Ghosts of the Tsunami Quotes

“I asked him what kind of consolation a priest could offer to people such as the parents of Okawa school, and he was quiet for a moment. “You have to be careful,” he said. “You have to be very careful in doing this to people who have lost their children. It takes long months, long years—it might take a whole lifetime. It might be the very last thing that you say to someone. But perhaps all that we can tell them in the end is to accept. The task of acceptance is very hard. It’s up to every single person, individually. People of religion can play only a part in achieving that—they need the support of everyone around them. We watch them, watch over them. We remember our place in the cosmos, as we work. We stay with them, and we walk together. That’s all we can do.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“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.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“Kaneta said, “What determined life or death? No Buddhist priest knows, no Christian pastor—not even the Pope in Rome. So I would say, ‘There’s one thing I can tell you, and that is that you are alive, and so am I. This is a certainty. And if we are alive, then there must be some meaning to it. So let’s think about it, and keep thinking about it. I’ll be with you as we think. I’ll stay with you, and we will do it together.’ Perhaps it sounds glib. But that is what I could say.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“He said, “We realized 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 realized then that religious language was an armor that we wore to protect ourselves, and that the only way forward was to take it off.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“The true mystery of Okawa school was the one we all face. No mind can encompass it; consciousness recoils in panic. The idea of conspiracy is what we supply to make sense of what will never be sensible— the fiery fact of death. Extinction of life: extinction of a perfect, a beloved child: for eternity. Impossible! the soul cries out. What are they hiding?”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“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.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“At a refugee community in Onagawa, an old neighbor would appear in the living rooms of the temporary houses and sit down for a cup of tea with their startled occupants. No one had the heart to tell her that she was dead; the cushion on which she had sat was wet with seawater.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“The universe wraps everything up inside it, in the end,” Kaneta said. “Life, death, grief, anger, sorrow, joy. There was no boundary, then, between the living and the dead. There was no boundary between the selves of the living. The thoughts and feelings of everyone who was there at that moment melted into one. That was the understanding I achieved at that time, and it was what made compassion possible, and love, in something like the Christian sense.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“A magnitude 9.2 earthquake,” he said. “When something that powerful occurs, the Earth moves on its axis. So many people, all over Tohoku, were looking up at the sky on that night, filled with intense feelings. And looking at the stars, I became aware of the universe, the infinite space all around and above us. I felt as if I was looking into the universe, and I was conscious of the earthquake as something that had taken place within that vast expanse of empty space. And I began to understand that this was all part of a whole. Something enormous had happened. But whatever it was, it was entirely natural; it had happened as one of the mechanisms of the universe. “It’s engraved in my mind: the pitiless snow, and the beautiful shining, starry sky, and all those countless dead bodies drifting onto the beach. Perhaps this sounds pretentious, but I realized that when I began my work, giving support to people whose lives had been destroyed, I had to attend to the hearts of human beings and their suffering and anguish. But I also”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“low expectations are corrosive to a democratic system.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“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 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; neighbors 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. And in Okawa, and everywhere in the tsunami zone, people fell to quarreling and reproaches, and felt the bitterness of injustice and envy, and fell out of love.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“Religious people all argue about whether these are really the spirits of the dead,” Kaneta told me. “I don’t get into it, because what matters is that people are seeing them, and in these circumstances, after this disaster, it is perfectly natural. So many died, and all at once. At home, at work, at school—the wave came in and they were gone. The dead had no time to prepare themselves. The people left behind had no time to say goodbye. Those who lost their families, and those who died—they have strong feelings of attachment. The dead are attached to the living, and those who have lost them are attached to the dead. It’s inevitable that there are ghosts.” He said: “So many people are having these experiences. It’s impossible to identify who and where they all are.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“A fire station in Tagajo received calls to places where all the houses had been destroyed by the tsunami. The crews went out to the ruins anyway, prayed for the spirits of those who had died—and the ghostly calls ceased. A taxi in the city of Sendai picked up a sad-faced man who asked to be taken to an address that no longer existed. Halfway through the journey, the driver looked into his mirror to see that the rear seat was empty. He drove on anyway, stopped in front of the leveled foundations of a destroyed house, and politely opened the door to allow the invisible passenger out at his former home.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“No photograph could describe the spectacle. Even television images failed to encompass the panoramic quality of the disaster, the sense within the plane of destruction of being surrounded by it on all sides, sometimes as far as the eye could see. “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 four hundred 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.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“Everything made by men will be destroyed by nature in the end. Mountains and river, the creations of nature -- they will remain. Everything human, that will go. We nee to reconsider the respect we give to nature.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“The earthquake is the thing that all humans face: the banal inevitability of death. We don’t know when it will come, but we know that it will. We take refuge in elaborate and ingenious precautions, but in the end they are all in vain. We think about it even when we are not thinking about it; after a while, it seems to define what we are. It comes most often for the old, but we feel it most cruelly when it also takes away the young.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“The most important thing of all is to stay supple and flexible,” he said. “The moment you will be most stiff is when you die—you never get stiffer than that. So you’ve got to sleep well, eat well, and keep moving.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“Japanese gaman is not a philosophical concept. The conventional translations fail to convey the passivity and abnegation that the idea contains, the extent to which gaman often seems indistinguishable from a collective lack of self-esteem. 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 the Japanese to feel that they had no individual power over and no responsibility for their national plight.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“In geological terms, Japan is in an appalling situation, on top of not one, but two so-called triple junctions—points at which three of the Earth’s tectonic plates collide and grate against one another. Fire, wind, flood, landslide, earthquake, and tsunami: it is a country of intense, elemental violence. Harsh natural environments often breed qualities that take on the status of national characteristics—the dark fatalism of Russians, the pioneer toughness of frontier Americans. Japanese identify in themselves the virtue of nintai or gaman, variously rendered as endurance, patience, or perseverance”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“In North America and Europe, there is no lack of odious and incompetent leaders; but there is a sense of creative friction and of evolution, of a political marketplace in which ideas and individuals less popular and effective yield, over time, to those that prove themselves fitter for purpose, and where politics—even if it has its wrong turns and dead ends—is at least in constant motion. In Japan, this is not the case; even seventy years after the war, a genuinely competitive multiparty system has still not established itself.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“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.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“More appalling than the scale of death was the spectacle of the bereaved survivors. “They didn’t cry,” Kaneta said. “There was no emotion at all. The loss was so profound, and death had come so suddenly. They understood the facts of their situation individually—that they had lost their homes, lost their livelihoods, and lost their families. They understood each piece, but they couldn’t see it as a whole, and they couldn’t understand what they should do, or sometimes even where they were. I couldn’t really talk to them, to be honest. All I could do was stay with them, and read the sutras and conduct the ceremonies. That was the thing I could do.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“A buckled car protruded from the window of one of the upper classrooms.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“It was bitterly cold, and the darkness was overwhelming. Everyone who lived through that night was amazed by the intense clarity of the sky overhead and the brightness of the stars. They found themselves in a land without power, television, telephones, a place suddenly plucked up and folded into a pocket of time, disconnected from the twenty-first century.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“There are several aerial films of the incoming tsunami, but the one that plays and replays in my imagination was shot above the town of Natori, south of the city of Sendai. It begins over land rather than sea, with a view of dun winter paddy fields. Something is moving across the landscape as if it is alive, a brown-snouted animal hungrily bounding over the earth. Its head is a scum of splintered debris; entire cars bob along on its back. It seems to steam and smoke as it moves; its body looks less like water or mud than a kind of solid vapor. And then a large boat can be seen riding it inland, hundreds of yards from the sea, and—unbelievably—blue-tiled houses, still structurally intact, spinning across the inundated fields with orange flames dancing on their roofs. The creature turns a road into a river, then swallows it whole, and then it is raging over more fields and roads towards a village and a highway thick with cars. One driver is accelerating ahead of it, racing to escape—before the car and its occupants are gobbled up by the wave.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“There was no advance warning, no marginal area of incremental damage. The wave had come in with full force, spent itself and stopped at a point as clearly defined as the reach of a high tide. Above it, nothing had been touched; below it, everything was changed.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“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.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“The moment you will be most stiff is when you die - you never get stiffer than that. So you've got to sleep well, eat well and keep moving.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone