Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan

by Richard Lloyd Parry

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...