one or two, but several years of rebuilding of homes, livelihoods, roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, and other infrastructures. In Japan, long-term reconstruction work is being handled mainly by the government and TEPCO. In Sri Lanka, a multitude of local and global relief agencies of all sizes, private companies, and hundreds of individuals were engaged in helping with the processes.
But as shown in Chapter Five, in Sri Lanka, national and international politics of aid and attempts by foreigners and locals to exploit the disaster for their own gain, substantially set back the reconstruction process and led to the creation of a culture of deviance among the IDPs themselves. As shocking as it may seem, exploiting disaster stricken countries is part of the narrative of complex disasters as shown by Naomi Klein in her work, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. [10] I hope that raising awareness of the issue will help to reduce such atrocities in other disaster-stricken countries.
As mentioned, a host of foreign organizations and individuals rushed to Sri Lanka to help with long-term reconstruction, and hundreds of local people and organizations also contributed to these efforts. The main question I attempt to answer in regard to this massive engagement in the reconstruction effort in Sri Lanka is: Does quantity assure quality? In other words, did the fact that so many people partnered with the GoSL to build back affected areas ensure success? With regard to Japan, the question that I attempt to answer is, in this country where the relatively frequent occurrence of natural disasters have resulted in much research and development on building back better, how well is the government and TEPCO handling the reconstruction process? Answers are found in Chapter Six in which I look at the rebuilding of homes, and Chapter Seven, in which I look at the rebuilding of livelihoods in the two countries.
In Chapter Eight, I return to the theme of psychology, looking at how several survivors in both countries who lost the most – whether it was loved ones and/or their worldly possessions – are doing a year after the disaster. It shows that even when they have the support of family and friends, some may take years to rebuild their lives and recapture meaning, and may even develop Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD.) PTSD diagnosis was developed in the US, and is treated with cognitive behavioral therapy and other treatment systems, as well as with drugs. However, as we see in this chapter, PTSD diagnostic tools applied in the west are not useful in treating trauma victims in non-western societies. Instead, a culturally relevant approach is essential for effective treatment and Chapter Eight presents such a method developed by a Sri Lankan psychologist now teaching in the US. I believe it could be beneficially used in Japan as well. This chapter also reveals the critical role played by a person’s socioeconomic condition in their recovery process, and how one survivor who lost 12 family members overcame PTSD with the help of Buddhist teachings.
While this study documents many negative outcomes of disasters, it is also witness to many successful interventions by local and global agencies and individuals in post-tsunami Japan and Sri Lanka. And it is a testimony to the courage and determination of Japanese and Sri Lankan disaster survivors who endured horrendous trauma and great stress, but are striving to overcome them and rebuild their lives, some even helping others to look ahead. Their successes are due to a great deal of help, economic and otherwise, from outsiders, as well as the strength of their own cultural heritage, and their visions and resilience provide invaluable life lessons for those of us who have not experienced such great tragedies.
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Now, to provide a brief note on data collection, analysis, and other strengths and limitations of this study: The data on Sri Lanka is based on ethnographic research I conducted in the country’s southern province, first from January to April, 2005, and then from December 2005 to March, 2006. In 2007, I also visited my research site for two weeks. Each time, I lived in the same home located in a little fishing village, about which I say more in the next chapter. But I traveled throughout the province (which is made up of three administrative districts,) and with my video camera running, spoke with over a hundred and fifty people in many stricken communities.
The majority of the interviewees whose voices are heard in pages that follow are natives of the south, and all are Sinhala Buddhists. Some I met only once, others, on several occasions. Some had lost loved ones, homes, and livelihoods, and were living in refugee camps. Others had suffered similar losses, but had left the camps and were living in their partially destroyed homes, with relatives, or in rented accommodation. They include fishermen and their families; men and women engaged in various cottage industries, those working in the informal economy; carpenters and painters; people catering to the tourist and garment industries; doctors and other professionals; farmers, teachers, students, and businessmen. I also spoke with many people who had helped with the immediate rescue and relief efforts, and /or were involved with the long-term recovery and reconstruction efforts. Among them were villagers living near affected areas, Buddhist monks; doctors, psychologists, and counselors; local government officials; officials of the Coastal Conservation Department, tsunami-affected national parks, and the Urban Development Authority; police officers and members of the Armed Forces; and employees of local and foreign non-governmental organizations and other agencies.
In 2005 and 2006, I also traveled to Colombo from time to time to talk with Ciranthi and other tsunami survivors, the Human Rights Director and his deputy, and with the Deputy Inspector General of Police and sub inspectors working with tsunami victims in the south western province. I also attended two tsunami-related conferences in the two years.
In this study, I provide a fairly comprehensive comparison of the impact of the tsunamis on Sri Lanka and Japan; but the coverage of the latter is not based on ethnographic research. Instead, it is based on interviews I conducted with three Japanese Buddhist priests and Japanese friends living in the San Francisco Bay area, and on media and other published sources.
The majority of people of the Tohoku region are Zen Buddhists, and of the three Japanese priests I spoke with, two are Zen priests originally from Japan. Rev. Kiko Tatedera is the Resident Minister of the Soto Mission of San Francisco Sokoji. He is from Minamisanriku, a town in Miyagi Prefecture the tsunami almost obliterated. Rev. Issho Fujita, who grew up in the south, is the Director of San Francisco’s Soto Zen Buddhism International Center. The third priest I met, Rev. Ken Fujimoto, is the Rinban of the San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin, a temple belonging to the Pure Land Sect. He grew up in the US and spent five years in Japan doing vocational training. I also learned much from my friend, Yuki. She was thirty-years old when she migrated to the US from Japan and went back to attend the funerals of both her parents. Her family too follows the Zen tradition.
The data is analyzed using a strongly multidisciplinary approach, drawing from anthropology, economics, history, psychology, ecology, urban studies, geography, and religion, specifically Buddhism, which offers non Judeo-Christian views and theories of human diversity and survival – core values of the science of anthropology. So, this work holds up a mirror to readers from other religions and cultures from a different perspective that might help them to cope with tragedies by seeing them in a new light, although some readers may find various aspects of the teachings controversial.
The Central Cultural Fund and the Ministry of Cultural and Religious Affairs. Our Cultural Heritage (Ape Sanskrutika Urumaya.) Sri Lanka: 1995.
NHK. March 10, 2012.
Poya days are the full-moon and new-moon days, and the two days of the first and last moon-quarters. Buddhists tend to visit the temples on these days and in Sri Lanka, the full-moon poya days are public holiday.
“Malli” is the normal term used for “younger brother.” “Malla” denotes the same meaning.
NHK Production. Surviving the Tsunami. Aired on Public Broadcasting Station’s NOVA Program. 28 September, 2011.
“Weary but resolute in ‘scene of hell.’ Financial Times, March 14, 2011.
See De Alwis, Malathi and Eva-Lotta Hedman, eds. Tsunami in a Time of War: Aid, Activism, and Reconstruction in Sri Lanka & Aceh. Colombo: International Center for Ethnic Studies, 2009. Estimates place the Indian Ocean tsunami death toll across the region at 230,000. The worst affected was Indonesia’s Aceh Province, where an estimated 164,000 people lost their lives.
See “Sri Lanka: Post Tsunami Recovery and Reconstruction: Progress, Challenges, Way Forward”. Joint Report of the Government of Sri Lanka and Development Partners, December 2005.
Since Sri Lanka was subject to both colonial and imperial rule, and both processes brought about the changes that ultimately made the country vulnerable to the tsunami, I use the terms interchangeably in this book.
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador, 2008.