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

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  Naomi came back to the school whenever she could. Time, as she experienced it, was passing in an unfamiliar way. There was so much to do for the family at home, and doing it was such an effort. She would spend hours queuing for petrol and food, drive home, drop off her supplies and then drive to the mortuary, or wade through black water to the school to scrutinise the dead. One day she found one of Koharu’s shoes, and later her school backpack. These finds were heartbreaking and consoling at the same time. Naomi harboured no false hopes. Bodies were still coming out of the debris at the rate of several a day. She knew it was only a matter of time before her daughter came out too.

  At the beginning of April, the nurseries and kindergartens reopened. With the two youngest children off her hands during the day, Naomi was able to devote herself to the search for Koharu.

  She found herself one of a dwindling group of parents, loitering by the traffic island at the entrance to Kamaya. There was a shy, quiet man named Masaru Naganuma who was looking for his seven-year-old son, Koto; as a qualified heavy-vehicle operator, Masaru sometimes drove the digger that scooped and divided the mud. Naomi became especially close to a woman named Miho Suzuki, who had buried her twelve-year-old son, Kento, but was still searching for her nine-year-old daughter, Hana.

  Masaru, in particular, was unswerving in his determination to find his son. Each morning Naomi would come to the school and watch him out in the black mud, turning it over and over with the arm of the yellow digger. As spring came on, rich colour returned to the hills and the river – the dark green of the pines, the lighter shades of the deciduous trees, and the fluffy yellow of bamboo. But at the heart of the landscape of leaf and water was darkness: this pit of mud, which had sucked down everything precious and refused to give it up. How deep was that mud? It seemed bottomless. It stuck to Naomi’s clothes and boots, and followed her home in her car. Liquid mud dripped off the caterpillar tracks on Masaru’s digger, as he rode it out every morning to look for his little boy. ‘Just look around this place,’ Naomi said. ‘What parent could rest, having left the body of their child under this earth and rubble, or floating out there in the sea?’

  Naomi was a teacher of English. She spoke it well, when she tried, with a clear American accent. But she lacked all confidence, and in our conversations she used Japanese. Describing the events following the disaster, she talked fast and fluently, with sharp, emphatic gestures. But when I asked her about herself, she became hesitant and ill at ease.

  She had grown up in Sendai, but studied at a university in Okinawa, the chain of beautiful, subtropical islands far south of the Japanese mainland, where her father had been born. She had gone there filled with excitement and aspiration, but came away disappointed. ‘I have Okinawan blood, but I had never lived there,’ she said. ‘I wanted to study the old Okinawan language and learn Okinawan dance. But I accomplished less than half of what I wanted.’ After graduation, she left the sunny south and returned to the cold northern territory of her birth.

  Of all the Okawa mothers I met, Naomi was the clearest-sighted, even in the intensity of grief. For many of those who experienced it, the tragedy of the tsunami was formless, black and ineffable, an immense and overwhelming monster that blocked out the sun. But to Naomi, no less stricken than the others, it was glittering and sharp and appallingly bright. This harshly illuminated clarity was the opposite of consoling. It pierced, rather than smothered, and left nowhere to hide.

  In all the time I spent with Naomi, I never went to her home. Her father-in-law did not care for journalists, and she didn’t want to upset him unnecessarily. We would meet at the school and drive back up the road towards Ishinomaki to talk in a roadside restaurant. At the beginning, she told me, the search for the missing children had been performed by local people, who cleared away what rubble they could, and by the police, who supervised the processing of the dead. Then came soldiers of the Japan Self-Defence Forces. At first this had been a cause for optimism, as the mesh of rubble encasing the school was removed piece by piece. But the longer the search for the children went on, the more the scale of the task was exposed.

  In the early days, children had been found all around, thrown up against the hollows of the hill – thirty-four of them in one soft heap. Then they began to come out in smaller groups of one or two; and then the flow diminished to a trickle. By late March, some thirty of the seventy-four missing children had still not been found; a fortnight later, there were just ten missing. At the end of April, four children were recovered in quick succession from a pond that had supplied water to the rice fields of Kamaya. Some of them were five feet below the water and mud, beyond the reach of the rescuers’ probing poles. It had become obvious that to search the area fully, the whole area would first have to be drained. So mechanical pumps were acquired, and a generator that had to be fuelled around the clock. Then bodies began to turn up in the Fuji lake, two miles away, on the far side of the hill.

  Rather than comprising a single wave, the tsunami had consisted of repeated pulses of water, washing in and washing out again, weaving over, under and across one another. Some of the objects that fell into its embrace had been lifted and deposited close to their point of origin; but many had been sucked under and thrown up, pulled back and dashed forward again, in an irretrievably complex operation of internal currents and eddies. The obvious places had all been searched; nowadays, new sets of remains were being found far from the school; and whenever this happened, the potential area of search expanded once again.

  In May, a doctor took swabs from the mouths of Naomi, Shinichiro and their children, in order to isolate Koharu’s DNA. At the end of that month, parts of a small body washed up in Naburi, a fishing village on the Pacific coast, four miles from the school, across lagoon and mountains. The condition of the remains made it impossible to identify them by sight; it took three months for the laboratory to establish that they belonged not to Koharu, but to another missing girl.

  The soldiers extended their search upriver to Magaki and towards the Fuji lake, and downriver to the villages around the Nagatsura lagoon. New units rotated in and out from all over the country; Naomi met so many different commanders that, with their short hair and identical uniforms, she found it hard to tell them apart. Then, three months after the tsunami, the Self-Defence Forces withdrew.

  The search operation, which formerly consisted of ten earth-movers and hundreds of men, shrank to a single team of policemen, and Masaru Naganuma in his digger. Naomi and Miho still came to the school every day. By this stage, there wasn’t much they could usefully do. When Masaru’s steel arm uncovered something, they would wade out and examine it. They found mattresses and motorcycles and wardrobes, but no more remains. They tidied the shrine in front of the school, and threw away the dead flowers. Sometimes a second digger would work in tandem with the first one. As they moved side by side, their long yellow limbs waving and plunging, it was almost as if they were dancing.

  An idea was taking form in Naomi’s mind. She consulted Masaru about it. ‘Why not try?’ he said. In late June, she participated in a week-long course at a training centre near Sendai. All the other participants were men. They showed no curiosity about Naomi, and she felt no urge to explain herself. At the end of the week she came away with a licence to operate earth-moving equipment, one of the few women in Japan to possess such a qualification. She went immediately to work, borrowing a digger of her own and sifting the mud in search of Koharu.

  Her father-in-law strongly opposed this development. He argued that operating heavy machinery was dangerous for a woman, and that her place was at home, looking after her children, husband and in-laws. Naomi listened patiently to what he had to say and paid it no attention.

  The Old and the Young

  When I heard the news, two weeks afterwards, the surprise was not that Takashi Shimokawara was dead, but that he had lived this long. I was driving back to Tokyo late in March 2011 when a friend called and read out the small, down-page headline in the Japanese
newspaper: Noted Athlete Dies in Tsunami. For the past fortnight, as I travelled among the ruined coastal towns of north-east Japan, I had found myself thinking about Mr Shimokawara and the afternoon that I had spent with him two and a half years earlier.

  I had never heard of Kamaishi, the town where he lived; the train that took us there was slow and trundling, and stopped at stations that were no more than platforms beside a deserted road. It was a freezing December afternoon in one of the coldest parts of the country, but Mr Shimokawara’s house was cosy and warm. His daughter-in-law served green tea and biscuits as he showed us his world-record certificates, and later we drove to the recreation ground where he trained, and photographed him as he stretched and jogged and made practice throws of his javelin and shot.

  After more tea, we said our goodbyes, and took the slow train home again. One fact alone had elevated this from an interesting to an unforgettable experience: Mr Shimokawara was 102 years old.

  Even to lift a javelin would be an achievement for most such men, but Mr Shimokawara threw it further than anyone his age. He competed in the class known as M-100, for athletes in their eleventh decade of life. His record throw – of 12.75 metres, at the Japan Masters Athletics championship in 2008 – broke the world centenarian javelin record, formerly held by an American. Often, after our brief meeting, I would find myself thinking of Mr Shimokawara and wondering how he was.

  Far from having merely clung on to life, he had flourished. The previous year, he had turned 104. The article recording his death reported that at the Japan Masters in 2010 he had narrowly failed to beat his own world records. Eighteen thousand five hundred people died in the disaster, and each of them was a tragedy. But to have survived to such a great age triumphantly fit and alert, to have lived through two World Wars, only to be felled by something as capricious and random as a tsunami, was unbearably bitter and ironic.

  A month later, I went back to Kamaishi to look for traces of one of the disaster’s oldest victims.1 I found them in the home where I had talked to him two and half years before, a stout two-storey house, still standing 400 yards from the sea. Mr Shimokawara’s middle-aged grandson, Minoru, was sorting through what remained, with a team of helpers and friends. There was his grandfather’s white tracksuit, and the postcard confirming his most recent achievements – 3.79 metres in the shot and 7.31 metres in the discus. And there were photograph albums, sodden but intact, the colours of the prints bulging and dissolving before our eyes.

  They contained pictures of Mr Shimokawara holding his medals, standing alongside his wife and at a school reunion. All of them showed a cheerful elderly man, not all that much fitter or healthier than the one I had met – and plenty of these photographs were more than forty years old.

  This is the most dizzying, and at the same time the most banal, thing about the situation of centenarians – just how very, very old they are. Takashi Shimokawara was born eight years before the First World War, and outlived all of his contemporaries and two of his six children. The youngest of his eight great-grandchildren was younger than him by more than a century. And yet there had been nothing about Mr Shimokawara to suggest that he would live to such an age.

  Both his parents died in their fifties. He led an active life as a high-school PE teacher, but he had his share of illness, including tuberculosis and gallstones. He admitted to me that as a young man he used to drink and smoke heavily, and that he still enjoyed a glass of sake with meals.

  ‘When did you give up smoking?’ I asked.

  ‘When I was eighty,’ he said.

  I recounted this to his grandson, who smiled and said, ‘He lied. When I went drinking with him he had much more than a glass, and he used to cadge my cigarettes.’

  All his life Mr Shimokawara was active in the community, as a teacher, local councillor and in later years as a local celebrity. But despite being surrounded by people, I recognised something painful: that he was intensely, unquenchably lonely. He had been a widower for thirty-five years. Many of the children he taught as a schoolmaster had long ago died of old age. ‘All my brothers and sisters are dead,’ he said. ‘I’m the last. My oldest friends are twenty years younger than me. My situation is fearful, in a way. So many have died around me – I have been to so many funerals. I don’t cry about it, but this is my biggest sadness, this loneliness.’

  The second painful thing dawned on me a little later: that, at the age of 102, Mr Shimokawara had a lively fear of death.

  Lulled by clichés about ‘serene’ old people, I had assumed that attachment to life diminishes with age. But here was an extreme example of the opposite: an ancient man fending off death with javelin and discus. It was this – the urge to stay on his feet at all costs – that drove his athletic achievements. ‘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.’ And all of this made the facts of his eventual death all the more pitiful.

  Because Mr Shimokawara’s son and daughter-in-law died with him, his friends and family had to work out for themselves the puzzle of the family car. It was found a few days after the disaster, carefully parked on a hill, safely beyond the reach of the tsunami. This discovery immediately inspired hope – for repeated searches of the area around the family home had turned up no trace of the Shimokawaras. Then eight days later, the three bodies were recovered from a public hall a few hundred yards from the house – and it was this that unlocked the sad truth.

  In Kamaishi, as elsewhere, the earthquake itself caused little serious damage, and tsunami warnings were immediately broadcast through loudspeakers across the town. Mr Shimokawara’s seventy-three-year-old son had plenty of time to help his father and wife into the car and to drive them to the single-storey public hall. It was only a few hundred yards from the sea, and scarcely more elevated than the family house. But by the time this became obvious, it would have been much too late.

  The wave surged around Mr Shimokawara’s house, although its upper floor was spared. But it overwhelmed the public hall and drowned those who had retreated there. Three minutes’ walking distance further up the road, the water petered out against a steadily rising slope. ‘If they had stayed with the car, or walked up the road, or even just stayed at home and climbed the stairs, they would have made it,’ said Keizo Tada, an old friend. Instead, as a good citizen obediently following the drill, Mr Shimokawara’s son drove to safety, parked his car and calmly and obliviously walked back down the hill to his death.

  Takashi Shimokawara had lived through the 1933 tsunami, the Chile tsunami in 1960, and countless minor waves and false alarms. When his old friend Tada last spoke to him, he had talked of the forthcoming athletics championship when he would compete in the over-105 age group. Without question, he would have set new world records – he would, literally, have been in a class of his own.

  The funeral of such an old man would not normally be an occasion of intense grief and tragedy, but this one was. ‘To be honest, I still don’t feel as if they are dead,’ said Minoru, who buried his mother, father and grandfather on the same day. ‘Of course, I have identified the bodies, signed the documents, and organised the cremation. But it’s as if I’m in the middle of a nightmare, and the real pain is still coming towards me.’

  The tsunami was a disaster visited above all upon the old. Fifty-four per cent of those who perished were 65 or older,2 and the older you were, the worse your chances. But the converse of this was even more striking. The younger you were, the more likely you were to survive – and the number of children who were killed was astonishingly small.

  In the Indian Ocean tsunami that struck Indonesia,3 Sri Lanka and Thailand in 2004, children died disproportionately because they were less physically capable of swimming and dragging themselves to safety. In Japan, the opposite was true. Out of the 18,500 dead and missing, only 351 – fewer than one in fifty – were schoolchildren.4 Four ou
t of five of them died somewhere other than school: because they were off sick that afternoon or had been quickly picked up by anxious parents. It was much more dangerous, in other words, to be reunited with your family than to remain with your teachers.

  If you are ever exposed to a violent earthquake, the safest place you could hope to be is Japan; and the best spot of all is inside a Japanese school.fn1 Decades of technological experiment have bred the most resilient and strictly regulated construction in the world. Even against the immensity of the tsunami, Japan’s sea walls, warning systems and evacuation drills saved an uncountable number of lives: however great the catastrophe of 2011, the damage caused would have been many times worse if it had happened in any other country. And nowhere are precautions against natural disaster more robust than in state schools.

  They are built on iron frames out of reinforced concrete. They are often situated on hills and elevations, and all of them are required to have detailed disaster plans and to practise them regularly. On that afternoon, Japanese architecture and bureaucracy did an almost perfect job of protecting the young.

  No school collapsed or suffered serious physical damage in the earthquake. Nine of them were completely overwhelmed by the tsunami, and at one of them, in the town of Minami-Sanriku, a boy of thirteen was drowned as his class hurried to higher ground. But with one exception, every other school got all its children to safety.