A distraught woman carries an elderly woman on her back, away from the piles of debris that are the flattened remnants of what was once a city. Only a few buildings remain standing, and trails of other people are making their way from the rubble. Some stay behind to see what they can salvage from the destruction, but they too will make their way from the now-desolate place they call home.
This scene comes from a photo taken the day after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck Japan last year and triggered a tragically destructive tsunami, killing thousands.
This image, along with other photographs, articles and video clips from the Kahoku Shimpo, a Japanese newspaper based near the earthquake’s epicenter in the Sendai region, will be displayed in the Fowler Museum as part of a photo exhibition titled “Moving Forward: Life After the Great East Japan Earthquake.”
“I was told that the woman who is carrying the old lady in this photo is Chinese and is married to a Japanese man. She’s actually carrying her husband’s mother, her mother-in-law. It’s not only the Japanese but those related to Japan who suffered,” said Hitoshi Abe, UCLA professor, chair of architecture and urban design, and director of the UCLA Paul I. and Hisako Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies.
The exhibit supports the Japan Platform, an emergency humanitarian aid organization, and documents the lives and progress of those affected by the earthquake and tsunami on the one-year anniversary of the tragic disaster.
Abe is guest curating the exhibition on behalf of the Terasaki Center, along with the Kahoku Shimpo and the Fowler Museum.
“We decided to show photos of people not in the disaster itself. Every photograph (shows) people in different stages of the disaster. This exhibit is important to show how people tried to survive and construct their lives, rather than show the destruction itself,” Abe said.
According to Cindy Suzuki, the special events coordinator for the Terasaki Center, the exhibit is divided into sections that correlate to different stages of progress. Sections include “Surviving,” “Helping One Another,” “Standing Tall” and “Toward the Future.”
Abe said it is difficult to say if the images are more powerful than the articles that will be displayed because each piece in the exhibit tells a personal story.
Suzuki said the articles that were chosen feature people who served as heroes during the disaster. The articles tell the story of those who got to safety, returned to the disaster area to save others and lost their lives in the process.
According to Abe, the exhibition will also host a symposium on Saturday. Abe and speakers from the Kahoku Shimpo, Save the Children and other non-profit organizations will present stories of their initial response to the disaster and will provide a more current perspective of the recovery efforts they are implementing in Japan.
“If people aren’t affected directly by something like this earthquake, they tend to forget about it. It’s important to remind the local community about this (disaster) and see how people are coping with this situation,” Suzuki said.
Noel Shimizu, assistant director of the Terasaki Center, said the exhibit is also important to the local community because such a disaster could happen here.
“It’s really important to be aware of the disaster because it could have happened here in Los Angeles. You can learn a little bit about how the people dealt with the situation by helping each other,” Shimizu said.