Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan

by Richard Lloyd Parry

‘It was hell,’ Hitomi said. ‘Everything had disappeared. It was as if an atomic bomb had fallen.’ This comparison, for which many people reached, was not an exaggeration. Only two forces can inflict greater damage than a tsunami: collision with an asteroid, or nuclear explosion. The scenes along 400 miles of coast that morning resembled those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, but with water substituted for fire, mud for ash, the stink of fish and ooze for scorched wood and smoke. Even the most intense aerial bombing leaves the walls and foundations of burned-out buildings, as well as parks and woods, roads and tracks, fields and cemeteries. The tsunami spared nothing, and achieved feats of surreal juxtaposition that no explosion could match. It plucked forests up by their roots and scattered them miles inland. It peeled the macadam off the roads, and cast it hither and thither in buckled ribbons. It stripped houses to their foundations, and lifted cars, lorries, ships and corpses onto the top of tall buildings.

Jigoku: hell. The image they had in mind was not the conventional landscape of lurid demons and extravagant, fiery tortures. There are other hells in Japanese iconography – hells of ice and water, mud and excrement, in which naked figures, stripped of all dignity, lie scattered across a broken plain. ‘What stays in my memory,’ Abe said, ‘is pine trees, and the legs and arms of children sticking out from under the mud and the rubbish.’ Abe was a village leader, a construction boss, an active, practical-minded man in his early sixties. He began to pull bodies out and to lay them out on the roadside. At first he used his bare hands. Then he waded back to his car and returned with his tools. In some places a shovel was useless, because the bodies of the children were so thickly heaped on top of one another, where they had been laid by the retreating wave.

He would spend three months in the village, picking through mud in the search for bodies. One day, the women called him over to the place where the bodies were laid out for washing. Among them was his own ten-year-old granddaughter, Nao. Abe had lifted her out himself. She had been so covered with mud that he had not recognised her. Nao’s nine-year-old younger sister, Mai, was found a week later, and their father a week after that. ‘The older girl was just the way she had always been,’ Abe told me. ‘She was perfect. It was just as if she was asleep. But a week later – well, seven days in those conditions makes a big difference.’ And he wept.

Daisuke was the first to be recovered, a week after the wave, followed by Hiroyuki’s father. Rika, who had died four days before her seventeenth birthday, was found at the end of the month. Old Mrs Konno and eighteen-year-old Mari were found in early April. Daisuke was at the bottom of the hill behind the school, not far from the traffic island, in one of several small heaps of children. The girls and their grandparents lay in different places, but there were clues that suggested what had happened to them. Old Mr Konno had his car keys in his pocket. His wife was carrying bags of clothes, and the girls had snacks and charger cables for their mobile phones. They were preparing a departure; they might have been about to get into the car when the tsunami struck.

There is a sisterhood of blind shamanesses who gather once a year at a volcano called Mount Fear, the traditional entrance to the underworld.

On 22 May 1960, a 9.5-magnitude earthquake,4 still the most powerful ever recorded, struck the seabed off the west coast of Chile. Waves eighty feet high inundated the city of Valdivia, killing a thousand people along the coast. Twenty-two hours after the earthquake, the tsunami struck Japan, having traversed 10,500 miles of sea. It was the morning of 24 May; none but a handful of seismologists in Tokyo knew what had happened in Chile, and even they never imagined the effect it would have one day later on the far side of the Pacific. The Sanriku Coast saw the worst of it; in places, the water was more than twenty feet high. One hundred and forty-two people were killed that day, because of an occurrence in the depths of the ocean bed literally half a world away.

Even as we drove in on that September afternoon, I was conscious of their absence. Between the outskirts of Ishinomaki and the sea, there were few traffic lights, road signs, vending machines or telegraph poles. There were no strip-lit restaurants or twenty-four-hour convenience stores, no advertising hoardings or cash dispensers. Most transforming of all was the character of local sound: the song of birds and cicadas in the trees, the low noise of the river, the slap of waves and a subtle, pervasive, barely audible susurration, which took me days to identify – that of air passing through the reeds.

Three hundred and ninety-three people lived in Kamaya7 at the time of the tsunami. More than half of them – 197 people – died, and every one of their houses was destroyed. Virtually all who survived did so because they were away from the village at the time, at work or school. Of those who were present in Kamaya that afternoon, only about twenty had not drowned by the time the sun went down. And these numbers did not include the teachers and children who died at the school. It was easy, often too easy, to reach for superlatives in describing the tragedy of the tsunami. But in all the disaster zone, I reflected as I drove in that September afternoon, I knew of no single community that had lost so much of itself.

In May, a doctor took swabs from the mouths of Naomi, Shinichiro and their children, in order to isolate Koharu’s DNA. At the end of that month, parts of a small body washed up in Naburi, a fishing village on the Pacific coast, four miles from the school, across lagoon and mountains. The condition of the remains made it impossible to identify them by sight; it took three months for the laboratory to establish that they belonged not to Koharu, but to another missing girl.

An idea was taking form in Naomi’s mind. She consulted Masaru about it. ‘Why not try?’ he said. In late June, she participated in a week-long course at a training centre near Sendai. All the other participants were men. They showed no curiosity about Naomi, and she felt no urge to explain herself. At the end of the week she came away with a licence to operate earth-moving equipment, one of the few women in Japan to possess such a qualification. She went immediately to work, borrowing a digger of her own and sifting the mud in search of Koharu. Her father-in-law strongly opposed this development. He argued that operating heavy machinery was dangerous for a woman, and that her place was at home, looking after her children, husband and in-laws. Naomi listened patiently to what he had to say and paid it no attention.

Then eight days later, the three bodies were recovered from a public hall a few hundred yards from the house – and it was this that unlocked the sad truth. In Kamaishi, as elsewhere, the earthquake itself caused little serious damage, and tsunami warnings were immediately broadcast through loudspeakers across the town. Mr Shimokawara’s seventy-three-year-old son had plenty of time to help his father and wife into the car and to drive them to the single-storey public hall. It was only a few hundred yards from the sea, and scarcely more elevated than the family house. But by the time this became obvious, it would have been much too late. The wave surged around Mr Shimokawara’s house, although its upper floor was spared. But it overwhelmed the public hall and drowned those who had retreated there. Three minutes’ walking distance further up the road, the water petered out against a steadily rising slope. ‘If they had stayed with the car, or walked up the road, or even just stayed at home and climbed the stairs, they would have made it,’ said Keizo Tada, an old friend. Instead, as a good citizen obediently following the drill, Mr Shimokawara’s son drove to safety, parked his car and calmly and obliviously walked back down the hill to his death. Takashi Shimokawara had lived through the 1933 tsunami, the Chile tsunami in 1960, and countless minor waves and false alarms. When his old friend Tada last spoke to him, he had talked of the forthcoming athletics championship when he wo...

In the Indian Ocean tsunami that struck Indonesia,3 Sri Lanka and Thailand in 2004, children died disproportionately because they were less physically capable of swimming and dragging themselves to safety. In Japan, the opposite was true. Out of the 18,500 dead and missing, only 351 – fewer than one in fifty – were schoolchildren.4 Four out of five of them died somewhere other than school: because they were off sick that afternoon or had been quickly picked up by anxious parents. It was much more dangerous, in other words, to be reunited with your family than to remain with your teachers. If you are ever exposed to a violent earthquake, the safest place you could hope to be is Japan; and the best spot of all is inside a Japanese school.fn1

Even against the immensity of the tsunami, Japan’s sea walls, warning systems and evacuation drills saved an uncountable number of lives: however great the catastrophe of 2011, the damage caused would have been many times worse if it had happened in any other country. And nowhere are precautions against natural disaster more robust than in state schools. They are built on iron frames out of reinforced concrete. They are often situated on hills and elevations, and all of them are required to have detailed disaster plans and to practise them regularly. On that afternoon, Japanese architecture and bureaucracy did an almost perfect job of protecting the young. No school collapsed or suffered serious physical damage in the earthquake. Nine of them were completely overwhelmed by the tsunami, and at one of them, in the town of Minami-Sanriku, a boy of thirteen was drowned as his class hurried to higher ground. But with one exception, every other school got all its children to safety. On 11 March 2011, seventy-five children in Japan died in the care of their teachers. Seventy-four of them were at Okawa Primary School. Later, many of their parents were tormented by self-reproach for not rushing there to collect them. But far from being neglectful or lazy, they had followed the course of action which, in every other circumstance, would have been most likely to secure their safety and survival.

It was a weekday afternoon, and the working people of Kamaya were away at their shops, factories and offices. Most of the parents who came to the school were full-time mothers and housewives; most of the villagers offering their opinions were retired, elderly and male. It was another enactment of the ancient dialogue, its lines written centuries ago, between the entreating voices of women, and the oblivious, overbearing dismissiveness of old men.

How does it feel to die in a tsunami? What are the thoughts and sensations of someone in those final moments? Everyone who contemplated the disaster asked themselves these questions; the mind fluttered about them like an insect around a flame. One day, I mentioned it, hesitatingly, to a local man. ‘Do you really want to know the answer to that question?’ he asked. ‘Because I have a friend who can tell you.’ He arranged the meeting for the following evening. His friend’s name was Teruo Konno and, like Toshinobu Oikawa, he worked in the branch office of the Ishinomaki town hall. Oikawa was the model of the local bureaucrat: quiet, patient, dogged. But Konno was an imaginative and restless character. As a boy, he had dreamed of leaving Tohoku and travelling the world. His parents, seeking to quell this impulse, had discouraged him from going to university, and Konno had spent his life in the place where he grew up, and his career in local government. In March 2011, he had been deputy-head of the local development section, responsible, among other things, for ‘disaster counter-measures’.

For the first time in a century of human development, the land was in a state of historic, virgin darkness. No illuminated windows blazed upwards to obscure the patterning of the night sky; without traffic lights, drivers stayed off the unlit streets. The stars in their constellations and the blue river of the Milky Way were vivid in a way that few inhabitants of the developed world ever see. ‘Before nightfall, snow fell,’ Kaneta said. ‘All the dust of modern life was washed by it to the ground. It was sheer darkness. And it was intensely silent, because there were no cars. It was the true night sky that we hardly ever see, the sky filled with stars. Everyone who saw it talks about that sky.’

As they marched, Kaneta and his group had intended to chant sutras and sing hymns. But here, among the stench and mess, their voices failed them. ‘The Christian pastor was trying to sing hymns,’ said Kaneta. ‘But none of the hymns in his book seemed right. I couldn’t even say the sutra – it came out in screams and shouts.’ The priests lurched uselessly through the rubble in their rich robes, croaking the scriptures, getting in the way. ‘And when we got to the sea,’ said Kaneta, ‘when we saw the sea – we couldn’t face it. It was as if we couldn’t interpret what we were seeing.’ He said, ‘We realised that, for all that we had learned about religious ritual and language, none of it was effective in facing what we saw all around us. This destruction that we were living inside – it couldn’t be framed by the principles and theories of religion. Even as priests, we were close to the fear that people express when they say, “We see no God, we see no Buddha here.” I realised then that religious language was an armour which we wore to protect ourselves, and that the only way forward was to take it off.’