After Shocks
An advancing hurricane you can prepare for, by nailing plywood over windows, fastening shutters or, if necessary, evacuating. A tornado may strike with little warning, though the darkened skies provide an omen. A tsunami can roll in on a bright, sunny day, like the one that swept away sunbathers on the beaches of Thailand in 2004. In a flash, with no forewarning, the world changes.
On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 in the afternoon a 9.0 magnitude earthquake shook the east coast of Japan for three to five minutes. Roads buckled, bridges cracked, bookcases fell, some buildings collapsed. The earthquake hit with such force that, incredibly, it jolted the entire large island some eight feet to the east. All was still for 45 minutes as residents picked themselves up and surveyed the damage. Then came the wave. It had started in the ocean, reaching the average velocity of a passenger jet, 500 mph, and as the wave sped across the ocean surface the sea level itself rose. Already the earthquake had caused coastal land to subside two feet, opening wide the gate for the onrushing sea which, when it slammed into land, crashed over protective sea walls like a giant stepping over a curb, snapping coastal highways and railroad tracks like chopsticks and scattering fishing boats, buses, automobiles, houses, and even passenger planes parked on an airport tarmac.
A British high school teacher heard emergency sirens, looked out on the ocean, and saw a wall of mist. "This must have been the spray from the tsunami, but it looked so awesome and strange," he said. "It was as if there had been a massive fire on the ocean, and above it were vast, rolling, white clouds of smoke. In it, I could see thousands of bits, floating. They must have been buildings, ships, cars—but they looked so tiny. It was all so awesome that my brain couldn't compute." He led his 42 students to safety, but more than a hundred others in the school perished that day.
A pastor was checking for earthquake damage in his home when he got a frantic text message from his daughter in Tokyo: "Escape! Escape! Escape!" It seemed odd at the time, when all was calm, but with electricity off he had no local radio source and so obeyed. He survived, and for two days lived inside his car in the midst of a debris field.
Another pastor fled to high ground with his wife after the earthquake. A sudden snow squall hit just as the tsunami rolled in and for a few minutes they could see nothing from their safe perch. They heard the wave roll in, then surge back out to sea carrying human bodies and tons of debris, the backwash as dangerous as the initial wave. Repeatedly it rolled in and washed back out, like water sloshing around in a bathtub, seventeen times in all. Each time they heard frantic cries for help, then at last a loud sucking sound as if from a huge drain, then silence. When the snow clouds lifted they looked out over an entire neighborhood utterly destroyed, not a building still standing, only the cross from their church sticking up at an unnatural angle like a broken bone. A few scraggly trees stood by the beach, sentinels of what yesterday had been a dense forest.
Following the laws of hydraulics, when the giant wave found a sheltered cove tucked among hills, it increased in velocity and force, a huge volume of water squeezing into a narrow opening. On flat land the wave measured 10 to 30 feet high; in hilly country it rose to the unimaginable height of 133 feet, as high as a twelve-story building. Having a history with tsunamis, Japan had organized evacuation sites long before—schools, hospitals, senior citizens' centers—and many residents fled to them for shelter when the warning sirens went off. No one had anticipated a tsunami so colossal, however, and in a cruel irony many 
hundreds died in the evacuation buildings meant to save them. In one senior citizens' center situated high on a hill, 47 of 67 seniors died; today a pile of wheelchairs, mattresses, and furniture marks a kind of grim memorial to them. In the same town 61 people climbed to the roof of a three-story evacuation center and most of them got swept away; twenty survived by clinging to railings and a television antenna. In an elementary school 74 of 105 students died when school officials delayed instructing them to climb a hill just behind the school. As the first wave hit, some of the children were scrambling upward across snowy ground, only to lose their footing and slip into the wave's certain death.
Exactly one year after the earthquake and tsunami, I spent three days visiting the affected area at the invitation of my Japanese publisher, which was reintroducing a couple of my books, notably Disappointment with God and What Good Is God? I spoke to somber groups both in the Tohoku region and in Tokyo, and toured the devastated region once known for its picturesque fishing villages and now forever associated with the tsunami of 2011.
The industrious Japanese have repaired or replaced many roads, raising the roadbeds several feet above the sunken land. Crews have removed most of the lumber and rubble from the 270,000 heavily damaged buildings and only the most durable structures remain, ghost buildings with broken windows and crumbling walls. Artificial mountains of debris mar the landscape, some of them seventy feet high and the dimensions of a city block. Other regions of Japan have resisted accepting the 23 million tons of debris for incineration or burial lest it contain contaminants or radiation from the crippled nuclear power plant.
"I wonder how many automobiles were destroyed," I said aloud as we passed yet another mountain of crushed vehicles. Immediately a Japanese colleague pulled out his iPhone and Googled the answer: 410,000.
Driving into one town we turned a corner and there, a half-mile inland, sat a huge freighter, two-thirds the length of a football field, propped up among the concrete foundations of what used to be a residential area. Some 17 ships and 1,000 smaller fishing boats had washed ashore in that town and many still remain where the tsunami incongruously deposited them—in rice fields, atop a hotel, on the roof of a hospital.
CNN and other news sources gauge disasters by statistics, and by any measure the tsunami of 2011 ranks as one of the most costly in human lives and financial loss. On the ground, though, you encounter a disaster as a collection of individual personal stories, not statistics. The man who watched helplessly from a tall building as his family floated away in their house. Another family whose house slammed into a bridge, giving all eight family members a chance to leap to safety. Seven employees of a fish processing plant who jumped into a van and drove toward high ground, only to get stuck in traffic gridlock and have the tsunami churn the van like an object in a washing machine, killing all but two. A woman who left her two children, 4 and 7, with their grandmother her first day on a new job, now punishing herself because the grandmother was unable to help the children escape.
A Baptist pastor who lived on the coast near Sendai spent four nights on the roof of the church with his wife. Downstairs all was flooded, and the two resorted to eating dog food in order to stay alive. Several times he tried to get out but found it impossible to wade in chest-high, frigid water. The first time he stepped into the water he felt a sharp pain in his side: falling debris had broken two of his ribs during the earthquake, an injury he had not even noticed. "Mainly I remember the freezing cold," he said. "We shivered in wet clothes, with no heat and no food, waiting for rescue from the roof." Two million people lost electricity in the earthquake, some for as long as six weeks.
A few heartwarming stories of survival brought hope the first days after the tsunami. An 80-year-old grandmother and her 16-year-old son survived nine days before being discovered, hypothermic but uninjured. A rescue helicopter spotted a 60-year-old man floating on the roof of his house ten miles offshore. Of course we only hear the stories of survivors and can only imagine the fate of the 20,000 who died. Emergency response crews who had geared up to treat the injured found relatively few; such is the force of a tsunami that most of its victims die instantly.
To my surprise police had not cordoned off most damaged areas, even a year later. We visited a junior high school left exactly in the condition of March 11, 2011, the water line clearly visible on the walls. A large fishing boat lay outside on the athletic field. Inside, school books, papers, backpacks, and desks were scattered helter-skelter in the classrooms. March 11 happened to be graduation day, and bright "Smile for graduation!" banners still hung in the hallways. A mother had written on a blackboard, "Thank you for loving my son"; like many classmates, he had died in the stairwell attempting to flee the rising waters.
Across the street an elementary school gymnasium has become a memorial warehouse for children's objects recovered from the mud. Four days a week volunteers come to the gym and painstakingly clean textbooks, dolls, trophies, graduation diplomas, coloring books, scrapbooks, loose photos, any memento of the children who were lost. I stood on steps and watched a YouTube video recorded at that very vantage point, with the death-wave hurtling in and children screaming in the background. Because we were visiting on a Friday, a rest day for the volunteers, only one person was in the cavernous gymnasium, a mother methodically sifting through the boxes full of mementos, searching for a scrap of reminder of her daughter.
And then there's Fukushima, site of the nuclear power plant that still dominates the news in Japan. In a reversal of the scenes of destruction, in that region houses, shops, temples, and office buildings stand intact, untouched by the waters but void of human inhabitants. 
Due to radiation and the danger of more meltdown, officials have declared a "no go" zone and only stray animals wander the streets. Within Japan former residents of Fukushima have become pariahs. Some hospitals refuse to treat them and other regions hesitate to hire employees from that area or even give them shelter. A mortician became a local hero because he agreed to prepare the bodies of those who had died, an important ritual in Japan but a job no one dared accept for fear of contamination. "Don't have children!" Fukushima survivors tell their own children, fearful of genetic defects.
One of our Japanese hosts had brought along a portable radiation detector, and the digital readout, measuring microsieverts per hour, surged from 0.8 to 4.8 as our bullet train sped past Fukushima, well below a harmful level but a clue to the ongoing fears of the Japanese who have learned not to trust their government's pronouncements about the invisible danger still radiating from the ground near the nuclear facility. The week we visited, the police chief of Fukushima finally admitted that at least six people had starved to death in the days after the disaster. Four hospital patients and two senior citizens had waited in undamaged buildings for someone to come and rescue them. No one ever came.
The news media have rightly celebrated the patience and endurance—the longsuffering—of the Japanese people. Residents voluntarily turned in almost $100 million worth of cash and valuables found in the rubble—a stark contrast to the looting that occurs in many countries after a disaster. For several months thousands slept in gymnasiums and halls crowded with evacuees and stood in line for hours for a bottle of water and a bowl of rice. Even now a quarter million Japanese live in temporary housing. We visited one such home, a modular unit such as you see in some temporary school additions in the U.S. An elderly couple lives in one of the connected modules in a space about 12 feet by 40 feet; any family larger than four qualifies for two modules. Even after living there for 10 months, the couple seemed grateful to have a place of their own regardless of size and proudly showed off the microwave oven with the Red Cross symbol on the door.
Enormous problems remain. The government has yet to decide which towns to rebuild and which to abandon as too vulnerable. A cloud of fear and gloom hangs over the entire area. As one counselor told me, "I've learned that PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) is a misnomer. After something like the tsunami, that syndrome is a sign of health, not a disorder. Who would not feel trauma and stress?" Authorities worry about the Japanese suicide rate, already among the world's highest.
We met teams from the Philippines, Germany, Singapore, and the U.S. involved in reconstruction. Organizations such as Habitat for Humanity and Samaritan's Purse responded immediately and, a year later, still mobilize crews to aid in recovery. The church in Japan represents only 1 percent of the population, yet Christian organizations have taken a lead in rebuilding efforts, and some Japanese churches have become distribution centers for food and supplies. One church sheltered more than 1,000 evacuees the first few months after the tsunami.
As a counterbalance to the list of seven deadly sins, the church in the Middle Ages came up with a list of seven works of mercy: to feed the hungry; give drink to the thirsty; clothe the naked; house the homeless; visit the sick; ransom the captive; bury the dead. Every day a small army of relief workers, military personnel, and volunteers in Tohoku have an opportunity to practice those works of mercy. As I reminded the staff of the publishing company in Tokyo the day we left, the church later came up with an additional list of spiritual works of mercy: to instruct the ignorant; counsel the doubtful; admonish sinners; bear wrongs patiently; forgive offences willingly; comfort the afflicted; pray for the living and the dead. The church in Japan, a tiny minority in a suffering nation, is endeavoring to practice those less visible works as well.
One woman drove an hour to hear me speak in a church that, its sanctuary destroyed, now meets in a printing plant. In a fashion I do not understand, she wore thick white facial makeup, like a Japanese doll. Her piercing dark eyes rarely blinked. "I was buried in a pile of garbage and rubble for two days!" she said, suddenly grabbing my hand. "Then I saw a hand reaching down like this and I grabbed the hand that pulled me out. I lost everything—my family, my friends, my town. No one wants to go back. The town no longer exists. Please don't forget us! They forgot me for days, now they forget my town. I want to know why!"
That last spiritual work of mercy, prayer, is one we can all do. In a global environment where every crisis makes the news, disaster fatigue can easily set in. Yet a healthy body, whether physical or corporate, attends to the needs of the weakest part. I can still see the haunting white face of the woman who grabbed my hand and pled so plaintively. May we not forget Japan.
