Women's Collegiate Lacrosse Associates

Sunny Dhanjal | The State News

EAST LANSING -    On March 11, 2011, Shoko Hiruta, an environmental policy junior studying abroad from Japan at MSU, said she was was sitting in her high school math class when she felt the ground start to shake. Hiruta is a member of the Michigan State Women's Lacrosse team and plays in the WCLA this spring. Born in Japan, raised in California, and attending high school back in Japan, she had seen a lot of earthquakes before. She didn’t think much of it.

   It wasn’t until later she learned Japan was not only struck by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, but that a tsunami wave triggered by the quake, with maximum heights reaching up to 133 feet, was about to flood the eastern parts of coastal Japan. This would in turn set off three nuclear meltdownswithin the Fukushima power plant, causing several nearby towns to evacuate entirely, never to return to their homes.  “It was shocking,” Hiruta said. “When I turned on the news, I felt like I was watching a movie, not something that had happened near me. It didn’t feel real.” 

   On Monday, days after the five year anniversary of the events in Japan, Hiruta met with a few other speakers with MSU’s Japan Club to talk about her experiences in a memorial event to the tragedy of March 11.  “This is really just to get together and show our support,” child development junior and Japan Club president Shiori Egawa said. “Even if we’re far from Japan we still have our hearts together. It’s been five years, so a lot of people are starting to forget about it. We wanted to get together and remember that this happened, and that it can happen any time.” Hiruta, though not personally affected by the quake, had friends who were. Vice president of the Japan Club and economics junior Hitoki Okamoto said he was moved to bring MSU and the community of East Lansing to remember the quake because of a friend he had that were affected in ways he was not.  “His relatives are okay, but his family that lived near the area were devastated and they had to move to a different area,” Okamoto said. “Hearing that story from him just reminded me of how people can forget one of the bigger impacts of events like this, and made me want to remind people about it.”

There was an educational seminar on the tragedy, followed by an emergency survival food tasting. The night ended on a candlelit vigil around The Rock on Farm Lane, which the Japan Club painted on March 11, where members set off paper lanterns in solidarity for victims of the quake. Hiruta volunteered to help remove debris in the years following the quake, and said that the most important thing to her after the quake happened was being able to tell people about what she saw.

   “It was really different seeing the devastation with my own eyes,” Hiruta said. “But the most the important thing I remember was going back home and telling my friends what I saw.” Egawa said she wanted the memorial event to serve not only as a reminder to students about the quake, but also as a display of Japanese culture.

   “The population of Japanese students here is really small.” Egawa said. “We want to build awareness that we are here and also from a distance, culturally, we really have a culture of unity in Japan. Whenever a disaster like this happens, because event like this happens often in Japan, we really just combine and help each other.”