Martin Fackler
New York Times News Service

OKUSHIRI, Japan – On the night of 12 July, 1993, the remote island of Okushiri was ripped apart by a huge earthquake and tsunami that now seem an eerie harbinger of the much larger disaster that struck northeastern Japan in March. Islanders still recall with horror how a wall of frothing black water raced out of the darkness to consume entire communities, leaving almost 200 people dead.

In the half decade that followed, the Japanese government rebuilt the island, erecting 10-metre concrete walls on long stretches of its coast, making it look more like a fortress than a fishing outpost. The billion dollars’ worth of construction projects included not just the hefty wave defences but also entire neighbourhoods built on higher ground and a few flourishes, like a futuristic US$15 million tsunami memorial hall featuring a stained glass panel for each victim.

But today, as Japan begins a decade-long US$300 billion reconstruction of the northeast coast, Okushiri has become something of a cautionary tale. Instead of restoring the island to its vibrant past, many residents now say, the US$1 billion spending spree just may have helped kill its revival.

The rebuilding did bring a surge of well-paying construction jobs, residents said. But that was the problem: Having grown accustomed to higher salaries, many of the remaining young people refused to return to the hard life of earning a livelihood from the sea, and left the island in search of salaried work elsewhere.

That accelerated the depopulation seen here and throughout much of rural Japan, as people, especially the young, are drawn to cities. The number of islanders has fallen faster here than in other rural areas, experts say, dwindling to 3,160 last year from 4,679 when the 1993 tsunami struck. “We didn’t use more of that reconstruction money to invest in new industries to keep young people,” said Takami Shinmura, 58, the mayor of Okushiri’s sole township, which bears the same name. “We regret this now.”

Since the tsunami in March, hundreds of officials from local governments in the affected areas, as well as the national news media, have descended on Okushiri, an island about twice the size of Manhattan, to seek lessons from its reconstruction.

But Okushiri’s message does not seem to be making a difference. The country is being driven by an outpouring of national sympathy for those displaced by the latest disaster, even as some Japanese quietly question whether it makes sense to begin an expensive reconstruction of communities that were withering long before the 2011 earthquake.

Okushiri’s kilometres of stout wave walls give the fishing ports behind them the feel of miniature medieval castle towns, with fishermen able to reach the sea only through heavy steel gates.

The building boom created other white elephants. The fishing port of Aonae, part of the town of Okushiri, boasts a US$35 million tsunami refuge that can hold 2,000 people, three times Aonae’s population. The refuge, a raised platform that people would climb up on to escape the waves, looks like a huge concrete table overshadowing the boats and docks below.

Yasumitsu Watanabe, the head of Aonae’s fishing cooperative, said that it had been shortsighted to think that the island could go back to its original, fishing-based economy. Even before the disaster, catches were declining from over fishing and global warming. Worse, the number of abalone, the island’s cash shellfish, never recovered from the tsunami, which damaged their habitat in shallow waters.

The number of fishermen on the island has dropped to less than 200 from about 750 at the time of the tsunami, he said.

“We need a new source of jobs,” he said. “Fishing alone cannot do it anymore.”

Watanabe said he wished the island had built sheltered coves where fish or shellfish could be farmed. Others said Okushiri could have used the government money to build factories to process locally caught fish, which are now shipped elsewhere, or to foster tourism on the largely pristine island, which has only one modern hotel.

The reconstruction splurge actually made that kind of diversification more difficult, island officials said. Besides using government funds, Okushiri borrowed more than US$60 million for its own building projects, a financial burden that the township will not finish paying off until 2027. That has forced it to postpone needed improvements, like replacing its 56-year-old rickety wooden town hall, which many consider an earthquake hazard.

“We have no reserves left, just debt,” Shinmura, the mayor, said. “Tohoku should learn from our experiences,” he added, referring to the northeast region struck by the earthquake and tsunami last year.

Okushiri’s bitter experiences have prompted some analysts in Tokyo to propose radically different approaches for rebuilding the northeast. Yutaka Okada, an economist at the Mizuho Research Institute, said Japan might fare better if it just gave lump sums to the latest tsunami victims. Some might pocket the money and leave, he said, but others would use it to start new businesses, the sort of private sector innovation that Japan often lacks.

“The private sector would come up with better solutions than just building white elephants,” Okada said.

On Okushiri, the end of the reconstruction boom has belatedly forced that sort of entrepreneurship. To find new ways to earn money, Okushiri’s largest construction company, Ebihara Kensetsu, has branched out, buying the sole tourist hotel, selling bottled spring water and even opening the island’s first winery.

“We can no longer depend so much on the central government,” the company’s president, Takashi Ebihara, said. “This is true not only here, but in Tohoku and everywhere.”