“Tsunami: Our Shock, Pain and Resilience” 　BOOK TALK with Author Amya Miller

“Tsunami: Our Shock, Pain and Resilience”
BOOK TALK with Author Amya Miller

By David Yamaguchi
NAP Contributor

▲ Amya Miller.

Only a few times in a life does one have the chance to sit down and chat with someone who has made a difference in US-Japan relations as a single individual. I had one such opportunity when Amya Miller and I met in early October to discuss setting up a talk to present her new book “Tsunami” to Americans. Her story is one that is of special interest to Northwest communities facing the Pacific Ocean between British Columbia and northern California. Most such populations lie in the paths of future “The Big One” earthquake and tsunami couplets.

Transpacific Press (Aug 2024, 308 pp.) Photo credit: David Yamaguchi. ▶︎

Miller’s credentials for writing the book are rare. Born and raised bilingually in Japan, she was the sole American on U.S. early-response teams invited to stay on in the hard-hit Tohoku region of northeast Japan. Notably, she would end up working side-by-side with Futoshi Toba, the young new mayor of Rikuzentakada, one of the hardest-hit cities of the entire Tohoku coast (in 2010, a population of 23,000). Toba and Miller labored on city recovery for 10 years, including raising the base-level of its flat substrate (an underlying substance or layer) 10 meters (33 feet).

The second exceptional thing that Amya (pronounced “A-mi-ya”) did was to come home and write a book of her experience for Americans. She did it as, in her words, “we are just not ready.”

So how does “Tsunami” read, the curious reader may be wondering? In my reading, she “had me” by page 3.

There, Toba begins, “Twenty-six days. That’s how long I had been mayor before the tsunami hit. In those 26 days, I had seen very little of my two sons and my wife, Kumi, as I attended an endless series of meetings … At 2:40 pm on March 11, 2011, I called Kumi and suggested we go out for dinner that night. I wanted to make it up to her and the boys, to take them all out somewhere nice … Six minutes later, the shaking began…”

In turn, Miller — then in Boston — describes how she became aware that she had to go to Tohoku herself. “I made a career by building connections between Japan and the United States … I had spent decades communicating on behalf of the country that meant so much to me. But now I needed to do more than talk …

“Long ago I learned that crisis management is best left to people who can think on their feet … not people who repeat theories learned from textbooks … Clearly, I should go.”
Today,with the clarity of eight decades of hindsight, we can say that peace activist Floyd Schmoe acted similarly. He did a great service to humanity when he quit his University of Washington forestry teaching post to help Seattle Japanese Americans displaced from their homes during WWII. He continued by building houses for single-mother families in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, postwar.

It may be that one day, people will also say that Amya Miller, an unfamiliar name today, also made a difference by stepping into the unknown in service of Rikuzentakada, as well as North Americans unfamiliar with tsunamis.

We can all participate in this history easily simply by joining her at her book talk.