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

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  I was sitting with Sayomi and Takahiro in the Shito family’s big wooden house. It was late at night; we had been there since dusk. I had asked all the questions in my notebook. Now the conversation had taken on a different quality – meandering, flickering between the particular and the general, between anger and sadness; marked by shifts, jumps, silences.

  Sayomi’s family had lived in this village, Fukuji, for 500 years. One of her ancestors had been a samurai who had travelled to the far north-east from distant Kyoto, Japan’s most magnificent and snobbish city. As a teenager, Sayomi had come to loathe the pressure of being a member of a grand old family and to long for escape and independence. But her two older sisters quickly found husbands and left home, and there were no brothers. So when Sayomi married Takahiro, he was legally adopted by her parents as their son, a common practice among families without a male child. Thus Sayomi was pulled back to the centre of the family against which she had rebelled, and became the inheritor and custodian of the line of descent.

  The banks of the Kitakami were remote from the sophistication of the city, but Sayomi’s forebears took a rich harvest from the sea, the river, the lagoon, the fields and the forests. The hills cut the villages off from one another, but the water connected them. There was a sense even now of the water being older than the land, and of having a claim on it which had been only reluctantly surrendered. It was hinted at in the names of places miles inland, with no obvious connection to the sea. The land on which Okawa Primary School had been constructed was called Nirajima – ‘Chive Island’; close to Fukuji was Shioden: ‘Salt Field’. As a child, Sayomi had dug up ancient shells from paddies that had once been under the ocean. The only sites of antiquity were stone monuments and Shinto shrines; and these, almost always, were positioned upon high ground.

  ‘Those rice fields were the sea once,’ Sayomi said. ‘Now they are the sea again. That’s the thing about water – water always tells the truth. There’s no argument to be had. Water goes freely where it must.’

  Takahiro said, ‘Everything made by men will be destroyed by nature in the end. Mountains and river, the creations of nature – they will remain. Everything human, that will go. We need to reconsider the respect we give to nature.’

  In the months and years afterwards, Takahiro received invitations to give talks around the country to groups interested in the tragedy of Okawa. He accepted out of a sense of duty; he assumed that he would encounter people alert to the human component of disaster, anxious to learn how they themselves could reduce the chances of falling victim to similar catastrophe. ‘But I was shocked,’ he said, ‘by how low their level of awareness was.’ Takahiro’s audiences expressed sympathy, and polite horror at what had happened, but it was as if they viewed it through the wrong end of a telescope, as something small, curious and remote from their own lives. ‘For them, it was someone else’s problem,’ he said. ‘They didn’t recognise it as the kind of thing that could happen again in the future, even happen to them. Perhaps it’s the same with nuclear power. Everyone played down the dangers for all those years, and the result was this sudden, terrible situation. In Okawa School too, the teachers played everything down, took nothing seriously.’

  Takahiro was a strong, healthy man in his forties. He spoke calmly; nothing in his tone suggested that he was in the grip of powerful emotions. But, as he continued, I could see that his hand was trembling.

  He said, ‘If they don’t take this opportunity, even now when so many people have died, you can’t ever expect them to change the way they think or act. That’s why we are pursuing the real cause of the tragedy. If they consider this disaster, but refuse to look into its core, the same tragedy could be repeated. But that’s how Japan functions, which the national government can do nothing to change.’

  In this, and in many of the conversations I had in Okawa, it wasn’t completely clear to me who ‘they’ were. I was about to ask, when Takahiro said: ‘As a citizen of this country, I’m ashamed of that. I think it’s embarrassing. But it’s something that I have to say. By telling this story, even though I am ashamed of it, perhaps we can change the situation.’

  The Shitos were victims; but the shame was theirs too. ‘They’ meant ‘us’, meant everyone. The tsunami was not the problem. Japan was the problem.

  ‘I tell them that the tsunami is not just water,’ Takahiro said, in a rush. ‘The tsunami is a lethal weapon that can kill you in an instant. Don’t think of it as water. The first thing the tsunami hit was the forest that blocked the wind from the sea. The trees are swept away, and it is those trees which break the houses, and then the rubble of the houses which hits the people. And then everything is gone. Trees, houses, rubble, people – everything. That’s how the tsunami attacks. It’s not water.’

  Predestination

  Secretly, Naomi Hiratsuka sometimes used to wonder how long she could continue searching for the lost children. But she never asked herself why she did so.

  After the remains of her daughter, Koharu, were recovered in August 2011, there were four who still remained missing. Yui Takeyama, who was seven years old, had died at the school alongside his sister and his mother. His surviving father, overwhelmed by grief and tied down by a full-time job, took no part in the extended search. Yuto Suzuki, a twelve-year-boy, had been off sick and was at home in the care of his family when the wave struck – so it was arguable whether he counted as one of the victims of the tragedy at the school. Masaru Naganuma, the father of seven-year-old Koto, was the most indefatigable of all the searchers, going out alone every hour he could, in digger and boat, looking for his son in ocean, lagoon and in the earth. But the parent to whom Naomi became the closest was Miho, the mother of the only girl still missing, nine-year-old Hana Suzuki.

  Miho had lived with her son and daughter by the Nagatsura lagoon, one of the communities to have been completely swept away by the tsunami. She and her husband, Yoshiaki, had both been at work inland on that afternoon. Miho’s elderly parents-in-law had died in the home they all shared. Both her children died at the school; the body of her son, the older of the two, had been found after eight days. Miho and Naomi spent months together looking for Hana and Koharu; they acquired, after a time, something of the intimate ease of sisters. Naomi, the younger, was focused and determined, the well-organised teacher adept at dealing with paperwork and officialdom, who got her heavy-vehicle licence and trundled her own digger out in the mud. Miho, gentler and less assertive, was the one who waited supportively on the margin with towels and refreshments, ready, whenever needed, to wade out in long boots and pick through the objects turned up by the digger’s claw. In 2012, police searching the lagoon had lifted out the body of an elderly couple in a submerged car; later that year, the head of a missing young woman had been recovered nearby. But, since the discovery of Koharu, no more children from Okawa school had been found. When Miho, with shaking hands, pulled bones out from the mud, they always turned out to be those of chickens from an obliterated poultry farm.

  Miho loved to draw. It was an enthusiasm that she had shared with Hana, who had spent hours creating cartoon faces in the distinctive style of Japanese manga, with big eyes and mouths, spangled with stars and teardrops and rainbows. One of the mediums whom Miho consulted had reported to her the consoling news that, even in the afterlife, Hana was still busily making pictures.

  The shrine in front of the school was decorated with three letters, written and coloured in felt-tip pen and illustrated with manga faces. They had been drawn and written by Miho and were addressed to her daughter. The first was faded by sun, and spattered by rain and mud. ‘Dear Hana,’ it began:

  Mum and Dad moved to Grandpa’s place. There are so many things there that your big brother and you used to play with, so remembering the two of you, I cry all the time. I always used to say, ‘Don’t cry!’ to your big brother and you, but now your mum cries so easily at anything at all. I’m sorry …

  Today, Grandma and I came here again wanting to see you, just
to breathe the same air with you. Even that helps. But, always I want to hear your voice, see your smile. I want to be with you.

  The second was less weathered and was written on a piece of paper cut into the shape of a heart:

  Dear Hana,

  I’m sorry that I can’t find you. I come every day, wanting to see you. You must be around here. I’m so sorry that I can’t find you, Hana. You don’t appear in our dreams and Dad, Mum, Grandpa and Grandma are sad. I’m sorry I can’t do anything for you. I’m so sorry. If I could see you in my dreams, I would hug you tight.

  The third letter, on the day I first saw it, was so crisp that it might have been left that morning:

  Dearest, dearest Hana,

  Did you like your funeral?fn1 We made a display of and in flowers. I hope that you and your big brother were glad to see them. That was the only thing that Dad and Mum could do for you.

  I wanted to prepare many dresses for you on your wedding day, even a traditional long-sleeved kimono in black like a bride in the old days … But Mum and Dad’s dream will just be a dream now.

  If you can read this letter, do come back to Mum and Dad, Hana.

  After losing her home and village, her children and her parents-in-law, Miho spent four years living in a metal ‘temporary residence’ on the outskirts of Ishinomaki. No one in the community knew her or her husband, Yoshiaki; no one asked about their circumstances; and this was how they wanted it to be.

  For one in Miho’s situation, even the company of other bereaved mothers was difficult to bear. The only people from whom she did not feel isolated were Naomi and their common friend Akemi, both of whom had spent long weeks searching for their own daughters. ‘They were the only people I could talk to,’ she said. ‘Akemi’s girl was found on the forty-ninth day, and Koharu was found long after that. So they understood how I felt. And they talked to me normally – they treated me like an ordinary person. With the other families, I was always aware of the way they were looking at me and thinking about me – that they saw me as the most tragic one of them all. And that just made me feel worse.’

  Miho was forty-three at the time of the tsunami; Yoshiaki was six years older. Neither had brothers or sisters; each was the sole inheritor of the family line. The prospect of having another child now seemed remote, and they were stricken by the sense, peculiar to the religion of the ancestors, of having been orphaned by their own children. There was the practical fear of growing old and sick with no one to care for them; and then there was spiritual anxiety about ongoing care and reverence after death, in the absence of descendants to pray not only for them, but for their own parents, grandparents and generations past. ‘When one of us dies, who will look after the other?’ Miho asked. ‘Who will bury us? Our closest relatives are cousins, or even more distant than that. We feel such anxiety about the future. When I think about it, it suffocates me.’

  Miho gave up her job as a doctor’s receptionist; the search for Hana became the centre of her life. She was at the school every day, to help Naomi and Masaru in their diggers. She resolved that she would look for Hana for at least two years. In the foremost part of her mind, she harboured no illusions; as the months passed, she gave up hope of finding a body, even an incomplete one – bones, a single bone, even a fragment of flesh or a strand of hair would have been enough. But in her car, Miho always kept a full set of Hana’s clothes in case – just in case – they should happen upon her miraculously biding in some overlooked spot, hidden and alive.

  Towards the end of 2012, though, she stopped going to the school. After careful thought about the emotional, as well as the financial, costs, she and Yoshiaki made the decision to undergo fertility treatment at the big hospital in Ishinomaki. The doctor was the same man who had delivered Hana eleven years earlier and he was optimistic: Miho, he told her, was in good health, and although she was in her mid-forties, there was no physical reason why she could not conceive again. But she would no longer be able to stand in the mud every day; the task of making a new child made it harder to look for the lost one. And at about the same time came another piece of news: Naomi Hiratsuka, who had always promised that she would continue the search for the missing children, was giving up.

  The practical difficulties of searching the mud were increasing every month. The chances of finding even fragmentary remains were dwindling. For all this, though, Naomi insisted that if it had been up to her, she would have gone on looking. The decision had not been made by her, and it had not been made by her husband or father-in-law. It was her dead daughter, Koharu, who decided.

  Naomi had once again become close to Sumi, the medium who had proved so adept at relaying Koharu’s voice from the other world. The two women met every few weeks, spoke often by phone and exchanged text messages and emails. Through Sumi, Koharu would make requests for sweets and snacks placed as offerings on the butsudan, and urge her mother to pay greater attention to one or other of her surviving siblings. Naomi was still on maternity leave from her job as a high-school teacher; the moment came when she had to choose whether to return to her job or abandon it. At the time that she was contemplating this important decision, Koharu made her feelings strongly felt.

  ‘The medium told me that Koharu wanted me to go back to work,’ Naomi said. ‘She said that she had always wanted to be a teacher when she grew up. And so she wanted me to do what she could not. The medium told me, “The way to use your talent is not just to stay in the house and search for the missing children, but to do something active outside the home.”’

  And so, in April 2013, Naomi found herself back in the classroom, at a junior high school in Ishinomaki. It was two years since the disaster, and three years since she had last worked. And yet the jolt she experienced came not from the strain of teaching, but from the children she taught. ‘My class were fourteen year olds,’ she said. ‘In other words, they were Koharu’s class.’ Every time she looked up from her desk, Naomi faced children exactly the same age that her daughter would have been, if she had survived beyond the age of twelve.

  She confronted a question: how to address, within the world of the school, the fact of Koharu’s death? Many people knew what had happened, of course, and those who didn’t only had to search for Naomi’s name on the Internet to bring up the interviews she had given over the years. She did not want to be defined by her loss, but she did not want to be evasive about it, either. Sometimes the subject came up indirectly – like the occasion when one of the girls asked Naomi how many children she had. Was the answer two, or three? Naomi wondered. Neither felt correct. ‘They were good children, and they trusted me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want them to pity me, but I didn’t want them to think that I didn’t trust them, either. I sensed that they wanted me to talk about it, but I couldn’t. For one thing, I couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t cry.’

  She left it until the very last week of the school year. She brought thirty-six copies of a book about Okawa Primary School, published by a group of the bereaved mothers, and gave one to each of her students. And she told them the story of Koharu and what had happened to her. At the end, she invited questions. The class of fifteen-year-olds sat in stupefied silence. ‘But I wanted them to know,’ Naomi said. ‘I don’t believe that stuff, which you sometimes hear, that the children who survived must “live their lives for those who died”. There are a lot of people around here who have feelings of guilt for surviving. We don’t want children growing up that way. I told them that you have to make a life for yourself. No one should ever need to feel that they are living their life for someone else.’

  Work, and the care of two younger children, left Naomi with little energy for anything else. It was the very best thing for her peace of mind. ‘Teaching was a kind of therapy for me,’ she said. ‘Very honestly, the more I work, the less I think about Koharu. I persuade myself that is a good thing.’

  Koharu herself confirmed that it was – or this was the message relayed by Sumi. The more time she spent with the medium, the more Naomi
appreciated, and depended upon, her soothing words, and her account of the existence into which her daughter had entered in the other world. Once, Naomi made plans for a winter holiday in Okinawa, the warm southern island where she had gone to university. She was going to catch up with old college friends – and Sumi said that she would come along too. ‘She said that she’d always wanted to go to Okinawa,’ Naomi told me. ‘And she said that Koharu wanted her to go, to console the spirits of those who died in the war.’fn2 It might have seemed a surprising suggestion from a twelve-year-old girl, but this, the medium explained, was part of the progression of a human spirit on the other side. Immediately after the end of her human life, Koharu had retained much of her individual character – her lovable girlishness and sense of humour. But now she was evolving into what Japanese call hotoke-sama1 – an enlightened soul, purged of the dross of human personality, the terminal stage of the soul’s pilgrimage into death. ‘The kind of things she tells me these days, through the medium, aren’t always what you’d expect from a sixth-year,’ Naomi told me. ‘They’re not just personal matters, but more general. She’s becoming more … authentic, somehow. She’s coming closer to god, or to Buddha. She’s not a little child any more.’

  Sumi’s explanation went even further than this. Far from being a tragedy, she told Naomi, Koharu’s death, and all the events that had followed on from it, had been predestined. ‘It is difficult to convey, and it was difficult to understand,’ she said. ‘But my husband and I both came to think that things are decided in advance.’

  Death, the woman explained to Naomi, is preordained at birth. More than that, the individual soul selects the time and manner of its own death. In other words, Koharu – and, by implication, the legion of others who perished in the wave – had chosen to die that day. ‘According to the medium, it’s destiny,’ Naomi told me. ‘She says that those who die as children are elevated to a higher stage than those who die in old age. And knowing that is a comfort to me.’