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

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  The old man finally tottered from the house, without his ancestors.

  But now the poles and wires and shutters were vibrating again, in the first of a long succession of aftershocks. Sayomi herded her parents and the children into the car, and drove down the lane to a spot in the rice fields where much of the population of Fukuji was already converging. Chairs and mattresses were being laid out for children and old people, and neighbours were exclaiming to one another over what had happened. But from this vantage point, it was clear that any physical damage had been remarkably slight. Apart from the displacement of a few roof tiles, none of the houses in the area, as far as Sayomi could tell, had collapsed or suffered serious damage. There was wonder, and a residue of alarm, but no one was panicking or hysterical. Like the reflection of the sky in rippling water, normality seemed steadily to be reasserting itself.

  Sayomi sent a text message to her husband, reporting on the family’s situation, and received one in return. The building site where Takahiro was working had been thrown into disarray by the shaking, but he was unhurt. She looked around, at friends and neighbours performing acts of kindness, a community spontaneously organising itself to help the old, young and weak. It occurred to her then that the returning bus, which would bring Chisato home from school, was due at any moment. After settling her parents and children among their neighbours, she drove the few hundred yards to the river to meet it.

  Half a dozen cars had pulled up on the main road along the river; their drivers stood beside them, discussing the situation. Wood from a timber yard was said to have spilled onto the road up ahead, making the way hazardous. None of the drivers had seen the obstruction for himself. But none made any move to investigate. People were calm; none gave any sign of impatience or trepidation. But in the inertness of the scene, Sayomi intuited anxiety and strain. She tried to text her husband again. Immediately after the earthquake, messages had gone through without difficulty, although voice calls were impossible. But now the network had shut down.

  Over the next hour, Sayomi drove backwards and forwards between the road, where she waited for the appearance of the school bus, and the rice field, where she checked on the well-being of her family. As she shuttled to and fro, the soothing sense of normality winning out over disaster drained rapidly away.

  Sayomi’s attention was drawn to one of the channels that connected with the great river, part of a network of slack creeks that irrigated the paddies. Its level rose and fell with the cycles of the rice crop, but it was never completely dry. Now, though, the water in it had almost entirely disappeared; the muddy bottom was visible, glistening greyly. The next time she looked, the situation had reversed: the stream was engorged with surging water from the river, and pieces of dark unidentifiable debris were racing along its churning surface. Soon, the adjoining fields were flooded with water. The spectacle was remarkable enough for Sayomi to make a film of it on her mobile phone. The brief clip recorded the time, 3.58 p.m., and a snatch of news from the car radio: ‘… as a result of the tsunami which hit Onagawa, houses are reported to have been inundated up to their roofs and vehicles have been washed away. Maintain strict vigilance …’

  The word ‘tsunami’ was well known to Sayomi, of course; stronger earthquakes, if they occurred under the sea, were commonly followed by a tsunami warning. The size of the waves would be reported on the television as they came in: thirty inches, fifteen inches, four inches – phenomena scarcely visible to the untrained eye, often measurable only by harbour gauges. But the radio was speaking of Ō-tsunami – a ‘super-tsunami’, twenty feet high – and all of this in Onagawa, a fishing port just an hour’s drive to the south. ‘I knew that twenty feet was big, although knowing it is different from feeling it,’ Sayomi said. ‘But to hear that it was capable of washing away cars, that brought it home. I tried to stay calm. There was nothing else I could do.’

  Sayomi went back to the main road and waited for her daughter, as dusk swallowed up the day.

  She had been standing in front of Okawa Primary School an hour and a half ago; it should have been the most natural thing in the world to drive back down the road along the river to collect Chisato. It was only four miles downstream, but there were no cars at all coming from that direction. The drivers loitering at the lock said that the way was dangerous, although no one seemed willing to explain exactly why. Wet, sleety snow had begun to fall. The river was behaving as if it was possessed. The surface of the water was bulging and flexing like the muscles beneath the skin of an athlete; large, irregularly shaped objects were dimly visible on its surface. Sayomi lingered by the river, watching the road, until after it was dark.

  At home, she found her house intact, but littered with fallen and broken objects, and without electricity, gas or water. She improvised a meal out of leftovers, and forced herself not to worry about Chisato. Plenty of families in Fukuji were waiting for children who had not come back from the primary school, and none showed excessive concern. Chisato’s teachers were trained to deal with emergencies. The concrete school was built more strongly than the wooden houses of Fukuji, all of which had ridden out the earthquake. Most reassuring to Sayomi, who had attended the school herself, was its position immediately in front of a 700-foot hill. A track, rising from the back of the playground, ascended quickly to a point beyond the reach of even a ‘super-tsunami’. Without electricity, people in Fukuji had no access to television or the Internet; none had yet seen the images of the devouring wave, which were being played over and again across the world. Instead, they listened to the local radio station, which was retailing the cautious, official casualty figures: scores confirmed dead, hundreds more likely. Then came an unambiguous report, which everyone waiting up that evening remembered: 200 people, locals and children, were sheltering in Okawa Primary School, cut off and awaiting rescue.

  Sayomi’s relief at hearing this was a measure of the anxiety that she had been reluctant to admit even to herself. ‘One of the other mums was saying that they were probably staying in the upper gallery of the gym, and enjoying a pyjama party,’ Sayomi remembered. ‘We said to one another, “Poor old Chisato. She’s going to be hungry and cold.” We were no more worried than that.’

  But when Takahiro finally reached home that night, after an exhausting journey along cracked and congested roads, the first thing she said to him was, ‘Chisato’s not back.’

  The family spent the night in the car, as a precaution against aftershocks. Squeezed side by side in the upright seats, no one slept much. Sayomi was kept awake by a single phrase, which sounded over and over in her head: ‘Chisato’s not here, Chisato’s not here, Chisato’s not here.’

  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. Sayomi got up at dawn, stiff and cold. Gas and water had been restored, so that she could at least make tea and cook. Then came news that spread excitedly among the mothers of Okawa Primary School. A helicopter was flying there to pick up the trapped children and to lift them out. Takahiro and the other men of the village were preparing a place for it to land. Chisato was coming home at last.

  Where Are the Children?

  Daisuke Konno was a stalwart of the judo team and captain of the sixth-year class, but he was a gentle, soft-hearted boy and that day he didn’t want to go to school, either. There was barely a week to go until graduation; his mother, Hitomi, pushed him out of the door. It was a cold morning in the unreliable period between winter and spring. But there was nothing ominous about it, and neither mother nor son was the kind to be troubled by supernatural intimations of disaster. Photographs of Daisuke show a cheery round face with a self-deprecating smile. ‘He loved judo,’ Hitomi said. ‘And to his friends he put on a tough face. But to me, back at home, he used to
complain about the pain of being thrown. And at school it seems that a group of the boys had been told off by the teacher. That was the only reason he didn’t want to go.’

  – Itte kimasu, said the reluctant Daisuke.

  – Itte rasshai, Hitomi responded.

  The Konno family lived in the village of Magaki, three miles downstream of Sayomi’s home in Fukuji. The bus passed through here, but Okawa Primary School was close enough that the children of Magaki made the journey by foot. Daisuke (his name was pronounced ‘Dice-keh’) walked along the river’s edge with a slouching gang of classmates. The river bank at this point was hardly elevated at all; the breadth of the road was all that separated the houses from the lapping water.

  Hitomi’s husband had already gone to work. She followed soon after her son, leaving behind her parents-in-law and two teenage daughters. She drove south, away from the river and up a road that ascended into the hills through hairpin bends and entered a mile-long tunnel, to emerge above the fishing port of Ogatsu. By eight o’clock she was seated at her keyboard in the small doctor’s surgery where she worked as a receptionist, awaiting the arrival of the first patient of the day.

  It was an unexceptional morning. Hitomi ate a packed lunch at her desk. She was a warm, calm woman of forty, with a core of firm-minded common sense beneath an exterior of kindly humility, well suited to dealing with the clinic’s mostly elderly, and frequently confused, patients. Apart from handling appointments, processing payments and keeping the accounts, she supervised the operation of an elaborate apparatus which used an electrical current to massage the muscles. She had just plugged two old ladies into the current when the earthquake began its violent shaking.

  She tried to rise, but couldn’t. The patients in the waiting room were crying out in alarm. Behind Hitomi were tall flasks in which metal instruments were being sterilised. The boiling water inside them was slopping noisily over the sides, to form steaming pools on the floor.

  When the motion had subsided, Hitomi removed the electrodes from the old ladies and handed back the insurance cards as the patients hurried out.

  She sent a text message to her oldest daughter, Mari, who was at home in Magaki. The reply quickly came back: We’re all fine. Don’t worry.

  Hitomi mopped up the water from the sterilising flasks and discussed with the doctor what to do. Ogatsu was on the sea, at the head of a narrow bay. After the strong, but lesser, earthquake two days ago, many people had evacuated the town; but no tsunami had come. As they were recalling this, a man entered the clinic, a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company, with the news that an evacuation warning had been issued and that everyone should retreat to higher ground. Hitomi picked up her jacket and bag and walked to her car. ‘I remember that the whole town was incredibly quiet,’ she said. ‘I could hear a tap dripping at the back of the clinic, the kind of sound that you would never normally notice.’ Later, she realised this was that ghostly moment in the advent of a tsunami when the water withdraws, exposing seabed and harbour-floor, before surging back in with full force. It was the absence of the familiar shush and slap of the sea that made tiny, domestic noises unnaturally noticeable.

  She drove back up the hill; even inside the moving car, she could feel the aftershocks. Without thinking, she entered the tunnel, and then immediately began to worry about the solidity of its ceiling, and the unimaginable volumes of stone and earth above it. On the far side, she pulled into a lay-by where other evacuees were waiting, and sat for a while, considering what to do next. She started off down the road again and passed a local man she knew, who waved her to a stop.

  ‘I wouldn’t go down there, if I were you,’ the man said, pointing in the direction of Hitomi’s home in Magaki.

  ‘Why not?’ Hitomi asked. But the man just mumbled something she couldn’t hear.

  It had begun snowing. ‘It wasn’t late, still not yet four clock,’ Hitomi remembered. ‘I was sending text messages and trying to phone home, but now nothing connected. It was very dark, unusually dark overhead. I started driving down again, but someone else I knew stopped me and said, “Don’t go on.”’

  A few hundred yards down the road was a vantage point from which Magaki and the country around it could be seen clearly. The man gave no explanation for his warning, and Hitomi did not press him for one. Instead, she retreated to the lay-by and spent a cold and uncomfortable night in the car.

  She drove down the road again as it started to become light, and soon reached the point where the hills fell away on the left, revealing the broad Kitakami river valley below, the view Hitomi saw every afternoon when she drove back from work. On both of its banks, a wide margin of level fields rose suddenly into forested hills. On the nearside was Hitomi’s home village of Magaki, and then an expanse of paddies stretching to the Fuji lake; the polished blue and red roofs of other hamlets glittered at the edges of the hills. It was an archetypal view of the Japanese countryside: abundant nature, tamed and cultivated by man. But now she struggled to make sense of what she saw.

  Everything up to and in between the hills was water. There was only water: buildings and fields had gone. The water was black in the early light; floating on it were continents and trailing archipelagos of dark scummy rubble, brown in colour and composed of broken tree trunks. Every patch of land that was not elevated had been absorbed by the river, which had been annexed in turn by the sea. In this new geography, the Fuji lake was no longer a lake, but the inner reach of an open-mouthed bay; the river was not a river, but a wide maritime inlet. Okawa Primary School was invisible, hidden from view by the great shoulder of hills from which Hitomi looked down. But the road, the houses and Magaki, where Hitomi’s home and family had been, were washed from the earth.

  Upstream in Fukuji, the news about the helicopter set off a clatter of collective activity. Sayomi’s husband, Takahiro, spent the early morning helping to mark off a space where the rescued children could land safely. Sayomi and the other mothers made heaps of rice balls, and brought them to the local community centre where the evacuees were to be taken to recover from their ordeal. She kept two of the rice balls back and put them in her pocket so that, even if she was one of the last to arrive, Chisato would not go hungry.

  The helicopter was expected at 11 a.m. Families converged on Fukuji from along the river: brothers, sisters, parents and grand parents, dressed against the cold in fleeces and puffer jackets, and carrying bags and rucksacks with hot drinks and bars of chocolate, and more warm clothes for their returning sons and daughters.

  They stood looking up at the sky. There was almost no conversation between them. Helicopters came and went all morning. The blue ones were from the police. One or two might have been military aircraft of the Japan Self-Defence Forces. None of them landed at Fukuji.

  ‘We waited for four hours,’ Sayomi said. ‘There weren’t just a few helicopters, there were a lot. We waited and waited. None of them even came close to us. A very desperate feeling was growing in me.’

  The men of the village conferred once again, and decided to send a team downriver to go to the school and find out for themselves what was going on.

  They drove past the spilled planks from the timber yard and through the village of Yokogawa, where everything appeared normal: a Shinto shrine, Buddhist temple, and two rows of houses facing one another across the road, none of them visibly damaged. Then they reached the rise that jutted out and concealed the view of the last stretch of the great river. It became obvious only as they crossed it that this unremarkable barrier marked the threshold dividing life from death.

  Physically, Yokogawa had been untouched by the disaster. A high embankment and the bend in the river had shielded it from the water. But beyond the hill, the tsunami had surged upstream, overwhelmed the embankment, and risen with deadly force. The men looked out to see what Hitomi, from her opposite vantage point, also saw: the highway and embankment overwhelmed, the bridge broken, and the land turned to sea.

  Hitomi drove down in the dawn light,
through perfect stillness and hush. Hers was the only car on the road; it was as if the world was newly formed and she was the first to enter it. The surface of the great expanse of water flashed black and silver with the changing angle of the sun. But at the foot of the hill, Hitomi discovered that not all of the land had been overwhelmed.

  In the innermost reaches of the valley, a hamlet called Irikamaya had been spared. The village hall had become a refugee centre. Hitomi could see human figures milling around it. The roofs were covered in snow. The people were wrapped in coats and fleeces against the morning chill. She stumbled out of her car, calling out her children’s names and reeling from face to face in search of one that she knew. But everyone seemed to be looking for somebody, and none was from Magaki. Then, with a jolt of recognition and relief, she saw a boy whom she knew from Okawa Primary School – Tetsuya Tadano, a younger member of Daisuke’s judo team. His clothes were filthy. His right eye was bruised and swollen shut.

  ‘Tetsuya! Oh, Tetsuya, are you OK? What happened, Tetsuya? What happened to Daisuke?’

  ‘We were running away,’ said Tetsuya. ‘When we were running, Dai fell over. I tried to pull him up by his collar, but he couldn’t get up.’

  ‘So what happened to him? What happened to him, Tetsuya?’

  The boy shook his head.

  Then Hitomi noticed another fifth-year boy, Kohei Takahashi, similarly ragged and begrimed.