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WAYS FORWARD
After the storm: How one city’s love affair with rugby helped it to heal Words by Salomon Micko Benrimoh Illustrations by Shereen Lee
T
he sites of a major international sporting event are usually reserved for the largest and most glamorous urban centres of the host nation. The 2019 edition of the Rugby World Cup, held in Japan throughout October, was no exception — except for one city. Away from the sprawling urban masses of Tokyo or Fukuoka lies the small town of Kamaishi in the Iwate prefecture. Kamaishi, nestled in a valley that borders the Pacific Coast, has a population of just over 34,000, but it found itself amongst the host cities of the World Cup. The Kamaishi Recovery Memorial Stadium, built in 2018, has the ability to seat almost half of the entire town, although it was still by far the smallest venue of the entire tournament. The home venue for the Kamaishi Seawaves rugby team was built in part with harvested Japanese cedar that was collected after a nearby 2017 wildfire and donated seats from the former Tokyo National Stadium. The stadium is also one of the hundreds of new buildings in a coastal city recovering from natural disaster. Kamaishi bore the brunt of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, where almost all of the city was wiped out by 14-foot high waves and over 1,250 people were either killed or went missing.
CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT Perhaps the only thing that wasn’t destroyed was the city’s love affair with rugby. Even the Seawaves players put everything aside, from rugby to their own lives, to help in the immediate recovery efforts in Kamaishi.
region’s recovery and the city’s rich history with rugby. “We were walking around the streets, people are taking our photos, everyone knew this World Cup was going on. It was such a spectacle in Japan and they really embraced us as part of the community,” explained Coe, who was with the World Cup squad in Kamaishi as they prepared to take on Namibia in their final group stage match. “We were very excited to play because that was a winnable game for us. … The whole team was looking really good moving forward into the Namibia game.”
STORM STRIKES
“When they decided that the World Cup was going to be there, they really [wanted] to bring fans to Kamaishi to support the rebuilding efforts and show how the city has rebounded from the tsunami,” said Andrew Coe, a fullback for the Canadian National Rugby team and a Thunderbirds rugby alumni. Becoming a venue for the 2019 World Cup was also meant to be the crowning achievement for both the
But fate had other plans in store for the Canadians. Typhoon Hagibis, a category five super typhoon, came knocking on Kamaishi’s door before the players got a chance to take the field. The storm brought wind speeds higher than 200 kilometers per hour and became the costliest Pacific storm in recorded history after causing over $15 billion in damages, along with landslides and flooding throughout Kamaishi. Typhoons and tropical cyclones are not foreign to Japan. But the last 40 years have seen the intensity of the storms increase with the deepening of the climate crisis. Research conducted by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San
