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

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  He was swept beyond the starting point of his journey towards the spot where a small park had formerly been, below a high section of embankment. The water was pouring over it in a black waterfall; Konno floated at the top, teetering on its brink. He was afraid that in the churn of the waterfall he would lose consciousness, and momentarily he did. When he came to, he was suspended on a crust of jammed and overlapping rubble. Among it was the red-tiled roof of a house, sturdy and intact around its wooden frame. He pulled himself up onto it, and for the first time since falling from his office he was out of the water.

  Then began what he described as the most frightening part of his ordeal, as he suddenly became aware of the profound cold.

  ‘A wind began to blow,’ he said. ‘A violent snowy wind. It was so cold. I had only a wet shirt, no jacket, no shoes. I started shivering. I could see the hills. They were close, and I am a good swimmer. But I was so cold and I knew that I would not make it. My senses were failing me again. I started counting. I wanted to know how long it would take before the tsunami reversed and took me out to sea again. I got to one hundred and sixty – I remember that number. And then the roof I was lying on began to move.’

  As his raft spun on the water, Konno began to lose himself again. Then into his failing vision came a place that he knew well. It was the home of an elderly lady named Mitsuko Suzuki, an old friend and formerly a teacher at the local nursery school. Her house was built a little way up the slope in a protective fold of the hill. Its ground floor was flooded, but the upper storey was clear of the water. From it, he heard a voice call out, ‘Hang on there!’

  It was Mrs Suzuki. She had seen the roof, and the prone figure clinging to it, without recognising who it was. And now, as if guided by her voice, the floating roof was edging towards her house. It came to a stop, wedged up tight against her front door.

  The face of the old lady looked down on him. ‘Young Teruo!’ she said. ‘What are you doing here? Climb up. Climb up!’

  ‘I can’t, Mrs Suzuki,’ Konno answered. ‘I have no strength.’

  ‘What are you talking about? No strength? Just come up.’

  Now the wave was renewing itself and pulling the roof away from the house again. It was Konno’s last chance. He forced himself up and found himself in a spaghetti of fallen electrical cables. ‘I was tangled up in them,’ he said. ‘I held onto them. And then I was swimming into her house through the front door. It was dark. Mrs Suzuki was upstairs. She was calling my name and shining a torch. I don’t know how I managed. I lost my memory of all that. But I got upstairs.’

  It was after five o’clock. Konno had spent more than two and a half hours in the water. He had saved himself from drowning, but now he was dying of hypothermia. He began to display the mania associated with the condition. Mrs Suzuki described to him later how, even at the extremity of exhaustion, he had acted like a madman, pulling open her drawers and cupboards, throwing their contents on the floor and scrabbling to find dry clothes. The old teacher soothed him, undressed him, laid him in her own bed and rubbed warmth back into him. Konno remembered nothing of this. He was conscious only of something he called ‘the golden hand’. ‘It was Mrs Suzuki’s hand,’ he said. ‘But it was also the hand of a Buddha. It was curved, soft, warm. I don’t think I ever saw her physically, during that time. I couldn’t open my eyes. But I saw the soft, round Buddha with golden hands.’

  He woke abruptly the next morning, electrified by anxiety. From Mrs Suzuki’s window, he could see that the water had retreated; ignoring her anxious pleas, he made his way towards the town office. He wanted to find the others who had been sheltering there, the people whom he had herded into the secure room. It was no more than a few hundred yards from the old lady’s house. Picking through snow and rubble in a pair of slippers, it took him an hour. He scaled a rise from which the office was visible, and immediately understood that the worst had happened.

  The building itself was a gaping shell. The area all around it was littered with bodies, half submerged in muddy pools, draped over railings. Most terrifying of all was the complete silence. ‘It was a world without sound, without any sound at all,’ said Konno. ‘I was trembling with terror.’

  A single other survivor from the town office had washed up to the hill and been helped to safety. Everyone else had died – the policemen, the firemen, the children and the old people on walking sticks and in wheelchairs. Abe, whom Konno had seen bobbing towards the hills, had reached them, alive. But there he had lost his strength and died of exposure during the night.

  What was it that spared Konno when so many others died? Was it physical strength or mental determination – or just the lucky timing of a last deep breath of air before he plunged into the water? His body was black with bruises where objects in the water had collided with him, but his face was unmarked, and his worst injuries were three broken fingers. He returned immediately to work, organising refugees, identifying bodies, consoling the families of the bereaved.

  They were dreadful, crushing tasks, even for one who had not gone through such an experience. But Konno found that it had left him with an indifference to mental hardship, and an absence of trepidation of any kind. He had no fear, of life or of death. He was like a man who had suffered a dangerous disease, to survive with complete immunity to future infection. The prospect of his own extinction – now, soon or far in the future – was a matter to him of no concern at all.

  The River of Three Crossings

  Tetsuya Tadano came to on the hill, blinded by mud and with the roar of the tsunami in his ears. His limbs were immobilised by spars of debris and by something else, something wriggling and alive, which was shifting its weight on top of him. It was Kohei Takahashi, Tetsuya’s friend and fifth-year classmate. Kohei’s life had been saved by a household refrigerator. It had floated past with its door open as he thrashed in the water, and he had squirmed into it, ridden it like a boat and been dumped by it on his schoolmate’s back. ‘Help! I’m underneath you,’ Tetsuya cried. Kohei tugged him free. Standing on the steep slope, the two boys beheld the scene below.

  Tetsuya’s first thought was that he and his friend were already dead. He took the raging water to be the River of Three Crossings, the Japanese equivalent of the River Styx. Those who have led good lives cross the river safely by bridge; evil-doers must take their chances in the dragon-ridden waters. Innocent children, being neither sinful nor virtuous, rely on a kindly Buddha to make their passage, and to protect them from the depredations of hags and demons.

  ‘I thought I’d died,’ Tetsuya said. ‘Dead … the River of Three Crossings. But then there was the New Kitakami Great Bridge, and the traffic island. And so I thought this might be Kamaya after all.’

  The water, which had receded, began to surge up the hill again. The two boys tottered up the slope. Tetsuya’s face was black and bruised. In the churn of the tsunami, the ill-fitting plastic helmet that he wore had twisted on its strap and dug brutally against his eyes. His vision was affected for weeks; he could make out only dimly what was going on in the water below.

  Kohei’s left wrist was broken and his skin was punctured by thorns, but his vision was unaffected. Whatever was visible of the fate of his school and his schoolmates, he saw it. He would never talk publicly about it.

  Tetsuya became aware that an expression of glazed sleepiness was passing over Kohei’s face. ‘Hang on, I thought – that’s dangerous,’ Tetsuya said. ‘I can’t have him saving me, then dying on me.’ But his friend was becoming more and more detached from the here and now. Tetsuya’s mind, too, began to drift and wander. He struggled even to remember what day it was. His little sister had been in the schoolyard too; his mother, who had disappeared on her vague errand, must be out there somewhere. He thought of the soldiers of the Japan Self-Defence Forces: surely by now they must be on their way. He called out to the soldiers: Help! Help! ‘But they didn’t come,’ Tetsuya remembered. ‘And while I was thinking about all these things, Kohei had fallen asleep.’r />
  With their loudspeakers blaring evacuation warnings, Toshinobu Oikawa and his colleagues from the town office had raced out of Kamaya and up to the traffic island opposite the Great Bridge. To his dismay, cars were still coming into the village from the opposite direction, towards the oncoming tsunami. They pulled in, with the aim of setting up a checkpoint to force drivers to turn back. Hardly had they parked when the water began to pour over the embankment.

  ‘It came down over us like a waterfall,’ Oikawa said. ‘We ran. There was no time to think.’ The only place of safety was a steep slope on the other side of the same hill that backed onto the school. Four of them reached it and scrambled clear, by a matter of seconds. One man, Sato, was caught by the water, but was dragged and yanked out by his colleagues. The sixth man, Hideyuki Sugawara, was trapped in his car and tumbled away by the waters, never to be seen alive again.

  From the hillside they watched the tsunami swallow up the road and the traffic island. That was the place of evacuation chosen by the deputy headmaster, Ishizaka – if any of the teachers or children had ever reached it, they would have perished there under thirty feet of water. By reckoning the distance the tsunami had travelled since it broke over the pine forest, and the time that had passed, Oikawa calculated its speed – more than forty miles an hour. The pines, carried by the water, added greatly to its destructive power – sixty-foot-long battering rams, which clubbed and crushed whatever they encountered. Where they met the bridge, the trunks became entangled in its arches, turning it into a kind of dam and diverting the tsunami’s flow over the downstream embankment – in other words, over Kamaya. ‘It made it much worse,’ said Oikawa. ‘There was still water going under the bridge, of course. But the barrier of trees was pushing some of it back, over the village and the school.’

  The construction of the embankment was of uneven quality: in places, the water washed it away like a child’s sandcastle, leaving the houses behind it completely exposed. The hamlet of Magaki suffered this fate. ‘Mr Sato, who was with us, lived in Magaki,’ Oikawa remembered. ‘He watched his own house being washed away. His parents, his daughter, his grandchild were in the house. He lost all of them. He was shouting, screaming, “My house, my house!”’

  One of the men had with him a video camera, and at one point he turned it on. The 118-second film1 is the only recording of the tsunami in full spate in the Okawa area. In the hands of the stricken cameraman, the image veers wildly back and forth between the black river, the green girders of the bridge and Magaki, already reduced to a single house. Suddenly, the camera is pointing up at trees and the sky; then it is lying on the ground amid stalks of dry grass. The voice of the man holding the camera can be heard calling out, ‘Is the school OK? What about the school?’

  Shivering in his sodden clothes, Sato made his way down the far side of the hill with one of his colleagues. The remaining three, led by Oikawa, climbed up it, in search of survivors. Rubbing their gloveless hands, they called aloud as they peeped between trees. Eventually their cries were answered by a strong voice, that of old Kazuo Takahashi, who had run up the hill past the fleeing schoolchildren.

  Takahashi was a fierce and irascible old man. Reporters who called on him to ask about his experiences were sent packing. He had no interest in hearing it, but he was one of the heroes of that day. Half a dozen lives were saved by him at the meeting point of the land and the wave.

  The tsunami had caught up with him as he climbed the hill, but he found his feet and outran it. He was aware of cries all around, and one voice close at hand. He ran to it and found a woman trying to save a young girl, who was trapped between floating rubble. Takahashi, risking his own secure footing, reached down into the water and dragged her out. This was Nana Suzuki, from the first year of Okawa Primary, the youngest of the children to survive the tsunami. Striding along the margins of the hill, Takahashi pulled to safety five more people, most of them elderly.

  He led the survivors to a clearing on the hill, where they settled, shivering, on the ground. A cigarette lighter was produced, and a fire kindled with twigs and fragments of bamboo. From time to time, human calls could be heard through the trees, and Takahashi marched off in pursuit of them. After uniting with Oikawa’s team, they found Tetsuya and Kohei and seated them around the sputtering fire.

  Fourteen people were gathered there, all told. It was by now completely dark, snowing and profoundly cold. Most of the survivors were in wet clothes, and one old man was barefoot. No one spoke much. They fed the fire with twigs on which frost was forming. They propped up a branch close to the flames, draped with wet garments. There were no tears or hysteria; but no attempts at mutual encouragement, no songs to keep up the spirits. The minds of all those on the hill were turned to those who were not present – parents and grandparents, children and grandchildren, siblings and spouses, who must still be down there, somewhere.

  Among the survivors was a married couple in their sixties, who had been thoroughly drenched by the tsunami. The woman clutched to her what Oikawa took to be a glossy black doll. Then he saw the doll moving feebly. It was a tiny dog, which had entered the water white and had come out dyed by evil-smelling mud. ‘It was the same with the shirts we wore,’ Oikawa said. ‘In the tsunami, everything which was white became black.’

  The woman’s husband had no visible wounds, but it was obvious that he had suffered dreadful internal injury. He could not speak at all. From the beginning, his breathing was shallow and laboured. No one present on the hill had any medical expertise, and he needed help urgently. The main road was a few hundred yards away; to the village of Irikamaya it was less than a mile. But it was pitch black, in a forest littered with obstacles and slippery with ice. Each man and woman on the hill was completely absorbed by the personal struggle against the cold. The idea of abandoning the fire, even in pursuit of help for a gravely injured man, was insupportable. They laid him alongside the fire and tried to keep him warm. Abruptly, at around 3 a.m., his gasping stopped.

  ‘No one got upset by it,’ Oikawa said. ‘Even his wife didn’t display much grief. In those circumstances, after what they had all managed to survive, that thing – I mean, death – was not frightening there.’ It was snowing, steadily and heavily, and the earth was freezing. Tetsuya and the other two children were falling asleep on the cold ground. ‘Usually, you would stop that,’ Oikawa said. ‘You would stop a child from falling asleep in that kind of cold. But we let them sleep.’

  Around six, the sun rose. The three children, the dog and the ten surviving men and women stirred and picked themselves up from the ground. At the high-water mark of the wave, someone found a mandarin orange and a packet of custard creams, which the children shared. None had the strength to carry the corpse, which remained behind them on the hillside. They picked their way down to the road and along it to Irikamaya, where refugees were gathering from all over the district. There they encountered another survivor – Junji Endo, the single teacher left alive, who must surely know what had happened at the school.

  PART 4

  THE INVISIBLE MONSTER

  In the Web

  The first place I ever lived in Tokyo was a harbour island reclaimed from the edges of the Pacific Ocean. I had been there less than two weeks when my first earthquake struck. The tremor passed while I was still asleep, leaving the faintest smudge on my conscious mind: a sudden wakefulness, fugitive unease, evasive as an exhalation of smoke. I woke up, without understanding why. I felt a tugging need to switch on the light and sit up. I felt very much like a solitary foreigner in a strange city.

  Over breakfast, the Japanese family with whom I was staying told me about earthquakes. Last night’s tremor had been small, but unusual in that it had come and gone with a single jolt: usually they rumbled on, and the abruptness of the event suggested that the stirring of the crust was incomplete and that there was more movement to come. There were earthquakes all the time, they said, every few weeks at least – some unmistakable, some difficult to distinguis
h from the routine rumbling of the city: construction work, passing trucks, the vibration of underground trains. The last one to cause any alarm had been six months ago: all the joints of the apartment block creaking, the ceiling lights swinging crazily, neighbours crying out in alarm. And one day, of course, there would be a truly huge tremor, a repeat of the Great Kanto earthquake, which shook Tokyo and Yokohama before the war and started fires that killed a multitude. The Tokyo earthquakes came round on a regular cycle, and the next one was already overdue.

  I knew this. Everyone who comes to Japan acquires this information within a few days of arriving. The first thing you learn about Tokyo is that it won’t be there for much longer.

  My friends talked with gossipy animation – there was evidently a mischievous pleasure in imparting this frightening information to a new arrival. They spoke with a kind of scandalised amusement, and with no visible alarm or trepidation. Earthquakes, the mass destruction of human life, the obliteration of the city were matters of lively breakfast conversation, of no more concern than a violent rain shower or an unseasonable fall of snow.

  Sometime in the next few years, it is generally assumed, Tokyo will be shaken by an earthquake powerful enough to destroy large areas of the city1 and set off fires and tsunamis that will kill many tens of thousands of people. The reasoning is straightforward. Every six or seven decades, for several centuries, the Kanto plain, on which Tokyo, Yokohama and Kawasaki have merged into a single megalopolis, has been devastated by a vast tremor. The last one, which killed 140,000 people, took place in 1923. Seismologists point out that it is not, in fact, as simple as this2 – that past Tokyo earthquakes have originated in different faults, on separate and overlapping cycles, and that a sampling of a few hundred years is, in any case, too small to infer a pattern. But, for more nuanced reasons of their own, they agree with the conclusion: that widespread destruction is inevitable and, in geological terms, imminent.