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

Young people are also leaving the area.

Munekatsu Okado, 70, a freezer keeper at the fishermen’s cooperative, had been working in the nursing care industry before the earthquake. He had worked for the fishermen’s cooperative for 30 years, and was asked by the cooperative, which was short on staff, if he would help out.

After graduating from high school, I first joined Goshimaya, a long-established Wajima lacquerware company,” he said. You know, the big building that collapsed after the earthquake became the talk of the town. I worked there. It was a time when I could sell a lot of products just by going to department stores all over the country in a truck and saying, ‘Here are all the products we have today.

At first, Mr. Ohtsuno was paid 90,000 yen a month. He recalls with nostalgia the days when his sales performance improved and he found himself earning 400,000 yen, then 450,000 yen, and so on. However, Mr. Ohtsuno was also afraid that the booming economy would not last forever. When he was looking for another job, his mother suggested that he apply for an interview at a fishing cooperative.

When I went for the interview, the interviewer said to me, ‘Why are you wearing a suit? This is a fishing cooperative. I rushed back to change into my work clothes. But the starting salary was low: 90,000 yen. I was surprised at how cheap it was.

Even so, Mr. Ohtsuno worked until retirement. At the fishery cooperative, he learned his job by moving from one department to another, including the sales department, computer room, and freezing warehouse, and before long he began to find his work rewarding. Mr. Okaku is not alone. Many of those involved in the fishing industry were also supporting their livelihoods by the sea and feeling happy with the peaceful life in Wajima. Until the earthquake.

Mr. Ohzumi is very emphatic about the current state of Wajima.

Even after a year, I don’t think reconstruction has progressed at all. （There are not enough contractors to fix the buildings. Some young people have already gone to Kanazawa or other places and are not coming back. In the end, there are no people for business or tourism, and the town has no appeal. It’s very sad.

The author has several photographs in his possession. The photographer Soichiro Koriyama happened to take these photos of the Okitsuhime Shrine Festival in Wajima City in the summer before the earthquake (the sixth photo). It shows a large number of men wearing makeup carrying a portable shrine into the sea. Okutsu Himine Shrine is a guardian deity of the sea that the residents of Ama-machi, Wajima City, believe in. As its name suggests, Ama-machi derives from the name of a woman diver.

According to the “Report on Urgent Survey of Folklore Materials in Okunoto Sotoura” published by the Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Folklore in 1975, Ama came to Noto from Kanezaki, Munakata City, Fukuoka Prefecture in the 12th year of the Eiroku Era (1688-1704) as a group of 13 men and women fishing in the region. These divers, called “Saigoku Ama,” are said to have gradually increased in number and settled in what is now Ama Town. Ama divers commute by boat to Hegura Island, 48 km north of Wajima, to catch abalone and turban shells, a practice that continues to this day. The “skills of divers’ fishing in Wajima” is designated as an important intangible folk cultural asset by the Japanese government.

The earthquake was not the only thing that threatened the continuation of the annual festival in this town of divers. Torrential rains in September of last year buried the grounds of the shrine in earth and sand, making it impossible to bring out the portable shrines. Last year, although the ritual was held on land, the water-entry ritual, the highlight of the festival, was cancelled. When we asked the Wajimasaki Shrine, the headquarters of the festival, about the situation, they replied, “We don’t know yet whether the mikoshi will be carried out again this year.