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

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  Naturally, invisibly, without fuss or drama, order crystallised in the chaos of the evacuation centres. Space was allocated, bedding was improvised and food was pooled, prepared and distributed. Rotas, for fetching, fixing, cleaning and cooking, were quickly established and filled. Everything was eased by the instinctive Japanese aversion to anything that could be judged messy, selfish or otherwise antisocial. And all of it was achieved in an atmosphere of good humour and generosity, which sometimes bordered on the ridiculous.

  Among the burdens of working as a foreign journalist in Tohoku was the constant struggle to fend off gifts of food – sweets, rice balls, chocolate biscuits, fish sausage – from homeless refugees who had only enough to feed themselves for the next few days or even hours. People who had recently lost their homes apologised, with pained sincerity, for the inadequacy of their hospitality. There was no significant looting; despite the chronic shortages of everything from petrol to toilet paper, no one took the opportunity of scarcity to raise their prices. I never once saw fighting or squabbling or disagreement; and, most remarkable of all, there was a complete absence of self-pity.

  It was impossible not to make mental comparisons. I pictured a school gymnasium in north-east England, rather than north-east Japan, in which hundreds of people were living and sleeping literally head to toe. By this stage, they would have been murdering one another.

  Every foreigner who visited the disaster zone in the early weeks was struck by it; it transformed what should have been a harrowing experience into an inspiring one. There were many terrible and fearful scenes, and bottomless pain, but the horror was offset, and almost eclipsed, by the resilience and decency of the victims. It seemed to me at the time that this was the best of Japan, the best of humanity, one of the things I loved and admired most about this country: the practical, unselfconscious, irrepressible strength of communities. And I found myself thinking about history, and those moments when a national shock of one kind or another had galvanised Japan and marked the beginning a new and dynamic era.

  There had been the forcible opening of the feudal country in the mid-nineteenth century by American gunships. There was the catastrophic defeat of 1945. Both events had seemed at the time moments of irredeemable humiliation. Both had been followed by decades of resurgence and prosperity. By 2011, that atmosphere of expansive and ambitious optimism was twenty years in the past. Since the collapse of the economic bubble in the early 1990s, Japan had been adrift, becalmed between a lost prosperity and a future that was too dim and uncertain to grasp. The economy was shrinking or stagnant. Companies no longer promised the security of employment for life. The old ruling party, which had led Japan for half a century, was bankrupt of ideas and personalities; but the opposition politicians elected in its place were diffident and inept. So I was not alone in wondering whether this new disaster might turn out to be the force that jolted Japan out of the political and economic funk into which it had slithered.

  A multitude of people had died at a stroke. Nuclear furnaces were venting poison into the air. In any country, surely, events such as these would be the catalyst of protest, and action, and indignant movements for change. ‘The Japanese people rose from the ashes1 of the Second World War using our fundamental strength to secure a remarkable recovery and the country’s present prosperity,’ said Naoto Kan, the prime minister at the time. ‘I have not a single doubt that Japan will overcome this crisis, recover from the aftermath of the disaster, emerge stronger than ever, and establish a more vibrant and better Japan for future generations.’

  Nothing of the kind was to happen; the promise of rebirth glimpsed in the evacuation centres would go completely unfulfilled.

  Japan changed in various ways in the years after the tsunami, but it shed energy and confidence rather than gaining them. Partly, this had to do with a gathering sense of insecurity in East Asia – the crackling belligerence of North Korea, the domineering assertiveness of China. At the core of it, though, was an ever greater disconnection between Japan’s leaders and the citizenry they were supposed to represent.

  Naoto Kan and the centrist politicians who were in power at the time crumpled before the tsunami. They were the first Japanese opposition party to have won an outright majority; their inexperience and poor judgement had been obvious from the day they took power. In 2009, they had won the country’s biggest-ever election victory; three years later, they suffered its fourth-worst defeat. Rejuvenated by its period of opposition, the old Liberal Democratic Party was back in power, as it had been for fifty-three of the past fifty-seven years. Its victorious leader, Shinzo Abe, was the most nationalistic prime minister since the war.

  He supported revision of Japan’s pacifist constitution, and assumed new powers to deploy its armed forces. He pooh-poohed historical accounts of atrocities committed by the Imperial Army; he was a worshipper at Yasukuni Shrine, where hanged Class-A war criminals were revered as Shinto deities. Despite the nationwide anxiety about Fukushima, he was unswervingly committed to maintaining Japan’s nuclear reactors. Opinion polls showed that his plans for Japan’s economy were widely supported. But his views about nuclear power, about wartime history, and the anger they excited among Japan’s Asian neighbours, were the cause of deep unease.

  At a moment when it most needed unifying leadership, Japan faced a democratic crisis. One party stood convicted of gross incompetence. The other was led by a man whose ideology was drastically at odds with most of the population. Many of those who voted for Shinzo Abe did not like or approve of him. But he was decisive, consistent and he had a plan, more persuasive than any other, for restoring to Japan its economic well-being. The weakness of the opposition was so extreme that many Japanese felt they had no choice.

  In government, Abe faced protests of his own – against the restart of the reactors, against his plans to allow Japanese soldiers to deploy overseas and against a sinister new state secrecy law. I followed these demonstrations and talked to the marchers; and I was always struck by the peculiar intensity of the opposition to Abe. It was not only about his nationalist enthusiasms; something in his personality excited in the demonstrators a deep, personal loathing. He was a lackey of big business and the powerful nuclear industry, they agreed; and a militarist who could end up leading Japan back into war. Japanese do not easily reach for invective, even towards their politicians. But many of the slogans denounced him as a fascist; some of the posters depicted Abe with the moustache of Adolf Hitler.

  One old marcher told me that he had lived through the war, and the devastation it had brought. He remembered the incendiary bombing of Tokyo; his cousin, a young conscript soldier, had died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And now he found himself in a country in which radioactive fallout once again drifted across the land, with a prime minister who was slowly leading his people back towards militarism. ‘It feels to me as if history is going into reverse,’ he said. ‘Who could stand by and watch such things happen?’

  A huddle had formed about us as we talked on the margins of the demonstration. People, young and old, were nodding in agreement. Behind us, slogans were being shouted through a powerful amplifier: ‘Against the Abe government! Against war!’

  If he was against Abe, I asked the old man, then who did he prefer? Where were the wise and responsible leaders? Who should be leading Japan?

  His face displayed puzzlement, then surprise and finally embarrassment. The protesters standing around us glanced silently at one another; a few smiled sheepishly. I suggested the name of Naoto Kan’s successor, the feebly uncharismatic leader of the disgraced centrist party, now in opposition; and people shook their heads in disgust. There must be someone, I said. But no one had any ideas. I was standing among some of the most politically motivated people in Japan. Shinzo Abe was a hate figure to them, almost a bogeyman. But they could propose not a single person to take his place.

  What accounts for this democratic deficit, this failure of the political system to generate a dynamic politics? It is one of
the mysteries of modern Japan.

  Technically, nothing is missing; all the moving parts are there. Japan has an unambiguous written constitution, an independent judiciary and a free press. There are multiple political parties; elections are uncontaminated by coercion or corruption. And yet there is a stagnancy and lack of conviction to Japan’s political life. In North America and Europe, there is no lack of odious and incompetent leaders; but there is a sense of creative friction and of evolution, of a political marketplace, in which ideas and individuals less popular and effective yield, over time, to those that prove themselves fitter for purpose, and where politics – even if it has its wrong turns and dead ends – is at least in constant motion. In Japan, this is not the case; even seventy years after the war, a genuinely competitive multi-party system has still not established itself.

  After the tsunami had destroyed their homes, the survivors of the wave mobilised and organised, and took control of their fate. They did this instinctively, because it appeared to them the natural and moral thing to do. They also did so because they didn’t expect official help. In any comparable disaster in the West, its victims would quickly and shrilly have been demanding to know: where is the government? In Japan in 2011, that was a question that was rarely heard.

  At the time, such low expectations were an asset, a spur to resilience and self-reliance. But low expectations are corrosive to a democratic system. It is not universally true – there are in Japan many people who are deeply and conscientiously engaged. But it is common in discussing parliamentary politics to encounter indifference, disgust and, above all, a paralysing resignation. Our leaders are terrible, people seem to be saying – but what can we do about it? It is as if politics itself is a natural disaster of which the Japanese are the helpless victims, an impersonal misfortune beyond the influence of common men, and which can only be helplessly accepted, and endured.

  One-tenth of the world’s active volcanoes are in Japan – the entire archipelago, in fact, consists of an immense range of volcanoes jutting out of the sea. Late every summer, typhoons churn into motion in the north-west Pacific and spend themselves on its long coast. The rain they deposit loosens the soil, which slides down the steep mountainsides in rivers of mud. In geological terms, Japan is in an appalling situation, on top of not one, but two so-called ‘triple junctions’ – points at which three of the Earth’s tectonic plates collide and grate against one another. Fire, wind, flood, landslide, earthquake and tsunami: it is a country of intense, elemental violence. Harsh natural environments often breed qualities that take on the status of national characteristics – the dark fatalism of Russians, the pioneer toughness of frontier Americans. Japanese identify in themselves the virtue of nintai or gaman, variously rendered as endurance, patience or perseverance. Foreign journalists covering the disaster liked to refer to the ‘Stoicism’ of the survivors, but Japanese gaman is not a philosophical concept. The conventional translations failed to convey the passivity and abnegation which the idea contains, the extent to which gaman often seems indistinguishable from a collective lack of self-esteem. Gaman was the force that united the reeling refugees in the early days after the disaster; but it was also what neutered politics, and permitted Japanese to feel that they had no individual power over, and no responsibility for, their national plight.

  I happened to visit Okawa during the election campaign that brought Shinzo Abe to power. Nobody I met displayed any curiosity about the election, or even an awareness that it was taking place; it was as though it was occurring in a separate dimension, parallel with, but invisible to, the one through which ordinary human beings moved.

  Posters along the road bore the slogans of the competing parties and photographs of their candidates. Vans mounted with loudspeakers drove through the villages, blaring out their names. It was impossible not to think of Mr Oikawa and the men from the town office, driving along these same roads with similar equipment, broadcasting their message about the coming of the tsunami, which was similarly ignored.

  ‘I’m not saying that they should have been rioting, and gaman or nintai – these qualities clearly had a positive role on the immediate aftermath,’ said Norio Akasaka, an academic specialist in the culture of Tohoku. ‘But people had all kinds of demands and complaints and dissatisfaction. They should have spoken out – against the national government, against the nuclear-plant operator. Their complaints were not made. They kept those things within themselves, through endurance, through patience. And that was a bad thing.’

  Sometimes in Japan I wondered if it didn’t come down to a simple proposition: would you tolerate a certain amount of whingeing and squabbling and disorder, even a bit of looting and profiteering, if such selfishness was accompanied by a willingness on the part of ordinary people to fight a bit, to shout down authority and to take responsibility for the people they elected?

  There was another set of slogans that were ubiquitous at that time, employing a different Japanese word. Ganbarō is an exhortation to overcome challenges and hardships: the simplest English translations would be ‘persevere’, ‘stick at it’ or ‘do your best’. Ganbarō is what you say to a child studying for exams, or to an athlete competing in a tournament. Banners reading Ganbarō Tohoku! were often to be seen in stations and public buildings. They were intended as declarations of solidarity by those – the great majority in Japan – who were personally unaffected by the disaster. But as an expression of sympathy, let alone condolence, it was a curious expression.

  Was it really a source of consolation to people newly homeless and bereaved to be told, in effect, to tough it out, like a marathon runner? Ganbarō always seemed to me a word in which empathy with those suffering was compromised by the implication that what they were going through would be good for them in the long run.

  Tohoku people were famous for their gaman. It was what had fortified them over the centuries against cold, poverty and unreliable harvests. It was also, I suspected, what had made them susceptible to their historical role as Japan’s exploited – inured to selling off their daughters, and sending off their sons as cannon fodder in the empire’s wars. People spoke nostalgically of Tohoku as a repository of ‘the old Japan’, by which they meant a slower, gentler, rural way of life, a ‘village society’ unsullied by urban ugliness and the viruses of greed and commercialism. But this outward simplicity masked a deep conservatism, a repression so deeply internalised that it was experienced by its victims as common sense. The people of the old Japan shut up and got on with it – and shutting up was the crucial element. They worried deeply about what other people would think if they stood up and argued. They rejected change, and efforts at change – the idealised village was a world in which conflict, and even disharmony, were immoral, a kind of violence.

  It was a hidden world, of which I only ever caught glimpses. By definition, those whose mouths have been stopped by social convention do not talk about it to an outsider. I encountered it through the stories of those who did speak out, such as Naomi Hiratsuka, whose father-in-law regarded grief as an expression of weakness; and in the accounts of the old men of Kamaya who refused to believe in the possibility of a tsunami. Most eloquent of all was Masahiko Chiba, the car mechanic into whose house Junji Endo, and dozens of other refugees, had staggered on the afternoon of the disaster.

  Over the next three days, more than a hundred strangers fetched up at the Chibas’ two-storey house, to be fed, clothed and sheltered. They included local people, passing motorists, local government officials and young Tetsuya Tadano and the handful of other surviving children from Okawa Primary School. The Chibas used up their stores of food, and gave away all their own clothes and those of their children and grandchildren. Afterwards, many of those whom they had helped, including the Okawa children, returned to express their gratitude to Chiba and his wife. Junji Endo was not one of them; nor were any of the local bureaucrats. And after he spoke publicly about the discrepancies in Endo’s story, Chiba told me, he began to become aware of an invisib
le force of disapproval and reproach.

  It came as no surprise. ‘In the village society, if you speak out, you will be ostracised,’ he said. ‘There’s a common assumption that if you talk too much, or do anything controversial, the authorities won’t help you. They won’t repair the road by your house. They won’t give the benefit of official services. That’s what people assume. We were lucky – our home and our business survived, and we didn’t need their help. But plenty of people round here lost their families, their homes, their possessions. People like that are not going to speak out, or criticise the local government.’

  It was vanishingly subtle. No one said anything explicitly angry or reproachful – it was the Chibas’ friends who cautioned them, for their own good, to remain silent. But the fact was that out of eleven car-repair businesses operating in the local area, only two, including theirs, survived the tsunami. And as the months wore on, Chiba saw official business from the local government offices and their employees consistently going to his rival.

  ‘The children were murdered by an invisible monster,’ Sayomi Shito said once. ‘We vent our anger on it, but it doesn’t react. It’s like a black shadow. It has no human warmth.’2 She went on, ‘The tsunami was a visible monster. But the invisible monster will last for ever.’

  I asked, ‘What is the invisible monster?’

  ‘I wonder myself what it is,’ said Sayomi. ‘Something peculiar in the Japanese, who only attach importance to the surface of things. And in the pride of people who cannot ever say sorry.’