Clocks stop. Time freezes when the tornado touches down, when the tsunami wave strikes, when the wildfire turns wood to ash. There was a before, and now it doesn’t seem there is an after. It’s no surprise that most people want back everything that was taken away—loved ones, homes, beloved landscapes. But that past is gone. Return is impossible. Whatever comes next will be a new story.
Re-Storying the Ruins
Can we Re-Story disaster as an unwanted, but nonetheless precious, opportunity to create a new future—one that we actually want? That’s one of the questions alive on the Noto Peninsula in Japan, the area devastated by the 7.5 earthquake and tsunami on New Year’s Day, 2024. More than 700 people died, twice that number were injured, more than 200,000 structures damaged or destroyed.
Patterns That Almost Always Appear
A precious friend and colleague of mine, Nomura Takahiko-san of Slow Innovation, has been invited to help find a new way forward on the Noto Peninsula. Taka and I introduced Future Sessions to Japan after the Triple Disasters of March 11, 2011 as a method for people to create a new future together. He is the perfect choice for this work. We had lunch this month in Kyoto.
I’ve worked with communities around the world for many decades now. I notice patterns—things that almost always happen after major disasters strike:
Most leave, but some stay. In places where the devastation is greatest, more than two-thirds of the people who lived there before are gone within a handful of years. They’re broken-hearted. They cannot find jobs or housing. The grief for loss is too great to bear. Somewhere else calls them. But up to a third stay. This is their home; they will not leave. They will create a new future together.
Newcomers arrive. Almost an equal number of people join them. They sense a newness, an opportunity for a fresh start. They’re often younger and they always come with fresh energy.
Someone puts a stake in the ground. Endo-san was a newcomer to Tomioka just before the Triple Disasters. The home he built was washed away by the tsunami. But he stayed, and he saw that starting a winery could be a way to build a new community. Denied help by the local government, he and other newcomers persevered. He now says every action they take is to build both a prosperous community and a profitable winery.
Grief doesn’t stop. If pushed aside, it festers and creates damage. When acknowledged, it can become essential fuel for building the new.
Disaster has a long tail. Everything takes forever. Patience, presence, perseverance and persistence become crucial qualities. Six old men, recently retired from local government in Okuma Town at the foot of the Fukushima Nuclear Reactor, told the younger employees to evacuate with their families. We’ll keep things running that are needed. We’re old. We’ll die from something other than radiation poison. They stayed. They kept things running. They made careful plans for people to return, and they watched those plans dissolve year after year. Eventually they understood: people will do what they want to do when they want to do it. Our job is to be ready.
Nothing works the first time. Almost everything people try fails the first time, and the second, and the third. But it isn’t failure, it’s constant learning, recalibrating, sensing-in is essential.
The list goes on. Consciously creating the new is demanding work.
Taka and I know that building new community anywhere after devastation is an insider’s job. So of course it is true on the Noto Peninsula It can’t be directed by outside experts or by well-meaning government intervention. People must do it themselves. They must find vision, values, principles. More than anything else, they must be in relationship. Community is a rich weave of relationships—people both loved and only tolerated. Community is created by that weave. Community is, itself, strategy.
Building the New Is an Insider’s Job
We have an idea for Noto Peninsula, a place celebrated for its wild beauty and deep-rooted traditions. Just 400 or so miles to the north is the Tohoku Region, the area devastated by a 9.0 earthquake, tsunami waves towering 60 feet, and then nuclear explosions at the Fukushima Power Plant. Any returning to the past was particularly impossible in the coastal region of Fukushima Prefecture and in the town of Onagawa to the north in Miyagi Prefecture.
What Tohoku Knows
Since 2015, my spouse, Susan Virnig, and I have worked with a Japanese team to conduct annual learning journeys to Fukushima. We’ve taken 15 or so people from across Japan to meet with and learn from community-based leaders in Fukushima year after year. We’ve gone to stand with them, to witness their struggles, to discover what they are learning about building the new after the old has been obliterated. Likewise, I have returned to Onagawa many times to witness their remarkable rebuilding.
Taka and I believe the learning from these rooted-in-community leaders can be so important for those who are standing up in Noto Peninsula. The patterns above? I can write about them as a trusted ally who has accompanied communities in Tohoku. For the people who live in these communities, these are not ideas or patterns—they are lived experience. Can we bring people from Tohoku to the Noto Peninsula to share what they have learned? Yes we can. Not only that, as I discovered in my time in Japan in April, others have this same idea as well and are already working on it.
I’ve been supporting communities after disasters for a long time now. I know some things make a difference:
Safe spaces where community people connect and grieve and dream and build relationships and take action. And then do it again. We called these spaces Future Sessions in Japan but they go by many names. Taka and I and others were invited by communities to create such spaces in Tohoku after the Triple Disasters. They are needed now on the Noto Peninsula.
Local leadership to organize and host these kinds of safe spaces for collective action. At NewStories these days, we call this kind of leader a Regenerative Responder.
Cross-community learning—making it possible for people to learn from each other across communities—sharing lived experience in building healthy and resilient futures. Australia’s DisasterWise network is one powerful example of this kind of collaborative learning and action. At NewStories, we’re heavily involved with communities facing wildfires in Northern California in forming a Collaboratory for these same purposes.
Community is a rich weave of relationships—people both loved and only tolerated. Community is created by that weave. Community is, itself, strategy.
The New Year’s Day disasters on the Noto Peninsula have tugged at my heart almost every day for more than two years. I’ve been in deep relationship with my Kyoto host family for 56 years now. I know that New Year’s is the biggest celebration in Japan—three days out of time, every year, to remember life and embrace family. Disasters striking on that day is even more horrible. I am glad to have found a way, finally, to stand with the people of Noto Peninsula as they begin to build their new future.
To learn more about NewStories Re-Storying Disaster work, follow the link listed below.
