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

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  ‘Kohei, where’s Daisuke?’

  ‘Dai was with me,’ he said. ‘He was behind me, running. We were in the water together. He was just behind me.’

  ‘So what happened to him, Kohei?’

  ‘He was floating.’

  Outside she found a third face from the primary school: a teacher named Junji Endo, a man who, surely, could provide some answers.

  ‘Mr Endo! Mr Endo, it’s Hitomi Konno, Daisuke’s mother. What happened? What happened at the school?’

  The teacher was sitting alone, hugging his knees with both hands. Hitomi leaned down to him and repeated herself. He hardly looked up.

  ‘Mr Endo? What happened at the school, Mr Endo?’

  He appeared to be in a state of deep abstraction. To Hitomi, it was as if his emotions had drained out of him.

  ‘No idea,’ he mumbled eventually. ‘No idea what’s going on.’

  Hitomi struggled to assemble these fragments of information. The primary school was on the other side of the hill from where she now stood. The boys and their teacher must have climbed up and over it in just the last few hours. If they had escaped, then others, including Daisuke, must have done the same; he might be up there still, on that hill. Hitomi walked away from the community centre and back down the road, wading in places, and began to climb the hill herself, calling her son’s name.

  ‘Dai! Daisuke! Has anyone seen Daisuke Konno?’

  But there was no one there. The area was so large, and paths branched in all directions, separated from one another by a density of pines. She descended the hill and stopped. Then she turned towards the river and waded further up the road to the place where her home had been.

  ‘It was just a lake,’ Hitomi remembered. ‘I couldn’t even see the foundations of the houses. I was walking all around, and getting very wet, calling the names of each member of my family. I wasn’t really conscious of what I was doing. I thought that if I kept calling their names, someone would reply. People tried to stop me. They were looking at me as if I was mad. But I couldn’t think what else to do.’

  Sayomi’s husband, Takahiro, did not accompany his neighbours on their mission downriver. For reasons that were not discussed, it had been decided that men with children at Okawa Primary School should be excluded from the party. But Takahiro heard from them on their return. They had eventually got a lift by boat to a spot on the embankment close to Magaki. One group of men had gone to Irikamaya. The rest had picked their way through the rubble to the school itself.

  Going about the village, Sayomi crossed paths with the wife of one of the men in the party. ‘The woman was weeping,’ she remembered. ‘She refused to look me in the eye.’ But Sayomi insisted that she didn’t feel hopeless. She said, ‘I strongly believed that, although they might not be coming back by helicopter, the children were fine. There were no phones or electricity. They might have been taken to the big sports centre in town, and just not been able to get in touch with us.’

  She was at home when Takahiro came back from the briefing by the search party. Japanese parents address one another as oto--san and okaa-san – Father and Mother – particularly when family matters are being discussed, and this was how Takahiro began.

  ‘He came in and called to me, “Mother … ”’ Sayomi remembered. ‘And I thought it might be good news.’

  ‘Mother, there’s no hope,’ Takahiro said. ‘There’s no hope.’

  ‘What?’ said Sayomi. ‘No hope for what?’

  ‘The school is done for,’ he said. ‘There is no hope.’

  ‘I just seized his shirt,’ Sayomi told me. ‘I grabbed his chest. “I don’t understand,” I said. Then I couldn’t stand up any more.’

  Takahiro recounted what he been told: that the bodies of two children from the school had been recovered so far, with many more certain to be found, and that only a handful had survived, including two pupils from the fifth year.

  ‘One of them must be Chisato,’ Sayomi said.

  ‘They are both boys,’ said Takahiro.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘One of them is Kohei.’

  To Sayomi, leaning backwards over the brink, this name was like a harness buckled around her waist; a smile came to her mouth as she recalled the moment. For in the fifth-year class Chisato and Kohei were the keenest rivals, and had been since they were small. ‘After sports day, Chisato would say, “I was faster than Kohei” or “I easily beat Kohei,”’ Sayomi told me. If Kohei had survived, then it was impossible that Chisato was not alive too.

  Jigoku

  Hitomi Konno finally reached the school early the following morning. It was the 13 March 2011, the Sunday.

  In a different time, the walk from Irikamaya would have taken twenty minutes, but Hitomi spent more than an hour picking her way along the road beneath the hill, over an obstacle course of water and debris. The rubble included large sections of houses which had been picked up and then dropped by the wave, cars and vans, upended and crushed, and the smallest household items: shoes, sodden garments, cooking pots, tea pots, spoons. Broken pine trees made up an inexplicably large volume of the mess; their resinous scent competed with the corrupt stink of the black mud, which coated everything that was not submerged in water. Of the houses that had once been here, not one in twenty survived even as a ruin.

  Finally Hitomi reached the point where the inland road met the highway along the river, beside the New Kitakami Great Bridge. The northernmost third of the bridge, a span of 200 yards, had collapsed and disappeared into the water, exposing bare concrete piles. From here the road had angled down into Kamaya, a typically jumbled Japanese village of low concrete buildings alongside traditional wooden houses with tiled roofs. Until two days ago, all but the top of Okawa Primary School had been obscured by them, and by the cherry trees planted around it.

  Today, though, the school was the first thing Hitomi saw, or its outline. It was cocooned in a spiky, angular mesh of interlocking fragments, large and small – tree trunks, the joists of houses, boats, beds, bicycles, sheds and refrigerators. A buckled car protruded from the window of one of the upper classrooms. A hundred yards beyond, a single concrete structure – the village clinic – was still standing, and in the middle distance a filament-thin steel communications mast. But the buildings in the main street of houses, the lanes that led off it and the houses and shops arrayed along them – all had ceased to exist.

  Beyond Kamaya had been a succession of hamlets, and beyond them fields, low hills, the swaying curve of the river and finally the Pacific Ocean. At the river’s distant mouth there was a beach, popular with surfers and swimmers, and a dense forest of pines, which had been planted as a windbreak and a place of recreation. It was those pine trunks, 20,000 of them, that had been ripped out and transported three miles inland, distributing their distinctive smell. The village, the hamlets, the fields and everything else between here and the sea had gone.

  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 400 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.

  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.

  A man named Ryosuke Abe reached Kamaya at about the same time as Hitomi. His house, his wife, his daughter, his son-in-law and his two grandchildren had been in the village at the time of the tsunami. Abe himself worked on a building site in the city, and his way home had been blocked by the flooded road and broken bridge. By the time he got to the village, two policemen had taken up positions in front of it. To his amazement and indignation, they diffidently tried to bar his way. He began to argue, then gave up and simply walked straight past them.

  Abe, Hitomi and everyone describing the scene in the first days after the tsunami used the same word. Jigoku: hell. The image they had in mind was not the conventional landscape of lurid demons and extravagant, fiery tortures. There are other hells in Japanese iconography – hells of ice and water, mud and excrement, in which naked figures, stripped of all dignity, lie scattered across a broken plain.

  ‘What stays in my memory,’ Abe said, ‘is pine trees, and the legs and arms of children sticking out from under the mud and the rubbish.’

  Abe was a village leader, a construction boss, an active, practical-minded man in his early sixties. He began to pull bodies out and to lay them out on the roadside. At first he used his bare hands. Then he waded back to his car and returned with his tools. In some places a shovel was useless, because the bodies of the children were so thickly heaped on top of one another, where they had been laid by the retreating wave.

  By the afternoon, a handful of people had gathered to join the effort. It was dangerous, precarious work, because there was so little solid ground. Even where the waters had receded, they had left layered decks of rubble that slid or collapsed underfoot, all of it broken, much of it razor-sharp and covered with foul, squelching mud. Stepping uncertainly among the jutting spines and raw edges, the men in the group hauled up tree trunks and broken spars of wood, bent back sheets of corrugated aluminium and prised open the doors of crushed cars. When they found bodies, they carried them to a traffic island opposite the bridge where the women, among them Hitomi Konno, laid them out and washed them in murky water hauled by bucket out of the river. ‘Of course there was nothing to cover the bodies with,’ Hitomi said. ‘We pulled mattresses out of the rubble and laid them out on those, and covered them up with sheets, clothes, anything we could find.’ Almost as carefully as the bodies, they retrieved and set aside the distinctive square rucksacks, carefully labelled with name and class, which all Japanese primary schoolchildren carry.

  There was no panic, or even much sense of urgency. Without anyone saying as much, it was understood that there was no question of finding anyone alive. ‘No one was just looking for his own friends or grandchildren,’ Mr Abe said. ‘We were pulling everyone out, whoever they were. Every man was weeping as he worked.’

  Friends, rivals, neighbours, schoolmates, nodding acquaintances, blood relatives, old sweethearts – all came out of the undiscriminating muck.

  By the end of the first day, Abe had dug out ten children. Most of them had lost their clothes and their name badges. But he recognised many of the faces.

  That afternoon, someone told Abe that they had seen his wife, Fumiko. He hurried to Irikamaya and there she was, with his daughter, both of them uninjured. ‘It was more than a matter of being relieved,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t believe that they were alive.’ But his son-in-law and two granddaughters were still missing.

  He would spend three months in the village, picking through mud in the search for bodies. One day, the women called him over to the place where the bodies were laid out for washing. Among them was his own ten-year-old granddaughter, Nao. Abe had lifted her out himself. She had been so covered with mud that he had not recognised her.

  Nao’s nine-year-old younger sister, Mai, was found a week later, and their father a week after that. ‘The older girl was just the way she had always been,’ Abe told me. ‘She was perfect. It was just as if she was asleep. But a week later – well, seven days in those conditions makes a big difference.’ And he wept.

  Nine miles inland, beyond the reach of the wave, was an indoor sports centre, which had become a centre for emergency relief. Entire families were sleeping in the basketball court on borrowed blankets and squares of folded cardboard. Sayomi Shito’s eldest sister, Takami, a brisk and formidable woman whose own family lived safely inland, took upon herself the job of going there to find her niece and bring her home. The confusion caused by the disaster was extreme, but people did not simply disappear. How difficult could it be?

  Okawa Primary School.

  Fifth Year.

  Chisato Shito.

  But after joining the throng inside the sports centre, Takami’s confidence fell away. She found herself one among hundreds, moving anxiously from one desk and dormitory and noticeboard to another.

  After several fruitless hours, someone suggested a different kind of place where such a girl might be. Takami’s heart quailed at the thought; she didn’t have the strength to go alone. She picked up her other sister and drove with her to the place, where they consulted a much shorter list of names. But only immediate family members were allowed inside.

  She went to Chisato’s father, Takahiro, and told him what she had found.

  Soon after, Takahiro came to Sayomi. She was in the kitchen again, preparing the latest batch of rice balls. Takahiro said, ‘Mother, it’s time to prepare yourself. We’ve found Chisato.’

  Sayomi told me, ‘When I heard that, I started to leave at once. But then I realised that I’d need food for her to eat, and clothes for her to wear, and all kinds of things, so I went about getting them all together.’

  Takahiro said, ‘You don’t need any of that. Just come.’

  It was two years later when Sayomi told me the story. As she remembered it, she got into the car without knowing where she was being taken, but in the calm belief that she was about to be reunited with her daughter.

  To Sayomi’s surprise, they drove past the sports centre where the refugees were sheltering and up the hill to a place she knew intimately – the high school where Sayomi and her sisters had all been pupils, and where Chisato would eventually go. ‘There was a kind of reception desk which they’d set up there,’ she said. ‘Takahiro and my brother-in-law stood by it, going through some sort of documents. They told me to stay in the car.’

  Sayomi slipped out and ran into the school. She found herself inside its gymnasium.

  ‘It was the first time I’d been there in thirty years,’ she said. ‘There were tables and chairs. They’d divided off part of the gym with plastic sheets. So I looked in, and there were blue tarpaulins on the floor and shapes laid out on them, covered with blankets.’

  A man was approaching Sayomi, holding out a pair of shoes. ‘He was saying, “Is there any mistake?” There wasn’t a mistake. They were Chisato’s shoes. I saw her name inside them, in my handwriting.’

  Now Takahiro was in the gymnasium. He was gathering one of the shapes up in his arms and lifting the blanket.

  ‘Don’t come yet,’ he said to Sayomi.

  ‘But I could see,’ she told me.

  She went on: ‘He lifted up one of the blankets.1 And then he was nodding, and saying something to the man who was in charge there. When I saw that, I thought, “What are you nodding for? Don’t nod. Don’t nod.” They were telling me not to come in, but I rushed in. Chisato was there. She was covered in mud. She was naked. She looked very calm, just as if she was asleep. I held her and lifted her up, and called her name over and over, but she didn’t answer. I tried to massage her, to restore her breathing. But it had no effect. I rubbed the mud from her cheeks, and wiped it out of her mouth. It was in her nose too, and it was in her ears. But we had only two small towels. I wiped and wiped the mud, and soon the towels were black. I had nothing else, so I used my clothes to wipe off the mud. Her eyes were half open – and that was the way she used to sleep, the way she was when she was in a v
ery deep sleep. But there was muck in her eyes, and there were no towels and no water, and so I licked Chisato’s eyes with my tongue to wash off the muck, but I couldn’t get them clean, and the muck kept coming out.’

  Hitomi Konno and her husband, Hiroyuki, found one another the following week. It was at that moment that she gave up hope. She had been spending mornings at the school, where she washed and identified bodies, and the afternoons in Irikamaya village hall, where she cooked and cleaned for her fellow refugees. It was difficult to know what else to do, for she was still looking for her children, Mari, Rika and Daisuke, and her mother- and father-in-law. Hitomi had no illusions about what had happened; she understood what the worst was, for it was all around her. But she was sustained, like many in her situation, by the simple instinct that, whatever was happening to other people, it was impossible – in fact, it would be ridiculous – for her own family to be extinct. Insupportable, soul-crushing, unfathomable – but also just silly. We’re all fine. Don’t worry, Mari had written in those first moments after the earthquake. ‘I thought, “They must be alive. They must be alive,”’ Hitomi said. ‘I couldn’t give up. When the phones came back on, I sent text messages, I tried calling over and over again.’

  Hitomi took a boat to the big sports centre, and found Hiroyuki there.

  It is conventional to picture such reunions as joyful moments of emotional release. But the emotions are too big, and too mixed with despair. Over the past few days, Hiroyuki had arrived at the belief that he had lost his parents, two daughters, son and wife. When he saw Hitomi, he adjusted his understanding: as it turned out, he had lost his mother, father and three children. ‘Of course we were glad to see one another,’ Hitomi said. ‘But we were so preoccupied with thoughts of the children. Until I found them, I couldn’t feel any relief.’

  Hitomi’s head-shaking refusal to take death seriously was not shared by her husband. Hiroyuki joined the search for bodies, in Kamaya, and in the area of the Fuji lake, where many of the component parts of their home village, Magaki, had fetched up. One day they found the top part of their house – the upper floor and roof, virtually intact, tossed by the wave onto a shore of the lake. A team was grimly assembled to break through the tiles. The Konnos expected the fulfilment of all their fears, the trapped corpses of their family. Inside, the tatami mats were still in place, but there was little else there. They found Rika’s pink Hello Kitty purse and what came to be very precious: an old album filled with photographs of the children when they were small.