Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

by Richard Lloyd Parry

Sometimes in Japan I wondered if it didn’t come down to a simple proposition: Would you tolerate a certain amount of whining and squabbling and disorder, even a bit of looting and profiteering, if such selfishness was accompanied by a willingness on the part of ordinary people to fight a bit, to shout down authority, and to take responsibility for the people they elected?

“In the village society, if you speak out, you will be ostracized,” he said. “There’s a common assumption that if you talk too much or do anything controversial, the authorities won’t help you. They won’t repair the road by your house. They won’t give the benefit of official services. That’s what people assume. We were lucky—our home and our business survived, and we didn’t need their help. But plenty of people around here lost their families, their homes, their possessions. People like that are not going to speak out, or criticize the local government.”

In the months and years afterward, Takahiro received invitations to give talks around the country to groups interested in the tragedy of Okawa. He accepted out of a sense of duty; he assumed that he would encounter people alert to the human component of disaster, anxious to learn how they themselves could reduce the chances of falling victim to similar catastrophe. “But I was shocked,” he said, “by how low their level of awareness was.” Takahiro’s audiences expressed sympathy and polite horror at what had happened, but it was as if they viewed it through the wrong end of a telescope, as something small, curious, and remote from their own lives. “For them, it was someone else’s problem,” he said. “They didn’t recognize it as the kind of thing that could happen again in the future, even happen to them. Perhaps it’s the same with nuclear power. Everyone played down the dangers for all those years, and the result was this sudden, terrible situation. In Okawa school, too, the teachers played everything down, took nothing seriously.”

It was seen, or felt to be seen, as a failure of gaman, a violation of the unwritten codes of the village society. There was an assumption that unpleasant consequences—social disapproval and exclusion, even victimization—were in store for those who sued, particularly those who took on the government. People became vague and tongue-tied when pressed over this; they struggled to come up with particular examples: the nagging sense of being talked about behind your back; an obscure guilt in the hearts of people who knew they had done nothing wrong. And the discomfort of stepping outside the snug, warm, paralyzing 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 internalized so efficiently within the mind.

There was no explicit conspiracy to deliver verdicts one way or another, no direct orders from on high, just an understanding, as natural as the instinct of an animal, about how the world worked and where self-interest lay. “If someone brings a lawsuit against an institution, against a big company or a bank, or a local government,” said Yoshioka, “in Japan the institution will almost always win.”

They were representations of Jizo, the bodhisattva associated with kindness and mercy, who consoles the living and the dead.

She ran away and found work in the mizu shobai, or “water trade,” the nighttime world of clubs, bars, and prostitution.