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

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  There were interviews, too, with the surviving children. They had lived through appalling trauma; their psychological state can only be imagined. But, in some cases, there was no parent present for these interviews, or any advance warning that they were to be conducted. When young Tetsuya Tadano was questioned, his interrogators simply turned up at his new school, with no attempt to seek the permission of his father.

  Parents who had been present noticed later that certain details were inexplicably omitted from the written summaries of these interviews. The most important of these were the words of Yuki Sato and Daisuke Konno, the two sixth-year boys who had pleaded with their teacher to be allowed to escape up the hill, who had been refused and who had both perished in the wave. A number of the surviving children had recounted this exchange. One of the officials, Shigemi Kato, had referred to it in an early meeting with the parents. This, it became clear, had been a bad and unintentional lapse on his part – ever after, when questioned about it, the members of the education board denied that any of the surviving children had ever told them such a thing. ‘I heard my child say during the interview that her friends were saying, “Let’s escape to the hill,”’ one mother told the meeting. ‘But that wasn’t written down at all.’

  The memos summarising parts of the interviews were identically worded, as if they had been cut and pasted one into the other. No audio recordings had been made; even the name of the person conducting the interview was not indicated. When parents asked to see the written notes taken at the time, they were told that Shigemi Kato had disposed of them.

  At a later meeting, Kato was pressed about the boys who had tried to run up the hill. During this exchange, his boss, Moto Yamada, was seen looking at Kato and raising his fingers to his lips as if to silence him. The gesture could be seen on the video recording of the meeting; Yamada repeated the hushing motion three times.

  And then there was the matter of the surviving teacher, Junji Endo.

  Of the various untruths in Endo’s testimony, the most baffling were his claims about the trees. Consistently, in recounting the events after the earthquake, he described the spectacle of pines on the hillside behind the school being toppled by the earthquake and its aftershocks. He recalled being pinioned by two cedars, and how the rising tsunami had lifted them off and miraculously freed him. His account conveyed a vivid impression of panicked survivors, having narrowly escaped death by water, cowering as the hillside shook with the collapse of deadly tree trunks.

  There were no fallen trees. Many people tramped up and down the hill in the weeks after the disaster, and not a single one was found. Trees, with flexible trunks and branches, efficiently dissipate the energy of earthquakes: they may shake and bend, but they rarely topple over. The landscape following the disaster was littered with pines, but these had been carried in from the beachside forest, and ripped from their roots not by the earthquake but by the tsunami.

  ‘If it was such a big a quake that so many trees fell down,2 all the houses would have collapsed too,’ said Kazutaka Sato. ‘Mr Endo was a nature lover. He must have known that.’

  The details of Endo’s testimony filtered outwards from the circle of the bereaved and into the community at large. The first person to denounce it was a car mechanic named Masahiko Chiba, whose house had been protected by its elevated position on the far side of the hill from the school. No other house so close to the river had survived the tsunami, and soon survivors – many of them wet, some of them injured – were converging on it. Among them were Junji Endo and Seina Yamamoto, the little boy who had escaped with him.

  The two arrived late that afternoon. Chiba’s wife was the first to see them – a man in a suit, and a young boy still wearing his white plastic helmet, stepping uncertainly down the hill. ‘The man in the suit said, “I could only rescue one,”’ Mrs Chiba recalled. ‘Those were his first words. I think he said something about Okawa school, but I had so much to think about that I didn’t listen carefully.’

  She remembered that the boy’s shoes and socks were wet, but that Endo’s clothes were dry. He still had his shoes, which he removed before stepping inside. ‘He wore a check suit,3 an indistinct brown-grey colour, and a bit shabby, typical for a teacher,’ she said. ‘But it was clean and it wasn’t wet. I remember this quite clearly.’

  One of the refugees staying in the house was an old man who could hardly walk. The following morning, Endo carried him on his back from the house to a waiting vehicle. Only a fit adult could have managed this; there was no sign at all that Endo was injured.

  Later, the Chibas read about the teacher’s own account of that afternoon: how he had been caught up in the tsunami and almost drowned; how he had lost his shoes and staggered down from the hillside in darkness; and how he had dislocated his shoulder. They were baffled and appalled. ‘The account of Endo, the teacher, is lies,’ Masahiko Chiba said. ‘Ninety per cent of it is lies. But why he lied, I do not know.’

  In June, three months after the tsunami, Endo wrote two letters,4 one to Kashiba, the headmaster, and another addressed to the bereaved parents collectively. They were sent by fax, the day before a meeting between the families and the education board. In one more of those suspicious and inexplicable decisions taken by the board of education, it was six months before these documents were released. In them, Endo added little to the account he had given in person, but described in some detail his own agonised state of mind. ‘It’s terrible to remember what happened then,’ he wrote. ‘I go completely pale when I think about it. My hands are trembling as I write … There’s something wrong with my body and with my mind. I’m being selfish, I know, I’m sorry, but for the time being could you leave me alone? I’m frightened when the phone rings.’

  Every request from the families to meet Endo received the same response – a letter from his doctor, explaining that he was recovering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and was too distressed to talk about what had happened. It was impossible to challenge such a diagnosis. But the months passed into years, and the response remained the same. ‘I think it’s an excuse,’ said Kazuhiro Yoshioka, a lawyer who advised the families. ‘Every note from the doctor reads like a carbon copy of the last one. He always says that just three more months are needed. And the drugs he’s on are no more than you’d be prescribed for insomnia.

  ‘It may be that Mr Endo doesn’t want to appear. But the board of education twists facts to avoid responsibility. Perhaps they have gone to him and said, “You stay in the background. Don’t say anything. We’ll look after this problem.”’

  The men of the Ishinomaki city government were not villains.5 In plenty of ways they had behaved heroically. They were local bureaucrats in a small regional city. They were familiar, in theory, with the threat of natural disaster, but nothing in their personal or professional experience could have prepared them for an event of such magnitude and horror. They were themselves victims: many had seen their homes flooded or washed away; some had lost friends and relatives. They were reeling and in confusion, but they never abandoned their sense of public duty, and they kept the motor of administration turning over, despite crushing practical obstacles.

  There were no telephones, no mains electricity and no fuel. The city hall itself was flooded by five feet of water; its vehicles were immobilised in the car park. The staff abandoned the mud-slimed ground floor and worked by torchlight in the upper offices. It was not a question of merely cancelling leave – city employees were required to remain on duty around the clock. Step by step, they extended themselves across the stricken municipality, first in the ruined city centre, then into the outer villages, across fields and hills and forests, by bicycle, by foot and in rubber boats. Fifteen of the city’s schools, nurseries and kindergartens were flooded, burned or otherwise affected by the disaster; others were serving as evacuation centres for tens of thousands of displaced families. Day by day, the board of education gathered information about the state of schools, the welfare of their children and teachers and a
rranged supplies of food for the refugees.

  As individuals, they were tireless and self-sacrificing; without them, a desperate situation would have been many times worse. But when confronted by their own failure, as they were at Okawa Primary School, personal warmth and empathy were stifled by the instinct of the collective – the instinct to protect the institution against outside attack. Faced with unanswerable reproach, it shrank back into itself, behind scales of formality and claws of bureaucratese. The faces of the kindly, hard-working local men and women who made up the education board dropped from view. Their loyalty was to a higher cause, beyond that of public duty or personal decency – that of protecting the organisation from further damage to its reputation, and above all from legal attack in the courts.

  The imperviousness of the city officials, their refusal to muster a human response to the grief of the families, seemed at the beginning to be a collective failure of character, and of leadership. But as time passed, Sayomi and Takahiro Shito, and the other parents of the ‘Fukuji group’, began to suspect another motivation – an obsession with avoiding anything that could be taken as an admission of liability. The metallic tang of lawyerly advice lingered around many of the bureaucrats’ utterances. They were happy to express grief and condolence, and willing to abase themselves in general terms for their unworthiness. But to acknowledge specific negligence on the part of individuals, or systematic, institutional failure – that was a step which no one would take.

  Then, the winter after the tsunami, they offered up a sacrifice, of sorts. Teruyuki Kashiba, the headmaster of Okawa Primary School, presented a signed statement of apology addressed to the parents.6 This ‘irremediable situation’, he said, resulted ‘from my carelessness as headmaster’. ‘However much I apologise,’ he went on, ‘things such as the lack of a proper emergency manual and the failure to promote crisis awareness among the staff cannot be forgiven.’ Two months later, he took early retirement.

  It looked, on the face of it, like an important concession. But to the Fukuji parents, finely attuned to the nuances of apology, there was something about it – something in the word ‘carelessness’ – that smacked of evasion. They put it to the test at a meeting a few months later at which Kashiba was present.

  Sayomi’s husband, Takahiro Shito, addressed the now-retired headmaster, as he sat before the assembled parents. He pressed him on the question of the school’s emergency manual, which Kashiba, in his statement of apology, had acknowledged to have been inadequate. ‘Reflecting on it now,’ Shito said, ‘I’d like to hear from you again what you mean by that that word “carelessness”.’

  ‘In short,’ said Kashiba, ‘not to have checked it thoroughly was careless.’

  The word for carelessness in Japanese is taiman. Shito was fishing for another, and more potent, word: kashitsu – negligence.

  ‘Do you not think,’ he asked, ‘that this carelessness amounts to negligence?’

  Sitting on Kashiba’s immediate left was a man named Kenetsu Shishido, deputy councillor of the board of education. Perhaps it was the temperature in the overheated room; perhaps it was the effects of a medical condition. Whatever the cause, Mr Shishido displayed signs of intense physical discomfort during Kashiba’s exchange with Takahiro Shito. He fidgeted in his chair. He wiped his face and hands repeatedly with a hand towel. At the mention of kashitsu, he leaned forward and back, and placed his hand on a document on the desk on which he appeared to be pointing to something. Almost imperceptibly, he muttered to Kashiba out of the corner of his mouth. Then he rubbed the towel over his hands and face again, wiped the back of his neck and attended to an itch in his right ear.

  ‘Headmaster?’ said Shito, after moments of unfilled silence.

  Kashiba shot a sideways glance at Deputy Councillor Shishido. ‘As far as that goes,’ he said, looking down now at the papers on the desk in front of him, ‘personally, I don’t think so.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘Although I might have overlooked some things, I did what I had to do, so I don’t think it’s negligence. I wouldn’t say that myself.’

  Shishido was wiping his face again. This, it had become clear, was not done to quell perspiration, but to mask more muttered remarks to Kashiba.

  ‘We can’t hear what Mr Shishido is saying to you,’ said Shito. At the mention of his name, Shishido looked up abruptly, with an expression of quizzical innocence.

  ‘Move away from him,’ someone else called out. Sulkily, Shishido shifted his chair a few inches to the left.

  Then Shito’s neighbour, Katsura Sato, stood up to speak. Katsura taught art in a high school in the city of Ishinomaki; she knew from personal experience about the preparations that teachers make in anticipation of disaster. ‘None of them was done,’ she told Kashiba. ‘But still, as headmaster, you told the education board you’d done them. If we’d known, then everyone would have gone to the school to pick up their children. If everyone had gone, many more children would have been saved. Because of your “carelessness” all those children died. It’s negligence. Negligence! How long do you intend to put off admitting responsibility? Seventy-four children died, and you still don’t get it.’

  Shishido was muttering again to Kashiba out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Truly,’ Kashiba said, after a pause, ‘for not being able to protect the lives of the seventy-four children and ten teachers, I feel truly sorry.’

  ‘You feel that,’ said Katsura. ‘But you haven’t done anything about it. Have you? It’s negligence, it’s negligence!’

  Shishido continued to towel his face and to mouth inaudible words.

  ‘For the fact that I couldn’t save seventy-four children and ten teachers,’ Kashiba said, ‘I apologise.’

  ‘Will you admit professional negligence?’

  Shishido wiped his mouth and continued his sidelong muttering.

  ‘I feel sorry,’ said Kashiba, ‘but … ’

  Katsura Sato almost screamed, ‘Will you admit negligence?’

  ‘I can’t make that judgement.’

  ‘Who will make that judgement? Answer!’

  Kashiba was looking at Shishido. Shishido was telling him something.

  ‘I feel very sorry,’ Kashiba said, ‘but I can only say that I am truly sorry, and I apologise.’

  Twenty-three months after the tsunami, the Ishinomaki city government announced the establishment of something called the Okawa Primary School Incident Verification Committee. It consisted of a panel of ten eminences, including lawyers and university professors of sociology, psychology and behavioural science. The committee would spend a year reviewing documents and conducting interviews. Its findings were published in a 200-page report7 in February 2014.

  The committee was funded by the city at a cost of ¥57 million (£390,000).8 Its mission – ‘verification’ – turned out to have specific and limited scope: to establish the facts and causes of what happened, but by no means to assign personal responsibility. It concluded that the deaths arose because the evacuation of the playground was delayed, and because the children and teachers eventually fled, not away from the tsunami, but towards it.

  The school, the board of education and the city government, the report said, were inadequately prepared for such a natural disaster. The municipal ‘hazard map’, which indicated areas of coast vulnerable to tsunami, did not include Kamaya. The possibility of a tsunami was not considered in compiling the school’s disaster manual, and there were no tsunami evacuation drills. No one in the municipal government had checked on the preparations taken by the school. Teachers at the school, the report concluded, were psychologically unable to accept that they were facing imminent danger.

  If any one of these failures had not occurred, the committee concluded, the tragedy could have been avoided. ‘These circumstances were not unique to Okawa Primary,’ said the report. ‘Such an accident could occur at any school.’ This seemed at first to be a powerful, and disturbing, conclusion: a warning to the country at large. But
its effect was to disperse to the wind any individual blame or responsibility. A terrible thing had happened, the committee was agreeing – but it could have happened anywhere, and to anyone.

  The most controversial aspects of the case – such as the silencing of the boys who wanted to run to the hill – were ignored or skated over. To the Fukuji parents, the committee’s conclusions were no more than an expensive restatement of what had been obvious for more than two years. The true purpose of the exercise, they concluded, was to shut down disagreement about the tragedy by commissioning ‘independent’ experts to produce a tepid report, which articulated mild criticisms, while sparing the careers and reputations of the guilty.

  No employee of the city of Ishinomaki or its board of education was ever sacked, disciplined or formally reproached over the deaths at Okawa Primary School. Shigemi Kato, who destroyed the notes from the interviews with the surviving children, was promoted9 the following year to the headmastership of a city primary school.

  The committee’s report came out in the last week of February 2014, almost three years after the tsunami. The day before the anniversary, on 10 March, came a startling piece of news. The families of twenty-three children who had died at Okawa were suing the city of Ishinomaki and Miyagi Prefecture in the Sendai District Court. They were accusing them of negligence, and demanding compensation of ¥100 million – about £600,000 – for each of the lives lost. It was two years and 364 days since the disaster, the very last moment that it was legally possible to file a case. It was the move they had secretly been planning all along.

  The Tsunami Is Not Water

  The tsunami had the power of many atomic bombs, but the most impressive thing about it – more astonishing, in its way, than the spectacle of destruction – was the behaviour of those who survived it. Within a matter of hours, hundreds of thousands of people were converging on schools, community halls, temples and shrines, huddling in classrooms, gymnasia, hallways and corridors, anywhere that had space enough to unroll a quilt. They were panicked, grieving and in shock; they included centenarians, newborn babies and everyone in between. For the first few days, there was scant official help. Those left alive had to help themselves, which they did with unsurpassable discipline and efficiency.