Here's my contribution.
Place names that are new to me
I had barely known these place names. Some "bigger" names such as Sendai, Ishinomaki and Rikuzen-Takata were quite familiar, but I didn't know anything about smaller towns. It was just like how I came to know the name Omagh, Northern Ireland, when the Real IRA bomb killed 29 people in 1998. There would have been far better ways to get to know the name of a town or city.
The fact is, whether you know the name or not, there are people living there.
Here is a photograph, dated 13 March, by Kiyomu Tomita, one of the first independent journalists who entered the area after the quake and tsunami. "A girl huddles herself," he tweeted. "She has lost her family. In Nobiru."
http://twitpic.com/49ug0u
How old is she? 11 or 12? I wept, for the first time after the quake. Then I realised that there's another person in the photo. Somebody wearing black socks is sitting right next to her. So, the girl is not alone, at least. I prayed, and remembered the place name "Nobiru." I googled and found it was a famous beach town in Miyagi Prefecture. Of course it's also a plant name. The girl wore a green top. I shut off my computer.
Another name is "Futaba, Fukushima". On Saturday, 12 March, I went to my local supermarkets. The bigger one was virtually empty. I could buy some ginger though. The smaller store seemed to have had fewer panicked shoppers. They had almost as many kinds of fresh vegetable as usual. Good, I thought, and then I saw the name "Fukushima" on the package of ordinary shungiku. At the time, partial meltdown had already been reported. I bought it. I cooked, praying for the safety of the farmers. It was delicious.
http://twitpic.com/49m8gj
As I found out later, Futaba was where the first cases of radiation were reported. I'm quite sure this is the last time we see a Futaba vegetable at my local supermarket.
(329 words)
(335 words with the title and image urls included)
This work, except for Mr Tomita's photo (see below), is released under a CCL (BY-NC-SA 3.0). Feel free to re-publish, remix, translate etc.
この 作品 は クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示 - 非営利 - 継承 3.0 Unported ライセンスの下に提供されています。
ただし冨田きよむさんの写真(座り込んでいる女の子)はCCL適用外です。非営利で情報を広めることを目的とする場合に限り、「冨田きよむ」さんの撮影であることを明記の上、無料で利用可能としてくださっています。
冨田さんのサイト:
http://tomphoto.dotera.net/
http://twitter.com/KiyomuTomita
Tomita-san's photo can be used for free of charge for non-profit news/journalism projects.
※この記事は
2011年03月19日
にアップロードしました。
1年も経ったころには、書いた本人の記憶から消えているかもしれません。
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