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

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  ‘Perhaps, I think, awareness about tsunamis was gradually increasing.’

  ‘So you came back from the headmasters’ meeting and told Mr Ishizaka what to do.’

  ‘I just never expected a tsunami to reach the school at all,’ said Kashiba. ‘So I thought it would be fine if we just put the word in.’

  ‘But if you thought a tsunami would never come, why did you bother to put any word in at all?’

  ‘We were told to put in the word “tsunami”, so we did.’

  ‘But why did you support putting it in?’

  ‘I thought … it would be fine.’

  The atmosphere in the courtroom was strained and grave. At various points there was stifled weeping from the seats where the families sat. But on hearing from the headmaster that their children had been protected from a tsunami by nothing stronger than words, the parents broke into bitter and incredulous laughter.

  There May Be Gaps in Memory

  Sometimes Tetsuya Tadano wanted to be a policeman when he grew up, and sometimes he wanted to be a firefighter. He loved judo and swimming, but his mum often had to nag him to do his homework. In other words, he was a conventional, playful eleven-year-old boy. But of all the people I met, it was Tetsuya who had the greatest love and fascination for Okawa Primary School, an enthusiasm close to passion.

  Everyone else emphasised the school’s ordinariness and normality, as if this absence of qualities enlarged the grossness of the tragedy. But in Tetsuya’s eyes, it was a wondrous place, not so much for its pupils and teachers, whom he loved and respected, as for its physical eccentricities. Most Japanese schools are flat-roofed cubes, which vary only in their size. Okawa Primary School was the work of an architect of ambition and imagination. The main building was constructed not as an angular block, but on a curving perpendicular; from it projected a secondary wing, which spread into a twelve-sided pavilion. Tetsuya talked about the inner courtyard where the children rode their unicycles,fn1 and the pond where they threw insects for the bloated ornamental carp. Planted along the front of the school were cherry trees, which every April put out a foam of pink blossoms. On one outer wall, the pupils had painted pictures of the children of the world in the national dress of their respective countries. Tetsuya described the view from the upper classrooms of the paddy fields and the river, and the play of the elements on the building’s materials. ‘When the weather was fine,’ he said, ‘the roof was red. But when it rained, the colour changed into this blend of purple and blue, a dark blue. And the whole building looked fantastic.’

  Before 11 March 2011, Tetsuya lived with his family in Yachinaka, the hamlet immediately behind Kamaya. His father, Hideaki, worked at the paper mill in Ishinomaki. He had fled from the tsunami to a hill in the centre of the city. When the waters receded, he borrowed a bike and pedalled to the big inland sports centre where the refugees from the Okawa area had gathered. There Hideaki learned the fate of the school and his village. But there, almost alone among the desperate parents, he found his own son, Tetsuya, scratched and battered, with a patch over his injured right eye – but alive.

  Tadano was head of the local volunteer fire corps, which went into action at times of natural disaster as an auxiliary to the professional fire brigade. Fathers of children from the school were exempted from duty in Kamaya, on compassionate grounds, but he led his men anyway, lifting bodies out of the mud. His wife, Shiroe, was found five days after the disaster, his father after eight days and his nine-year-old daughter, Mina, the day after that.

  Father and son moved out of the sports centre to the home of Hideaki’s sister. Later they found a house of their own on the outskirts of Ishinomaki. They often went back to the site of where they had lived. All that was left of the family home – all that remained of any of the houses in Kamaya – was the outline of its concrete foundations. Even the doctor’s clinic, the husk of which had outlasted the wave, had quickly been bulldozed. Only the school survived to show that there had ever been a village here at all – cracked, windowless, exposed in places to the elements, but still recognisable.

  Upon its ruin, a remarkable feat had been performed. Early on, soldiers and recovery workers had removed the rubble of trees, cars and broken houses that enmeshed the building, but the work had not ended there. The school’s interior, and its contents, which had been churned and befouled by the inrushing water, had been tenderly sifted and restored, as if awaiting the return of children and teachers. The small desks with their iron legs had been lined up in rows. There were heaps of miscellaneous objects: a sewing machine, abacuses, a recorder and a wall clock, its hands suspended at 3.37. Outside each classroom was a row of hooks still labelled with the names of the children whose coats had once hung there.

  Tetsuya took comfort in his visits to the school. So much had changed, so suddenly, that his old life – and the lives of his mother, sister, grandfather, schoolmates – flickered in his mind sometimes, with the insubstantiality of a dream. The presence of the school assured him that he, and they, had lived. Memory lived on in its walls and spaces. During one of his wanderings through the deserted classrooms, Tetsuya uncovered a dictionary bearing the name of his little sister, Mina, written in her own childish handwriting.

  Then one day his father told him that the city government would soon reach a decision about the future of the surviving buildings. The consensus was that the remaining structures should be demolished, the site levelled and all traces of Okawa Primary School removed from the earth.

  All along the north-east coast, those who had survived the tsunami were considering how to deal with what it left behind. Not the mundane mess of broken houses and commercial buildings, which was steadily being heaped and cleared, but the symbolic ruins:1 those sites of particularly acute or vivid tragedy, as well as the jarring juxtapositions thrown up by the wave’s force. There was the Disaster Prevention Centre in Minami-Sanriku, where a young woman named Miki Endo famously remained at her post, dutifully broadcasting evacuation warnings, even as she, and forty-two of her colleagues, were swallowed up. There was the No.18 Kyotoku-maru, a 200-foot fishing boat, which was deposited in a residential street in the port of Kesennuma; and the Hamayuri, a 190-ton catamaran that came to rest on the roof of a hotel in Otsuchi. And then there was the ‘miracle pine’ of Rikuzen-Takata, the single lonely survivor of a coastal forest of 70,000 trees, and the object of intense efforts to keep it alive. There was a precedent in Japan for preserving ruins associated with death and disaster: the Atomic Bomb Dome in the city of Hiroshima, a former public hall whose skeletal shell is a place of international pilgrimage and a world-famous symbol of the horrors of nuclear war.

  Local campaigns were established to preserve these relics, but they were controversial and divisive. To some people, the tsunami ruins were emblems of survival and hope, and a necessary warning to future generations of the power of the sea. To many others, they were reminders of a horror they were struggling to forget. Some pointed out the value of such sites as tourist attractions, in towns that now had less than ever to draw visitors from outside; for others, that was exactly the reason why the ruins should be expunged. ‘A lot of people want to pray for the souls of the dead in a calm, peaceful environment,’ Naomi Hiratsuka told me. ‘They don’t want pitying eyes upon them. The bodies of some of the children were recovered from inside the school – that’s the kind of place it is. You don’t want buses parking there, and sightseers on package tours.’

  The arguments also turned on money, and on the irrationality, as some people saw it, of devoting resources to maintaining ruins at a time when many people still lacked permanent homes. But they also seemed to express opposing convictions about the best way of dealing with mental trauma: whether to face it, articulate it and struggle to accept it – or to thrust it out of view.

  As time passed, the supporters of preservation lost several of their battles. The hulks of the Kyotoku-maru and Hamayuri were hoisted away and scrapped. The surviving iron frame of the Minami-Sanriku Di
saster Prevention Centre was condemned to demolition. Salt in the soil slowly killed the roots of the miracle pine.fn2 A survey of the families of children who died at Okawa school revealed that 60 per cent of them wanted it to be razed. ‘If you remain silent, it will definitely go,’ Hideaki Tadano told Tetsuya. ‘If you want to speak out, the time to speak out is now.’

  Of the seventy-eight children who were caught up in the water, only four had come out alive. Three of them disappeared from view, anxiously protected from scrutiny by their families. Tetsuya’s father, Hideaki, used to see one of them from time to time; he was struck by an air of anguished repression about the boy, as if he had been instructed not to speak, or even to think, about the fact of his escape from death. Only Tetsuya chose to talk publicly about his experience. To journalists, he was a gift – a child of the tsunami, both a victim and a survivor, authentically boyish in manner, but lucid, articulate and, on the face of it, remarkably undamaged by what he had seen. Okawa Primary had been re-established in another school and Tetsuya attended it with the other survivors, most of them children who had been picked up by parents or grandparents in the fifty-one minutes between earthquake and wave. He spoke willingly about the experience of being caught in the tsunami and the unanswered questions about what had happened, and why. His father was vigilantly alert to his son’s mental state, but he encouraged these engagements. There was no systematic provision of mental-health care for the children of Okawa Primary School: for Hideaki, Tetsuya’s conversations with sympathetic reporters amounted to a kind of therapy. ‘And it was all easier,’ Hideaki told me, ‘with other people around. There was a restaurant where we all used to go as a family, and to go there with a TV producer, all talking about what they were going to film, was fun. To go there alone, just Tetsuya and me – that was too sad, because of all that we remembered.’

  Hideaki was aware of an atmosphere of unvoiced disapproval from the community of the bereaved, and he understood it well. ‘I am the father of a survivor,’ he said, ‘but I am also the father of a child who died at the school. Plenty of people – the kind of people who have lost two or three children – they don’t want to turn on the television and see the faces of the children who survived.’ But no one, surely, had a greater right to express his opinion than Tetsuya?

  He began talking to journalists about the fate of the school buildings, and his belief that they should be saved. He made a speech on the subject at a public event in Sendai. With his father, he took the bullet train to Tokyo to give talks at two famous universities. A handful of other young people began speaking up in support of Tetsuya, former pupils at the school, whose younger siblings had died there – including the surviving daughters of Katsura Sato and Sayomi Shito, and Amane Ukitsu, the sixth-grade girl whose mother had picked her up just in time. The group of six children began to meet every week to discuss tactics and muster their resolve. ‘The Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima was preserved2 because people took action,’ Amane said. ‘Nothing changes until somebody stands up.’

  Early in 2014, Tetsuya spoke at a symposium at Meiji University3 in Tokyo. It was a solemn and intimidating occasion, the biggest gathering he had ever addressed. ‘I lost my mother and sister in the tsunami,’ he told the audience. ‘And my grandfather, who used to look after me. The grief did not come immediately, but now, at last, I feel the sadness and the pain.’

  He talked about the word gareki, meaning ‘rubble’ or ‘debris’, and used to refer to the detritus of the tsunami. To most people, it was a neutral, colourless term, unthinkingly employed; but for Tetsuya, it hurt to hear it. ‘Our possessions,’ he said, ‘are now called gareki. Until the disaster, they were part of our life. Now, they contain our memories. I don’t like to hear all those things referred to as “rubble”.’ And now the school, where he had been so happy, and where his friends and sister had died, was also to be treated as gareki. ‘If the school is demolished, people in the future will not know what happened here,’ he said. ‘I don’t want the building to be destroyed.’

  It was a matter of concern to his father that even in the early days after the tsunami, Tetsuya rarely showed signs of being overcome by emotion. But after delivering these words to the university audience, he began to slump in his seat. Hideaki had to lead him off the podium to a quiet room. Asked what was wrong, he laid his head on the table. ‘I started thinking about how everyone died, and how they must have felt,’ he said. ‘Thinking about that, I felt very heavy.’

  The final decision about the school lay with the mayor of Ishinomaki. In February 2016, he called a public meeting to debate the question of the school’s future. This time Tetsuya did not appear in person, but he recorded a video message, pleading for the school to be preserved. Naomi Hiratsuka’s husband, Shinichiro, was one of those who argued passionately for it to be demolished. A wrenching and unbridgeable gulf separated the opposing sides; whatever the decision, the result would be pain. To some, the ruin of the school represented the destruction of their beloved children; to others, it was their last surviving trace.

  The following month, the mayor made his decision. The school would be preserved, and a memorial park built around it. But a thicket of trees would be planted so that those who chose to could pass by without ever looking the ruin in the face.

  Two weeks after the testimony of Kashiba, the former headmaster, a second hearing was held at which further witnesses were sworn in and examined. To spare them the ordeal of a court appearance, Yoshioka, lawyer for the families, decided not to call as witnesses any of the surviving children. But Miwae Ukitsu, the mother of the sixth-year girl, Amane, did give evidence. She had been off work and at home on the day of the earthquake; she recounted how she had immediately driven the two miles to the school after hearing the tsunami warning on the radio. She went straight to her daughter’s teacher, Takashi Sasaki, who was standing in the playground with his class. ‘I told him, “On the car radio, I heard that the height of the tsunami is getting higher, so please run up the hill quickly,”’ she said. ‘I took his left arm, and I pointed at the hill and I said, “There’s a tsunami coming. Twenty feet high, they said.” I was upset, I was shouting loudly. He was completely unconcerned. He patted my shoulder, and said, “Calm down, ma’am.”’

  Mr Sasaki asked Mrs Ukitsu to take Amane home. The girl was weeping uncontrollably and it was upsetting the other children. Her mother was struck by this, for Amane was not a tearful or touchy child. As Amane explained later, she had heard her two classmates, Yuki Sato and Daisuke Konno, arguing with the teacher.

  Sir, let’s go up the hill.

  We should climb the hill, sir.

  If we stay here, the ground might split open and swallow us up.

  We’ll die if we stay here!

  And she was thinking of a dream she had had a few days before, of all of her friends caught up in a churning, chaotic swirl. Remembering the nightmare, she became uncontrollably afraid.

  The nineteen families who went to court did so for different reasons, and with varying degrees of alacrity and hesitation. For some, the prospect of a financial pay-out, after years of grief and hardship, was like rain after drought. For others, the idea of placing a value on the lives of their dead children was unbearably distasteful. But everyone I met agreed on one thing: the most important thing was not the money, but the prospect of uncovering the truth about what had happened at the school. These declarations began to puzzle me after a while – for the families, after years of investigation, knew a great deal already.

  The speedy evacuation from the school buildings, the long sojourn in the playground, Sasaki’s offhand confidence, Ishizaka’s indecisiveness, and then the panicked flight into the mouth of the tsunami – all of this has been established in documents and eyewitness accounts. The board of education might slither and swerve around the question of responsibility, but it was clear what had taken place, and who had failed. What further ‘truth’ remained to be uncovered? When I put this question to Sayomi Shito, she answered w
ith a single word: ‘Endo’.

  After his single appearance at the first of the explanatory meetings, Junji Endo had gone to ground. With him, in the eyes of many of the parents, the truth had also vanished from view. This was the point of going to court – to force Endo out of hiding and compel him to come to the witness stand, where he would finally give voice to the evasive truth. ‘It’s very simple,’ said Yoshioka. ‘There is one living adult witness who was present at the school. The families want to know in his own words exactly what happened to their children in those last moments, how they were washed away by the tsunami, how they died.’

  Endo continued to insist that he was psychologically unfit to appear in court. The judges, if they chose, had the power to order his appearance, and Yoshioka requested them to do so. In the meantime, he attempted to manage the expectations of his clients. To win their case, he pointed out, they had to show that the teachers could have foreseen a tsunami – Endo might be useful in achieving this, but there were other routes to proving the same thing. Even if he did appear as a witness, it was likely that, having been coached by the city’s lawyers, his evidence would be vague and misleading. The parents nodded their understanding, but the lawyer knew how much was invested in the hope of seeing and hearing this one man.

  What exactly was it, I asked Sayomi Shito, that she expected to learn from Endo that she didn’t already know, or couldn’t guess?

  ‘Everything that happened then.’

  ‘Such as what?’

  ‘What kind of sky it was,’ she said. ‘How the wind was blowing. What kind of atmosphere there was. What the mood was among the children. Did the teachers seriously try to save their lives? Did the children feel cold? Did they want to go home? How was my child? Who was the last person to talk to her? Who was beside her when she ran away? Was she holding hands with anyone? Even knowing all of this, none of it will bring Chisato back. But everything that happened then – that is what I want to know.’