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

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  In speaking of natural disasters, large casualty figures quickly acquire an air of unreality. To put them into perspective, consider the victims of the two atomic bombs. In Hiroshima in August 1945, 70,000 people were killed at once, and by the end of the year 60,000 more had died of injuries and radiation sickness. The Nagasaki bomb was less destructive, with a total of about 74,000 deaths. In 2004, the Japanese government predicted that an earthquake under Tokyo could kill as many as 13,000 people3 – one-tenth of a Hiroshima. Six years later, it considered a scenario in which a tremor originating in one fault sets off earthquakes in two more,4 and concluded that across the country 24,700 people could die – one-third of a Nagasaki. Projections made after the Tohoku disaster became gloomier, or more realistic. In 2012, a new study concluded that an earthquake and tsunami originating in the Nankai Trough5 could take 323,000 lives along the south-central Pacific Coast and cause 623,000 injuries.

  This was not the speculation of cranks or activists, but the carefully researched finding of Japan’s Cabinet Office, a deeply cautious organisation instinctively averse to alarmism. It took into account the many precautions and protective measures that Japan has developed – the sturdy construction, and sea walls, and regular evacuation drills. Despite all of these, its conclusion was blankly horrifying: the Nankai earthquake, which might strike at any time, could kill more people than four atomic bombs.

  What is it like to live with knowledge such as this in daily life? What goes on inside the heads of those living under sentence of earthquake?

  Recurring questions come to mind every few days, sometimes every few hours, especially in a new or unfamiliar quarter of the city. Sitting in a car on an elevated expressway, or walking through an underground shopping centre, you ask yourself, more in curiosity than in alarm: what if the Big One struck now? Are the pillars beneath that flyover strong enough? Would that plate-glass window hold? What would become of the large and rusty water tank on top of that old building? Finding a place to live crystallises the situation with particular clarity. Question one: is this apartment conveniently located, well appointed and reasonably priced? Question two: will it crush me to death when the ground starts to shake?

  The answer, in the case of almost all modern buildings, is no. One of the unexpected consequences of the March 2011 disaster was to diminish anxiety about earthquakes. Even in Sendai, the big city closest to the epicentre, the damage caused by the tremors alone was impressively slight. There were cracks and broken windows; the ceiling of the main hall of the station partially fell in; and on the edges of the city, older houses – especially those built on hillsides – slumped and slid on their foundations. But there were no big fires; no large modern buildings came close to collapse, and most of them suffered no significant damage at all.

  In a disaster caused by an earthquake, in other words, only a tiny proportion of the victims was killed by the earthquake itself.6 More than 99 per cent – all but a hundred people or so – died in the water. And to survive a tsunami, it was not enough to be in a strong building; it also had to be tall. During an earthquake, open ground – an uncluttered beach, for example – is the safest place to find yourself. In a tsunami, such exposure is deadly. Mentally, a rebalancing took place as one menace receded and another loomed. There was no improvement in the overall sense of security; those who lived through March 2011 simply exchanged one set of imaginings – of fire and blunt impact – for new mental images of death by drowning.

  I live and work in strong buildings, and on elevated ground. My home, my office and my children’s schools may be badly shaken and structurally damaged, may even be rendered uninhabitable, but it is unlikely they will collapse or be inundated. Japan’s wealth and advanced technology protect it from disaster better than anywhere else in the world. But the safety of any one individual depends entirely on where he or she is when the moment comes.

  Over dinner one evening in Tokyo I found myself among a group of friends discussing the very worst place to be in a big earthquake. One of us suggested the Tokyo monorail, a slender ribbon of steel and concrete on which trains from the airport glide high over the chemical and petroleum tanks in the south of the city. Someone else imagined being trapped in the subway, amid fracturing tunnels and blackness. My own phobia was the flimsy pedestrian bridges that extend across big roads, often sandwiched between a six-lane highway below and an expressway above. But as we talked, I became aware of the restaurant in which we were sitting. It was a dark, narrow snuggery on the eighth floor of a cramped and decrepit old building. Behind the counter, the chef was cheerfully pouring oil onto a pan that flared with a foot-tall plume of flame. The partitions, doors and the mats on which we were sitting were made of wood, paper and rushes.

  ‘Why does it not upset people more,’7 the journalist Peter Popham asked, ‘the fact that they might any day be roasted alive, gassed to death, buried in a landslide or in the wreckage of their own homes?’ People in Tokyo abandon the city from time to time, or lose their minds, or take their own lives, for the same reasons that they do such things anywhere in the world. But no one goes mad over earthquakes. Why not? What does it do to the unconscious, even to the soul, to exist with such precariousness?

  The first time I lived in Japan I was eighteen years old. I had come to Japan in search of strangeness and adventure – I had come precisely to seek out excitements such as earthquakes. But they also seemed to explain something about the city I was experiencing with such intensity. I spoke no Japanese, and knew almost no one in Japan. Tokyo, with its vastness and impenetrability, answered to something in my loneliness. I left the Japanese family with whom I had been staying on the edge of the bay, and found a room in the suburbs and a job at an English conversation school. On the morning train, I stared at the ideograms in a Japanese textbook. I spent my evenings in bars with red lanterns at their doors, with new friends, most of them foreigners as transient and untethered as me. On the last train home, I exchanged smiles with Japanese girls. It was close to the height of Japan’s ‘Bubble’ economy, the moment when Tokyo was briefly the richest city in history. The force of money was tearing down the old neighbourhoods and throwing them up again in steel and glass. The city, as I inhabited it, was as dazzling as a filament and as thin as tissue paper. It felt, in my excitement, like a place that was physically trembling, and that could at any moment come crashing down. It seemed entirely appropriate to learn that this was literally true.

  ‘Far from being dull to the dangers,8 acute awareness of them gives Tokyo people’s lives tone and brio,’ wrote Popham, during this same period. ‘The satisfaction of being a cog in the most elaborate and well-oiled machine in the history of the world is given an almost erotic twist by the knowledge that the machine is poised over an abyss.’ Tokyo, he concluded, is ‘a city helpless to save itself, and reconciled at some quite deep level to destruction and loss of life beyond all but the nuclear nightmares of other cities.’

  ‘Now I will tell how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made,’9 says Kublai Khan, in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities:

  There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed.

  This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children’s games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants.

  Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long.

  Earthquakes get into your dreams. But their meaning
changes as you grow older. When I was young, I was excited by the idea that Tokyo’s atmosphere of impermanence was a result of its inevitable doom. But that sense of things falling apart, the conviction that the centre cannot hold, is an adolescent notion: in reality, of course, the tension and insecurity came, not from the city, but from within me.

  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.

  ‘Some people can’t find the words,’ said Naomi Hiratsuka. ‘They just mutter, “Must have been terrible … ” and that’s it. It’s not that they don’t feel sympathy. They just don’t have a way to express it. But I get sick of hearing the same phrases over and over again. And then I meet people who pretend not to know anything about it, because that’s easier for them, just to ignore it and hope it’ll go away. Not that I particularly want to talk to people like that.’

  She paused and then smiled, as if at a private joke. ‘The thing is that if someone doesn’t mention it all, I think, “Why?” But if they’re full of pity, I don’t like that, either. I live my life day by day. I’m not always crying and feeling sorry for myself. Sometimes, even when we’re out at the site, digging, we have a chat and a laugh about something. And then we feel self-conscious about people seeing us smiling. I shouldn’t have to worry things like that, should I? It’s very difficult.’

  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.

  From the survivors of the tsunami, I learned that everyone’s grief is different, and that it differs in small and subtle ways according to the circumstances of loss. ‘The first thing was this,’ said Naomi. ‘Did you lose your children, or did your children survive? That divided people immediately: the children who lived and those who died.’ Thirty-four of the 108 pupils at the school survived the wave – because they had been picked up in time by their parents, or crawled miraculously out of the water. The horror of survival – the destruction of their community, the deaths of so many of their friends – was not to be underestimated. But in the eyes of those whose children had perished, they were the beneficiaries of almost unbearably good luck.

  ‘Some of those who lost their children find it impossible to talk to those whose children survived,’ Naomi said. ‘In some ways, it’s worse for people who were close.’ Naomi knew one mother who had collected her children from the school and taken them to safety. Her neighbour had not done so, and her children had died. ‘So the neighbour says to her, “Why? Why didn’t you take my kids too?” Of course, it doesn’t work like that. The school has rules – it wouldn’t have been allowed. But once something like that is put into words, that friendship is over.’

  Even among the bereaved there were gradations of grief, a spectrum of blackness indiscernible to those on the outside. It came down to a cold-hearted question: once the water had retreated, how much did you have left? Sayomi Shito had lost her beloved daughter Chisato; it would have been unthinkably callous to point out that her two older children, her husband, her extended family and her home were unharmed and intact. But others were acutely aware of Sayomi’s circumstances, and the precise degree to which they differed from their own. Naomi, for example, had also lost one child out of three, while her home, husband and the rest of her family had survived. But Sayomi had been able to find and bury Chisato quickly, while Naomi had gone through the prolonged anguish of hunting for Koharu’s remains.

  Then there were those worse off, who had lost some, though not all, of their children, and the entirety of their homes; and those even more wretched, who had lost their homes and their entire families. And even within this group, the most miserable division of the stricken, there were terrible distinctions. Hitomi Konno, for example, had lost her son and both her daughters, but soon recovered and cremated their bodies. In this, she was better off than Miho Suzuki, who had found her son, but five years later was still looking for her daughter, Hana.

  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, and 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; neighbours 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 quarrelling and reproaches, and felt the bitterness of injustice and envy, and fell out of love.

  Naomi Hiratsuka and Sayomi Shito were scarcely more than nodding acquaintances before the disaster. After it, they grew to hate one another. Of all the Okawa mothers, they were the ones whom I came to know best, and their mutual resentment was almost palpable. Sometimes I would visit Sayomi’s house after a meeting with Naomi, or vice versa. In exaggeratedly casual tones and with a thin smile, the second woman would ask after the first, and the air in the room became colder.

  Their antipathy was a function of the distinct tasks which each had set about with such energy. As Naomi sat in her digger, turning over the earth, Sayomi, her husband and the friends whom I had met that evening were pursuing a systematic investigation into the truth about what had happened at the school. Searching letters were sent to Ishinomaki city hall. Witnesses were sought out, and their accounts compiled. The group held a press conference at which they demanded that Junji Endo come before them again, to account for the anomalies in his story; and there were consultations with lawyers.

  To Sayomi, these two tasks – dredging the physical, and bureaucratic, mud – were complementary; Naomi’s contempt was baffling to her. ‘By pursuing the question of what happened, by forcing the authorities to take responsibility, that will also force them to carry out the search,’ she said. ‘We talk to the media to keep up the pressure, and so that public concern won’t fade away. I never interfered with her taking her digger licence. I’ve never criticised her. So I wonder why people such as Mrs Hiratsuka try to get us to do things their way.’

  But to Naomi, the campaigning of what she called the ‘Fukuji group’ was a practical hindrance, as well as a social embarrassment. Because they were so outspoken, Sayomi and her friends were assumed by many outsiders to be leaders among the Okawa parents, representative of the whole. But their unashamed directness, amounting, by Japanese standards, to plain aggression, irritated and mortified many. The barracking of the town officials in the public meeting was regarded as unforgivably bad manners. Their denunciations of the education board threatened the delicate architecture of relationships built up by Naomi, who depended upon the goodwill of the city government for diggers, for fuel and for the permissions necessary to continue her search. ‘I’m not in the least satisfied with the education board,’ Naomi told me. ‘But we need them, we need their cooperation, just to do what we have to do.’

  Something else distinguished Sayomi and the campaigning Fukuji parents, as Naomi pointed out: all had recovered the bodies of their children quickly – within a couple of weeks, at most. ‘From the beginning, it depended on whether you found your child or not,’ Naomi said. ‘When your child came home, when you had held a funeral, then you naturally moved onto the next question: why did this happen? And then anger could begin. But if your child was still out there, all you could thin
k about was her face, the only thing in your mind was the idea of finding her, finding her.’

  Naomi said: ‘The question is: what’s the purpose of pursuing the truth? What do you expect to come of it? Those people’ – and she meant Sayomi – ‘say, “Why did it happen? Why did it happen only at Okawa, but not at other schools?” But if you knew all that, then what? They say, “It’s for the future, it’s for the sake of other children. We want to draw lessons, so that our children didn’t die in vain.” But is that really all it is? Or are they simply laying blame? When you know exactly what happened, are you any better off? When you’ve got the truth in your hand, what are you going to do with it?’

  What Use Is the Truth?

  In all their dealings with the families of the dead children, the bureaucrats of the Ishinomaki Education Board maintained an exterior of calm and fussy courtesy. In the ‘explanatory meetings’, held several times a year, they sat in a dark-suited line, attending patiently to the distraught mothers and fathers with tilted heads. Their bows were slow and deep. In the most formal registers of language, they expressed their profound and sincere condolences. But about the city’s handling of the tragedy of Okawa Primary School there lingered an air of disreputable shabbiness, an odour of suppressed panic and cack-handed cover-up. It seemed, at times, to be as much a matter of incompetence as deliberate conspiracy. But every few weeks emerged some new example of fishiness and ineptitude.

  Early on, the education board had conducted an interview with the headmaster, Teruyuki Kashiba. The written record of this conversation contained obvious and inexplicable impossibilities. Kashiba claimed that immediately after the disaster,1 for example, he had travelled from his inland home to a spot on the Kitakami River in two hours, an impossibly fast journey. He described meetings with people who had no memory of seeing him on that day, and of a visit to a place which, at the time, was under five feet of water.