‘Too Late’ for Some Tsunami Victims to Rebuild in Japan

Kunio Imakawa, a 75-year-old barber, was not among them.

Mr. Imakawa and his wife, Shizuko, lost his three-chair barber shop, their second-floor apartment and all their belongings in the tsunami. Rebuilding would mean starting from scratch. And he said that simple math, calculated in yen and in years, showed it was not worth the effort.

“Young people would think, ‘Maybe there’s another way,’ ” he said last week as he sprawled with 1,600 other refugees in a chilly local sports arena. “But I’m too old. My legs have problems.

“It’s too late to start over.”

And as this rural corner of northeastern Japan tries to start over, his spent resilience is a telling indicator of the difficulties ahead. Well before disaster struck, this region was an economic and social laggard, leaching people and money to Japan’s rich urban south, sustained — even as opportunity moved elsewhere — by government largess and an unspoken alliance with the nuclear-power industry.

Now a week of calamity threatens to upend those compacts, with unpredictable consequences.

“The young people left these rural communities long ago for jobs in Sendai, in Tokyo and in Osaka,” said Daniel P. Aldrich, a Purdue University professor who is an expert not only on the region’s economy, but also on the aftereffects of natural disasters like the tsunami.

“These are declining areas. With an exogenous shock like this, I think it’s possible that a lot of these communities will just fold up and disappear.”

Some have been hollowing out, albeit slowly, for a long time. Japan’s population as a whole is shrinking and graying, but the Japanese prefectures hardest hit by the tsunami — Miyagi, Fukushima and Iwate — often outpace the national trends, and their workers’ average incomes are shrinking as well.

Kesennuma’s home prefecture, Miyagi, claims one comparatively prosperous hotspot: its capital, Sendai, a million-person city that boasts some technology firms and a far younger population. But even Sendai has prospered at the expense of the surrounding countryside, which is significantly poorer and older.

Less than 19 percent of Sendai residents are older than 64, below the 22 percent national average. In contrast, over-64 citizens officially make up nearly 27 percent of Kesennuma’s population, and city officials say the total is closer to 30 percent.

People — especially young people — are leaving for the same reason as migrants everywhere: they see fewer opportunities here than in Japan’s bigger, flashier cities. For centuries, inland residents farmed and coastal residents fished. Over the years, farming declined in importance, and village fishermen have increasingly been routed by huge and more efficient factory ships.

“It’s a declining industry. That was so before the tsunami,” said Satsuki Takahashi, a University of Tokyo cultural anthropologist who has long studied the coastal villages in the tsunami area.

Unable to compete, but saddled with debt from purchases of boats and equipment, many fishermen troll in small boats near the coast, catching just enough to pay their bills.

“It’s usually the case that the first son has to stay with the home,” Ms. Takahashi said. “Those who can leave town are the second and third sons or daughters. Many of them do.”

Like governments everywhere, Tokyo has tried to manage the region’s decline. For pensioners — retired fishermen, and folks like Mr. Imakawa who serve them — there is a generous tax break for people who operate even marginal businesses from their homes. Japan’s small towns are filled with first-floor shops below second-floor apartments.