W

hen the tsunami struck the eastern part of Japan exactly one year ago, one of the earliest pictures from the horrific natural disaster was the live feed from cable news television, with the harrowing footage of Sendai International Airport in the Miyagi prefecture being washed away by the tidal wave.

It was one of the most breathtaking sights on television in 2012. The surging, 10-meter-high water rose, submerging runways and terminals of the airport and washing away parked cars like driftwood.

Getting off the Shinkansen Hiyate bullet train, which plies the Tokyo-Sendai route on a late winter day, The Jakarta Post saw little evidence of the terrible event that happened only one year ago.

In typical Japanese fashion, local residents milled about in a rush in elegant winter clothes, going in and out of eating joints and pastry shops.

The steady flow of public buses, taxis and private cars in between the tall buildings with neon lights on top, advertising music retail chain HMV, American fast-food joint Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pachinko game parlor, could all indicate that this could be any regular provincial town in Japan. Had it not been for the Japanese characters on billboards and street signs, visitors could easily mistake this town for a major city in Europe or the American Midwest.

Back at Sendai airport, the tsunami left piles of metal, mounded neatly by excavators on scraps of the precious empty land next to the major road connecting the airport with downtown Sendai.

Inside the spotlessly clean airport, the only reminder of the March 11 tragedy was a redline drawn on one of the airport’s columns to mark the height of the tsunami water when it submerged the ground floor of the premises. It was 3 meters high.

“On March 11, not a single plane was parked here and we also had a plane diverted to another airport. There’s a learning center for flights nearby and some light planes were damaged,” said Keisuke Sakamoto, a local transportation official.

He also told of the heroic attempt to save passengers and locals who looked for higher grounds from the tidal wave.

“During the tsunami, passengers were evacuated to the third floor. We also had members of the local community being evacuated to the airport. Among the refugees were some wheelchair-bound people going to the airport. We later learned that some died because they did not evacuate here,” he said.

Transportation officials also considered themselves lucky, because with a railway tunnel connecting downtown Sendai and the airport only less than 1 kilometer away from the beach, no subway was traveling through the tunnel when the massive body of water submerged the passageway.

It took less than six months for the local authority to reopen the airport and the railway network around it after the devastating tsunami, but it appears that things are slowly coming back to normal at the airport.

In spite of the Japanese government’s policy to declare Sendai a visa-free region to encourage foreigners to come to the city, the international arrival hall at the airport remained deserted days after the tsunami.

The airport authority gave an explanation for the slow return of international travelers.

“Sendai population is smaller than that of Tokyo and Osaka. The trip from Sendai to Tokyo could take two hours, so it is more convenient for them to take the Shinkansen bullet train, which also takes two hours to Tokyo,” Sakamoto said.

As for the dearth of international passengers, he said that before the tsunami struck, Sendai airport, which was inaugurated in 2006, only had international flights to five destinations: Guam, Taipei, Seoul, Hong Kong and Beijing, all of which will be reopened later this month.

The airport operator has taken precautionary measure to protect the airport from future quakes and tsunami.

It has moved the airport control room from the ground floor to the third floor and fortified the room in which an emergency generator is kept with powerful waterproof walls of steel and concrete that can withstand tsunamis with a power greater than what struck on March 11 last year.

Japan’s resilience in the face of this mega-disaster was also visible in the port city of Shiogama, also in the Miyagi prefecture, where the wall of water reached 10 meters in height and brought a devastated impact on settlements on 260 small islands that dotted waters around the prefecture.

Locals credited the islands as a barrier that protected Shiogama from the more devastating impacts of the tsunami.

It took only five days for the local authority to reopen the port, one of the biggest producers of tuna in Japan. The city’s fishing industry, which churns out 80 million tons of fish per year, miraculously suffered little from the tsunami.

One year later, Shiogama is now teeming with local and foreign tourists who visited the city’s most famous attraction, the Shiogama Jinja in Tohoku, one of the most important Shinto shrines in Japan, which is accessible up a tiring flight of 201 steps.

In downtown Shiogama, which could be the most beautiful beachfront city in Japan once the winter haze disappears, tourists are seen getting in and out of souvenir shops looking for tees and key-chains produced to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the tsunami.

In one of the souvenir shops, which remained shut one year after the disaster, its owners had plastered a photo of debris blocking the entrance to the shop, which was likely taken only hours after the tsunami struck, as a reminder of the calamity.

But rather than the sign of mourning, the photo, just like the old Buddha statue in the shrine and the smiles of the souvenir shops attendants, was the sign of resilience in the face of Mother Nature’s unpredictability.