Refugee in Tokyo

Thank you very much Unprofessional Translator for profusely citing me in your latest post and the support it means.  I am back from Sendai where I had a sort of "baptême de feu" of interpretation at war, that is, after the war, on the battle ground smashed and tormented as hell, but devoid of the liquid enemy that pummeled the outskirt of Sendai along the coast, a coast that is flat and deep. Sendai itself is seemingly lightly bruised. The periphery is like the pictures, like the newsreels I never watch on purpose, only you as the viewer look at it from inside the picture. I was one of the group of volunteer interpreters who raised hands when the news came to willingly assist the French professional rescue team that visited Japan, a visit too brief that ended after 48 hours in situ by a tactical retreat to the northern part of Japan to end up air lifted to their country of origin [Correction, March 18th : it seems that they are still in Aomori]. We, on our side headed back south to take refuge in Tokyo. I was the only one professional interpreter (still unsure about the validity of the qualitative) while others were unprofessional. The job was not extensive as the interaction with local authorities was rather short, in situ. I won't go deeper into the characteristics of the place. Suffice to say that the awfulness of the torn and crushed places is but one aspect of how the lifeline of a whole region has been put to its knees, even if it doesn't show at first sight. A queue of hundreds of private cars waiting in the middle of the night for the potential opening of a gas station within 8 hours of more was the impressive visual number one. Besides that, this is Japan and you have to go deeper into despair to start seeing the worst part of humanity popping up.

Therefore, I won't go into the details and won't do the journalistic stuff. I received close to a dozen of emails mostly but also phone calls begging for a fixer to the region, or me giving two minutes of my own "testimony" on the situation. The best defense to the media crap and the awful tendency to ask some local national, not the locals, about how ugly feels ugly was to say no to all. I did my own on the spot interviewing by request of the rescue team heads, calling stunned visitors of void or crushed and mangled spots that was earlier called home. I am sorry to say that it was not the most difficult side to start a conversation, all Japanese people met everywhere showing sorrow and bowing at the circumstances that have been making so many foreign teams looking for lives and corpses in the muddy dangerous rubles. Keeping countenance, showing empathy while containing emotion at bay was the delicate balancing issue. One of the unprofessional interpreter, a lawyer, told me that he escaped the duty of talking with locals and would have not been able out of fear to speak with people alive about their grieves, death of family members or friends. One young lady when asked about whether she knew personally someone close by that was still unaccounted for showed fear and sorrow and begging the Japanese way - restricted expression of despair - about a girl friend of her, 21, who had lived on the opposite side of a canal she was pointing at. The location was out of the district allocated by the local authorities to the team so they would not meet expectation to go there and try and find that anonymous 21 year old, granted she was to be found inside the empty plot that now was a vanished house. Showing compassion the local way, which differs to the way the rescue team's culture set the mood in such situation, that is, adapting words and body expressions, adding much more to the original inquiry, was the most challenging, unprepared side of the experience. Enough with it. I am back in Tokyo, "where there is nobody in the streets" as I read a few hours ago from the written words of a local correspondent of a major French daily who has been taking refuge in Kyoto, 500 km from here. I don't see any ghost city from my vista here in Tokyo. Was he referring to the same place?