Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan

by Richard Lloyd Parry

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’.