Memories from Japan's Triple Disaster 10 Years Ago

My social feeds this week are full of commentary about what it’s like to live through a year of pandemic and leadership lessons from our experiences. Quite frankly, it’s rare that we as a society learn leadership lessons after a disaster. After participating in disaster response and management for decades, I’ve come to the conclusion that these experiences shape us as individuals, but rarely have a collective impact to avoid the next disaster.  This week I’m thinking of a different traumatic event that occurred 10 years ago in Japan on March 11th, the triple disaster of a 9.1 magnitude earthquake, a devastating tsunami, and a nuclear meltdown. My three children and I lived in Tokyo during that time, and we’ve been talking about what has stayed in our memories after 10 years. So instead of trying to glean lessons from trauma, I’m going to share a few memories.

From a family perspective, here are some of our strongest memories:

• Being on a business trip in Beijing when the earthquake happened, and my kids staying by themselves that first night before I could return home the next evening. I really understand why we rush into a disaster area in order to reunite with family.
• My kids tell me they didn’t realize that I had been in contact with our building manager, their schools, and their backup adult resources to ensure they would be safe at home that night. They felt very alone! One of their school friends lived in our building, and his parents sent him over to our apartment to check in. They remember that he brought them a jar of fancy olive oil because even during a crisis, it’s important to have good manners in Japan.
• My son had forgotten to lock our apartment door that morning when he went to school, and the earthquake shook the door open and our frightened dog, Liberty, went out looking for safety. Thank goodness our building manager found her and brought her back! Like all of us, she was extra sensitive to the smallest shake after that, but she also made it easier for us to talk about our own fears.
• The agonizing, seemingly endless bus ride home from school on grid-locked local roads after the trains and highways were shut down for safety. My daughter was a bus monitor, and she and the other monitors comforted and distracted the younger kids, found places to stop and use the bathroom, and pooled money from the students to buy snacks. It took more than 6 hours, but every child was eventually delivered home.
• Walking home from the bus stop, my kids were amazed at huge numbers of people out on the street at 10 p.m. We seek out human connection during a tragedy.
• School being cancelled and all their international friends being evacuated from Japan, my kids were stuck at home and bored while I was doing crisis management work. Then I had to go work at our backup site in Osaka and my kids were packed off to Hilo to stay with my brother, where they were bored and stuck at his house all the time. That was their first experience with remote school for a month. It did not go well.
• About an hour after the Government of Japan notified the public that drinking water supplies had been contaminated with radiation, there was not a single bottle of water for sale in Tokyo. I spent quite a bit of time after that securing bottled water for employee families with children or pregnant mothers.

Here are a few vivid memories of my work as a crisis manager for GE Japan:

• Since I was on a business trip to China on March 11, 2011, I was sitting in an enormous factory in Beijing at a sales event with lights and cameras and entertainment, looking at my blackberry at a constant stream of terrible news. I struggled to process what was happening in Japan while all around me the marvels of Chinese engineering and construction were celebrated. In a weird turn of events, a large hose truck from that very factory was sent to Fukushima weeks later to help cool the melting nuclear reactors.
• Finding out about several employees who had been at work that day but had lost their entire families in the tsunami. Over the coming weeks and months, it was devastating to learn about the nearly 20,000 people who lost their lives as a result of the triple disaster, 2,529 of whom have never been found.
• Our management in the U.S. demanding twice daily updates, but only during their business hours so we had to prepare for briefings at 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. each day.
• Writing a shelter-in-place plan for our employees in the event that there was an explosion at the nuclear plant, realizing that it was impossible to evacuate the City of Tokyo. A week later, the plan I wrote was emailed to me by a colleague, who (not realizing it was my work) suggested it might be helpful.
• Getting insider briefings from a GE engineer who had helped design and build the Fukushima plant and happened to be in Japan when the triple disaster occurred.
• My U.S. management being shocked and surprised that we had neither iodine nor radiation monitors available to us in Japan. One American executive assumed that each of us employees would have a personal radiation monitoring device. I wonder where she thought we were going to find them?
• Constantly checking the government earthquake monitoring website to see if the latest aftershock required action to check on our operations around Japan. Even in the middle of the night. Over and over and over again the aftershocks came and went over the entire year after the earthquake. It reset our nervous systems.
• Feeling completely abandoned at first when it came to figuring out what it meant that radioactive iodine and cesium were everywhere, in the air at first, then in the rain and in the rivers and in the drinking water, then over the passing months in the vegetables and tea plants and sewage sludge and building air filters and the scrap metal….it just went on and on. No one really understood what it meant for the health and safety of our families and employees. Japan’s government was completely unforthcoming, so I was scouring every available source and guidance document to get some idea of how best to guide our employees and our management. I sent an email to our U.S. environmental executives begging for help and expertise to navigate the science, and eventually I linked up with one of our healthcare radiation experts who was such a godsend and generously helped us for months with understanding and communicating about radiation risks.