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

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  Naomi, who survived the disaster with two living children and an intact family home, found her daughter, buried her, returned to her career and made an accommodation with death. Miho, childless, middle-aged, isolated in her metal hut, was unable to do so. And at some point, difficult to define, the close friendship between the two women turned to sourness and mistrust.

  Both were shy of talking about it, but it seemed to have been Miho who turned away. Every spring, as the March anniversary drew near, she became intensely depressed and withdrawn. At these times Naomi kept a respectful distance. ‘After I started my job again, I was busy,’ Naomi said. ‘But we would speak from time to time – for a year, it all seemed normal. Then it started to become difficult to reach her. One day, I went round to where she was living. I didn’t call in advance, just turned up. I got the impression she didn’t want me there at all.’

  Naomi puzzled over the reason for Miho’s coldness. She did not believe that it was about the search for the missing children, from which Miho was also withdrawing. It was about the hunt for something more elusive, divisive and dangerous – the truth of what had happened at the school.

  In the beginning, Naomi and Miho’s solidarity had been cemented by a common isolation, a shared sense of standing alone against the world. They despised the arrogant bureaucrats of the board of education; but they also had a shared contempt for the ‘Fukuji group’, and what they saw as the aggressive self-righteousness of people such as Sayomi Shito. The search for the children had consumed all their reserves of emotional, as well as physical, energy. But when Miho stopped going to the school, in the tense hiatus of her fertility treatment, she found herself with leisure to think through matters that she had never closely considered before: the way, as she came to think of it, that teachers had permitted the deaths of her children.

  ‘We couldn’t find Hana,’ she said. ‘So we had to find the truth. We couldn’t just leave this as one more of those things that no one is to be blamed for. I can’t accept that. The more time passes, the more strongly I feel this.’

  Naomi was torn by the contradictions of her own situation. ‘Seventy-four of them perished,’ she said, ‘and no one was taking responsibility. And that feeling, that outrage – of course, we have that feeling too. Someone has to take responsibility for what happened.’ But the only people capable of doing so were the teachers at the school and members of the education board – the colleagues and direct superiors of Naomi and her husband.

  Naomi’s husband, Shinichiro, was a promising and ambitious teacher who had no intention of sacrificing his career by taking on his bosses in a campaign to heap condemnation on his own dead colleagues. ‘For a while, I felt that I wanted to take legal action,’ Naomi said. ‘But my husband never agreed.’

  A lawyer from Sendai held an open meeting for bereaved parents who wanted to learn more about the possibilities for legal action. Miho attended, and was surprised to encounter Naomi there. The atmosphere between the two women was chilly. To Miho, her former friend’s presence was ‘insincere’. It was obvious that the Hiratsukas would never join in legal action against other teachers. She half suspected them of having come to spy on the proceedings, and to report back, although to whom it was not clear.

  Later that year, Shinichiro Hiratsuka was promoted to deputy headmaster of a big school in Ishinomaki. Miho’s fertility treatment failed; mental stress and anguish, her doctor speculated, were interfering with the production of the hormones necessary for the creation of a new life.

  The Rough, Steep Path

  Miho and Yoshiaki Suzuki became leading figures in the legal action against the Ishinomaki city government, which had been launched so unexpectedly and at the last possible moment. It was striking, to anyone familiar with Western modes of litigation, that it had taken so long to get under way. If a comparable tragedy had happened in Europe or the United States – scores of children dead, piercing questions about the competence of the authorities – there would have been lawyers swarming over it from the beginning. But in Japan there was an instinctive aversion to taking legal action, and a sense that those who did so were themselves breaking some profound unwritten law.

  It was seen, or felt to be seen, as a failure of gaman, a violation of the unwritten codes of the village society. There was an assumption that unpleasant consequences – social disapproval and exclusion, even victimisation – were in store for those who sued, particularly those who took on the government. People became vague and tongue-tied when pressed over this; they struggled to come up with particular examples. It was about the nagging sense of being talked about behind your back; an obscure guilt in the hearts of people who knew they had done nothing wrong. And the discomfort of stepping outside the snug, warm, paralysing web of compliance that Japan weaves around its people, a fuzzy, enveloping tangle in which constraint is inseparable from the sense of being protected, and where the machinery of coercion rarely has to be applied from outside, because it is internalised so efficiently within the mind.

  It takes an unusual kind of personality to be deaf to those snickering interior voices. By comparison with the West, the damages awarded by Japanese courts were low – even if they won their case, the Okawa parents would be lucky to receive half of the ¥100 million they were demanding for the life of each child. Kazuhiro Yoshioka was the lawyer who represented them, and even he sympathised with the reluctance of ordinary people to resort to the courts.

  ‘It’s not the kind of abuse that is obvious or explicit,’ he said. ‘But people feel themselves, in quite an insidious way, to be reproached. If a relative works at the local authority, that relative may be ill spoken of. At school, sons and daughters might be referred to as the children of someone who went to court. Cutting remarks online. It’s often hard to see it clearly or to pin it down, but such people end up feeling rejected by society. Often people prefer to stay under the warm futon and endure their anger and sorrow, rather than go to court.’

  Japan’s civil-justice system, like its democracy, appeared on the face of it to be beyond reproach. Judges were independent; bribery and intimidation were almost unknown. But at its core the system expressed a bias in favour of the status quo and the private and public institutions that upheld it. Judges, Yoshioka told me, were derisively referred to as ‘flounders’ – flatfish who dwelt on the ocean floor, with their eyes positioned on the top of their bodies, always anxiously looking upwards. There was no explicit conspiracy to deliver verdicts one way or another, no direct orders from on high, just an understanding, as natural as the instinct of an animal, about how the world worked and where self-interest lay. ‘If someone brings a lawsuit against an institution, against a big company or a bank, or a local government,’ said Yoshioka, ‘in Japan the institution will almost always win.’

  It was eight months after the disaster when the first of the Okawa parents, Sayomi and Takahiro Shito, came to talk to him. He gave them two pieces of advice. The first was to muster as large a group of complainants as possible, to attract the attention of the media and establish an institutional presence of their own. The second was to bide their time, and to make use of the legal resource that their opponents in the city government were unwittingly providing for them – the infuriating ‘explanatory meetings’. ‘Once you’ve filed a case,’ Yoshioka said, ‘no one connected with it will talk any more – they’ll just say that the matter is in the courts, and use that as an excuse to say nothing. Even if you summon them to court, you get each witness in the stand for no more than an hour or two. But those explanatory meetings went on for three or four hours each. And there were ten of them.’ Rather than rushing to sue, it was better to draw out the city officials while their guard was down, encourage the media to report it all, and quietly accumulate as much ammunition as possible.

  The families who took up the case were housewives, joiners, builders, factory workers; none had expertise in forensic inquiry. ‘A lot of people would assume that these ordinary blokes out in the countryside wouldn’t
be capable of making a cross-examination, for example, and putting sharp questions,’ Yoshioka said. ‘Well, they’d be surprised. These are pretty smart people, quite capable of following a line of inquiry and pinning down the other side.’

  Yoshioka made no attempt to rehearse the families for the meetings. ‘I intervened as little as possible,’ he said, ‘and sometimes it got quite rough. People lost their tempers – they shouted, “Idiot!” and “Return my child!” Those kinds of words serve no purpose in the legal sense. But the people facing them, hearing those words of grief, seeing the parents of dead children exposing their hearts – I was glad for them to talk like that, because it forced those officials to respond.

  ‘I also tried to think about what this case was really about. Usually, it’s simple – if the lawyer wins, he’s done his job. But these families were fighting for their beloved children, the children they had lost. Even if they did win, it wouldn’t end their suffering. It’s not about a victory. It’s about finding out what happened to their children in the last moment of their lives, and why.’

  In Japanese justice, nothing happens quickly; it was not until April 2016 that witnesses appeared to give evidence in the case against Ishinomaki City and Miyagi Prefecture, co-defendants in the case. In the two intervening years, there had been half a dozen hearings at which lawyers for both sides debated matters of law and narrowed down points of contention. The plaintiffs’ claim was that the city, in the person of the teachers at Okawa Primary School, had been guilty of negligence – kashitsu, the word that Kashiba, the headmaster, had resisted so tenaciously – in failing to protect the children in its care. The case centred on two questions. Could the teachers have foreseen the coming of the tsunami? And, if so, could they have saved the children from it?

  The city insisted that the answer to both these questions was no. The school was two and half miles from the coast; even the mightiest tsunami in living memory – the one released by the Chile earthquake in 1960 – had done no harm this far inland. The school building, and the village around it, obscured the teachers’ view of the ocean; the spectacle of the wave overwhelming the forest of pines at the sea’s edge had been invisible to them. As soon as Deputy Headmaster Ishizaka had become aware of the water coming over the river bank, he ordered the children to flee – but by then, tragically, but unavoidably, it was too late.

  Yoshioka countered these arguments. The school may have been a good distance from the ocean, but the tsunami had come over the river bank, and that was only a hundred yards away. The village of Kamaya was scarcely above sea level at all, and had experienced conventional flooding from the Kitakami River in the past. Ishizaka had had the choice of several paths of evacuation – at least three different routes up the hill behind the school, or via the waiting school bus – all of them to places higher and safer than the spot he chose, the traffic island on the river’s edge. And there were multiple reasons for believing that not only should the teachers have anticipated a tsunami, but that they did in fact do so. ‘If we prove that they could have foreseen the tsunami,’ Yoshioka told me, ‘then we can win this case.’

  The public gallery at the Sendai District Court was full on 8 April 2016 when the former headmaster, Teruyuki Kashiba, gave his evidence; so many members of the public queued to get in that the available seats had to be allocated by lottery. All the familiar faces were there. Takahiro Shito, the Konnos, the Suzukis and Hideaki Tadano, the father of the young survivor, Tetsuya, sat behind their lawyers. There were bureaucrats from the board of education, and local journalists who had been covering the story from the beginning. But the courtroom possessed a quality of tension and formality that the explanatory meetings never had. It was imparted by the presence of the three dark-robed judges who swept in, as everyone in the room rose to their feet; and by the oath that Kashiba read aloud at the witness stand.

  ‘I swear to tell the truth, according to the dictates of my conscience,’ said the headmaster, small and plump in his charcoal-grey suit, ‘without omission or addition.’

  Kashiba was first questioned by one of the city’s lawyers, who walked him through the basics of the defence case. He talked about the school’s emergency manual, which set out clearly the actions to be taken in case of fire or earthquake. The school had carried out regular drills to prepare for such eventualities, and their effectiveness had been demonstrated when the strong, but lesser, earthquake had shaken the area on 9 March 2011, two days before the catastrophe. Kashiba had been at school that day; the children had evacuated calmly and quickly; the teachers had confidently discharged their designated duties. Okawa Primary School did not bother to hold tsunami drills, for a simple reason: no one had any reason to anticipate such an event. And, whatever the plaintiffs asserted, the paths up the hill were completely unrealistic as a route of evacuation. Kashiba had climbed them himself and found them steep, treacherous and overgrown with brush or bamboo.

  But here lay the flaw in the defence case. If the tsunami had truly been unimaginable, something that had not even crossed the minds of the teachers at the school, then why give any thought at all to the need to escape from one, any more than from an asteroid impact or zombie apocalypse?

  Yoshioka’s cross-examination of Kashiba lingered on this contradiction. He pressed the headmaster for details about the precursor earthquake on 9 March. A tsunami warning had been issued that day too, but for a wave of no more than twenty inches – scarcely noticeable to a casual observer, and incapable of causing damage. Nonetheless, as the children waited in the playground, Junji Endo, third in the school hierarchy, had conscientiously gone down to the river to scan its waters and confirm that nothing was amiss.

  Kashiba was asked about an exchange which he had that day with Endo and Ishizaka, his deputy. Details of this conversation had been let slip by the headmaster himself; it was one of the choicest of the revelations that came out of the ‘explanatory meetings’. After the children had returned safely to their classrooms, the three men had talked in the staffroom for several minutes about the evacuation, and the lessons to be learned from it. ‘We discussed what we should do if a tsunami reached Okawa Primary School,’ Kashiba told the court. ‘In such circumstances, could we escape by climbing up behind the bamboo grove? As it’s rough and steep, perhaps we couldn’t. We didn’t reach a conclusion.’

  He was shown a set of photographs that he had taken himself from the hill behind the school. It had been a blazing day of summer at the beginning of the long holiday. The photographs showed the red-roofed school set among the colourful jumbled roofs of the village, with the shining river and rice fields beyond. They had clearly been taken from a good way up the slope – a slope that, Kashiba insisted, was too dangerous for children to climb, even to save their lives.

  ‘Take a look at these pictures,’ Yoshioka told the witness. ‘Photographs one and two were taken by you on the twenty-first of July 2009.’

  ‘I remember it,’ said Kashiba.

  ‘How did you get up there?’ Yoshioka asked him.

  ‘I think that I climbed up behind the back of the little hut and through the bamboo grove.’

  ‘The route you walked – children could climb up there too, couldn’t they?’

  ‘I think that would be very dangerous.’

  ‘What was your physical condition when you took those pictures?’

  The headmaster paused for a moment. ‘I weigh eleven stone,’ he said. ‘With a height of five foot one.’

  A moment passed in which this information registered with the court, along with the visual image of the short, podgy man standing at the witness stand.

  ‘At such a height and weight,’ asked the lawyer, ‘wouldn’t it be easier for a child to climb than for you?’

  The starkest evidence of all that the school had, in fact, anticipated the disaster was in the emergency manual itself.

  Earlier versions of the document had adapted the basic template to strike out all references to tsunamis, on the basis that they were i
rrelevant to Okawa school. But beginning in 2007, these had been restored. The teacher who carried out the task was the deputy headmaster, Toshiya Ishizaka.

  The section labelled ‘On the occurrence of an earthquake’ was renamed ‘On the occurrence of an earthquake (tsunami)’. In a list of actions to be taken, the instruction ‘collect information’ became ‘collect information (also tsunami-related)’. And Ishizaka had added a new directive among the list of tasks to be ticked off by teachers during an earthquake evacuation: ‘confirm the occurrence of a tsunami, and lead the school to the place of secondary evacuation’. The place of secondary evacuation was added, but with wording unchanged from the template: ‘in case of tsunami: vacant land near school, or park, etc.’

  Kashiba’s obvious discomfort in the witness stand reached its peak in discussion of the emergency manual. At first, he found himself unable to recall why the revisions had been undertaken at all. Yoshioka reminded him: the education board had summoned a meeting of headmasters at which they had been instructed to review their procedures. The logic of the changes seemed inescapable. The manual had formerly made no mention of tsunamis. It had been changed to make provision for a tsunami. Why? Because there was a danger of a tsunami. With every question, Yoshioka seemed to tighten his grip on Kashiba; with every answer, he wriggled in the lawyer’s grasp. At one moment, Yoshioka furiously reminded him of the risk of perjury.

  ‘What prompted these revisions?’ the lawyer asked.

  ‘Deputy Headmaster Ishizaka added them,’ Kashiba said, ‘so I don’t know.’

  ‘During the time you were in charge at the school, three additions to the manual were made.’