Our 14-and-under youth baseball team from South Pasadena had just taken the lead with a four-run rally in the second inning when my son stepped up to the plate.
Then a siren rang out — and wouldn’t stop.
Our players, our parents, our coach, and I (the team organiser-manager) were unsure what it meant.
We didn’t want to stop playing. We had travelled 6,500 miles (10,460km) from Southern California to Okinawa to play against local teams. The trip was spurred by two of our former players, whose families had moved back to Japan (one to Okinawa) in recent years.
And that day, we were excited to be playing in the town of Kunigami, at Kaigin Stadium, spring training home of the Japanese team for which Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani played. It would be our last time ever playing with our Okinawa-based teammate, a pitcher, who was taking the mound later in the game.
But with the siren blaring on July 31, the umpire stopped play, stalling our momentum. We escaped the humidity in an air-conditioned clubhouse and were admiring a photo of Ohtani from 2014 spring training when our Japanese-speaking parents gave us the news:
A tsunami warning had gone out for Okinawa, triggered by a massive earthquake off Russia’s far-east coast.
The tsunami warning system went global after the 2004 tsunami that decimated oceanfront communities across the Indian Ocean. It’s a combination of two networks. One — of global seismic stations, DART (deep ocean) buoys, and coastal tidal gauges — detects possible tsunamis. The other is local — a warning network that is supposed to reach coastal communities.
Minutes after the sirens sounded, loudspeakers in the surrounding neighbourhood issued a tsunami warning in Japanese. Then the phone of our opponents, from a town called Motobu, started to ring with warnings.
Then my phone went off too. But the emergency alert on it was not for Kunigami or Okinawa. Santa Barbara County emergency services was advising me to seek higher. A couple minutes later, my home county, Los Angeles, sent a similar warning.
If we’d been playing in South Pasadena, we’d be 20 miles inland. But Kaigin Stadium is just 100 yards (91 metres) from the East China Sea. Out of an abundance of caution, both teams moved from the dugout to the top of the stands.
There, on our phones, we looked out at the placid, azure sea and read local warnings were being issued all over the Pacific, as far away as Chile. No one seemed to think that a tsunami would reach Kunigami. People in surrounding neighbourhoods were staying put. Nonetheless, island authorities, citing guidance from Japan’s prime minister, ordered an evacuation.
I spent the next two hours trying to keep our ballplayers from pelting each other with toys. After 1.30pm, the evacuation warning was lifted, and we drove back to the stadium.
But the municipality, citing the tsunami threat, didn’t want us to continue. Our opponents protested politely, pointing out that the evacuation and warning were over, to no avail. The first game was declared a victory, and two scheduled afternoon games were called off.
The earthquake, despite its size, did not produce dangerous tsunamis in Japan or anywhere else. But in the aftermath, the Japanese press questioned why people hadn’t responded to evacuation orders. In an editorial, Yomiuri Shimbun, a leading newspaper, said that the millions of summertime visitors to Japan had been uncertain about what to do, since warnings were broadcast in Japanese.
We were lucky to have an opposing team and our Japanese-speaking parents to guide us. We were lucky that the tsunami threat wasn’t more serious. We also benefited from good design.
We saw firsthand that the world has a working tsunami system, with global reach and local notice. Warning systems for too many other kinds of emergencies — fires, diseases, wars, terrorist attacks — lack the same reach. Back in January, a firestorm killed 17 people in Altadena, which did not receive local warnings until it was too late. If only major fires were considered global events, worthy of universal local warnings.
That said, warnings only work if we follow them. The temptations to ignore warnings were there — part of me preferred to stay and get two more games in that idyllic stadium, with our Okinawan player.
But we followed the evacuation orders, and all our players made it home safely. Which means, perhaps someday, that we can all return to Kunigami and finish those games. Zócalo Public Square
AloJapan.com