One Year After the Noto Peninsula Earthquake [Wajima, Suzu] Fishermen’s Daily Lives Have Not Returned

We’re just scraping by.

We won’t be able to launch our boats tomorrow.

On January 4, at a fishing port in Wajima City, Ishikawa Prefecture, where the first landing of the year had been postponed, an elderly fisherman gazed out at the stormy sea in a daze. A full year has passed since the great earthquake hit the Noto Peninsula. The hardships of people living with the sea continue to this day.

Takayuki Hashimoto, 44, a fisherman who was working on a boat at anchor, said, “My income is really nothing.

The income is really nothing at all. If you want to make a living just by fishing, you can’t. Even if we catch fish, we don’t have enough staff to unload them. After a day of fishing, we would take another day off and repeat the process. Everyone has a mortgage. They have to go to work demolishing houses, or do something else on the days they can’t fish.

In Suzu City, located at the tip of the Noto Peninsula, there are still many houses that have collapsed. Even in the center of town, people are sparse. When we visited the local Suzu Shrine, a middle-aged woman who had come to pray lamented, “Even though it’s the New Year, there are no people here at all.

Shigenori Funaki, 68, a fisherman who is also a shrine parishioner, built a small house on his parking lot after the disaster and began living there with his two cats.

He said, “I managed to repair my boat, but my mother is still in temporary housing. If this cat had died in the earthquake, I wouldn’t be living here either.

The earthquake has drastically reduced the number of times he can go fishing.

Before the earthquake, there were about 200 boats and 400 to 500 fishermen, but now there are even fewer. There are still restrictions on fishing due to the lack of staff and damage to the harbor.

Toshihiko Uehama, 59, of the Wajima Branch Office of the Ishikawa Fishermen’s Cooperative Association, describes the current situation.

The first snow crab was landed in Wajima last November. Many people think that Wajima’s fishing has resumed in earnest after seeing the news, but repairs to the port and facilities have not been completed, and the fishermen are still managing by adjusting the amount they catch.

There is not enough manpower to unload the fish, and in some places fishing boats cannot dock due to the rising seabed. In the past, they used to go fishing every day, but now they are only able to go out once every two days.