Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan

by Richard Lloyd Parry

Those who work in zones of war and disaster acquire after a time the knack of detachment.

This is professional necessity:

no doctor, aid worker or reporter can do his job if he is crushed by the spectacle of death and suffering. The trick is to preserve compassion, without b...

In Japanese, domestic leave-taking follows an unvarying formula. The person departing says itte kimasu, which means

literally, ‘Having gone, I will come back.’ Those who remain respond with itte rasshai, which means ‘Having gone, be back.’ Sayonara, the word that foreigners are taught is the Japanese for ‘goodbye’, is too final for most occasions, implying a prolonged or indefinite separation. Itte kimasu contains a different emotional charge: the promise of an intended return.

But in Japan spiritual beliefs are regarded less as expressions of faith than as simple common sense, so lightly and casually worn that it is easy to miss them altogether. ‘The dead are not as dead there as they are in our own society,’4 wrote the religious scholar Herman Ooms. ‘It has always made perfect sense in Japan as far back as history goes to treat the dead as more

alive than we do … even to the extent that death becomes a variant, not a negation of life.’

‘We used to think that we were bringing up our children,’ said Sayomi Shito. ‘But then we discovered that it was we, the parents, who were being brought up by them. We thought that the children were the weakest among us, and that we protected them. But they were the keystone. All the other pieces depended on them. When they were

taken away, we realised this for the first time. We thought that we were looking after them. But it was the children who supported us.’

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.

It is easy to imagine grief as an ennobling, purifying emotion – uncluttering the mind of what is petty and transient, and illuminating the essential. In reality, of course, grief doesn’t resolve anything, any more than a blow to the head or a devastating illness. It compounds stress and complication. It multiplies anxiety and tension. It opens fissures into cracks, and cracks into gaping chasms.

It is true that people can be ‘brought together’ by catastrophe, and it is human to look to this as a consolation. But the balance of disaster is never positive. New human bonds were made after the tsunami, old ones became stronger; there were countless,

and remarkable, displays of selflessness and self-sacrifice. These we remember, and celebrate. We turn away from what is also commonplace: the destruction of friendship and trust; neighbours at odds; the enmity of friends and relatives. A tsunami does to human connectedness the same thing that it does to roads, bridges and homes.

instinctive Japanese aversion to anything that could be judged messy, selfish or otherwise antisocial.

one of the things I loved and admired most about this country: the practical, unselfconscious, irrepressible strength of communities.

Japanese do not easily reach for invective, even towards their politicians.

What accounts for this democratic deficit, this failure of the political system to generate a dynamic politics? It is one of the mysteries of modern Japan.

Gaman was the force that united the reeling refugees in the early days after the disaster; but it was also what neutered politics, and permitted Japanese to feel that they had no individual power over, and no responsibility for, their national plight.

The people of the old Japan shut up

and got on with it – and shutting up was the crucial element. They worried deeply about what other people would think if they stood up and argued. They rejected change, and efforts at change – the idealised village was a world in which conflict, and even disharmony, were immoral, a kind of violence.

‘Something peculiar in the Japanese, who only attach importance to the surface of things. And in the pride of people who cannot ever say sorry.’

And the discomfort of stepping outside the snug, warm, paralysing web of compliance that Japan weaves around its people, a fuzzy, enveloping tangle in which constraint is inseparable from the sense of being protected, and where the machinery of coercion rarely has

to be applied from outside, because it is internalised so efficiently within the mind.

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.’