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

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  The last hearing of the Sendai District Court was on 21 April 2016. Afterwards, the lawyers made their final written submissions. The document prepared by the city of Ishinomaki was twenty-three pages long; lawyers for the second defendant, the government of Miyagi Prefecture, presented just nine pages. Yoshioka submitted a 400-page book, dense with diagrams, graphs, statistics and legal argument. He was a calm, poised man, but afterwards he seemed as close as such a personality could ever get to jubilation. ‘I was talking about it with my colleague, and we can’t think of a single reason why we might lose,’ he told me. ‘Not one – and that’s a rare thing.’ From first filing to last submission, the case had taken two years and three months. By the standards of Japanese justice, Yoshioka said, that was ‘extremely quick’.

  But the chief judge ruled against calling Junji Endo as a witness. He was not obliged to set out his reasons, but Yoshioka took it to be a good sign. The plaintiffs, it implied, had successfully argued their case by other means. The judges did not need another witness to persuade them; and they would, in any case, have been reluctant to impose upon a man diagnosed with mental illness.

  ‘As long as he’s alive, I believe that he will cross our lives again at some point,’ said Sayomi. ‘It may not be in court. But we will have a chance to meet him, and listen to what he has to say. It’s not just Endo whose life has gone to pieces. He’s not the only one suffering mentally. I don’t just mean that our lives have changed. I mean inside our heads. Since that day, everyone has something wrong with them.’

  PART 5

  GONE ALTOGETHER BEYOND

  Consolation for the Spirits

  Reverend Taio Kaneta, priest and exorcist, described to me the night after the tsunami, a moment remembered with intense clarity by people all over northern Japan. His inland temple had been untouched by the water, but the earthquake had knocked out power and light across Tohoku. For the first time in a century of human development, the land was in a state of historic, virgin darkness. No illuminated windows blazed upwards to obscure the patterning of the night sky; without traffic lights, drivers stayed off the unlit streets. The stars in their constellations and the blue river of the Milky Way were vivid in a way that few inhabitants of the developed world ever see. ‘Before nightfall, snow fell,’ Kaneta said. ‘All the dust of modern life was washed by it to the ground. It was sheer darkness. And it was intensely silent, because there were no cars. It was the true night sky that we hardly ever see, the sky filled with stars. Everyone who saw it talks about that sky.’

  Kaneta was personally safe, and isolated by the power failure from a full understanding of what had happened. But he recognised that the world had changed. He had learned enough about the unprecedented magnitude and submarine epicentre of the earthquake to know that a tsunami must have followed. The closest stretch of coast to his temple was Shizugawa Bay, thirty miles away. His mind was filled with an image of the waters of the bay, awash with bodies. ‘A magnitude 9.2 earthquake,’ he said. ‘When something that powerful occurs, the Earth moves on its axis. So many people, all over Tohoku, were looking up at the sky on that night, filled with intense feelings. And looking at the stars, I became aware of the universe, the infinite space all around and above us. I felt as if I was looking into the universe, and I was conscious of the earthquake as something which had taken place within that vast expanse of empty space. And I began to understand that this was all part of a whole. Something enormous had happened. But whatever it was, it was entirely natural; it had happened as one of the mechanisms of the universe.

  ‘It’s engraved in my mind: the pitiless snow, and the beautiful shining, starry sky, and all those countless dead bodies drifting onto the beach. Perhaps this sounds pretentious, but I realised that when I began my work, giving support to people whose lives had been destroyed, I had to attend to the hearts of human beings and their suffering and anguish. But I also had to understand those sorrows from the cosmic perspective.’

  He experienced at that time a sensation of dissolution, of boundaries disappearing. It was the enactment of a Buddhist concept: jita funi, literally ‘self and other: undivided’ – the unity of being apprehended in different times and places by mystics of all religions. ‘The universe wraps everything up inside it, in the end,’ Kaneta said. ‘Life, death, grief, anger, sorrow, joy. There was no boundary, then, between the living and the dead. There was no boundary between the selves of the living. The thoughts and feelings of everyone melted into one. That was the understanding I achieved at that time, and it was what made compassion possible, and love, in something like the Christian sense.’

  It was a singular, unrecoverable moment. A catastrophe had occurred. But because it was so new, was still unfolding in fact, no one could reckon its breadth and its height. In the Kitakami River, Teruo Konno was clinging to his raft. The mothers of Okawa Primary School were listening to the reassuring broadcast on the radio, confident that they would see their children the next day. Standing beneath the stars, Kaneta glimpsed the scale and horror of what had happened, but he did so imaginatively, and in his imagination the disaster took on the lineaments of a profound spiritual truth. It would be a long time before he possessed such clarity again.

  Of all the people I encountered in Tohoku, none made a stronger impression than Taio Kaneta. It was not his Buddhism that interested me the most – the fact of his being a priest often seemed incidental to who he was, no more than an interesting detail of personality. He was a natural teller of stories, a man of learning and intellectual honesty, and of rich empathy. And he had that gift of imagination which I had been seeking for myself – the paradoxical capacity to feel the tragedy on the surface of the skin, in its all cruelty and dread, but also to understand it, to observe from a position of detachment, with calm and penetration. Kaneta did not jump back from the disaster, as I always did – back on the bullet train, back to Tokyo, back to my desk on the tenth floor. He was immersed in the necessity of dealing with the corpses of the dead, although he had lost none of his own loved ones. He allowed the catastrophe to change his life, but he did not become its victim. He was strong enough to admit doubt, and confusion, and his own physical and mental weakness. It was these qualities that enabled him to console the living, and to communicate with and command the dead. But there was a mental cost for those who straddled the boundary between the two worlds. In Kaneta’s case, it would almost break him.

  When the funerals were done, and after the possessing spirits had been driven out of Takeshi Ono, Kaneta turned to face what the tsunami had left behind and looked for ways of making himself useful. In Buddhism, the forty-ninth day after death marks the moment when the departed soul enters the afterlife. He gathered a group of fellow priests, Shinto and Buddhist, as well as a Protestant pastor, to perform a ritual march to the town of Shizugawa, a town almost completely obliterated.

  They set out in the morning from a temple inland. The Shinto priests wore their extravagant black lacquered hats; the Buddhists were red-robed and shaven-headed; the pastor had his dog-collar and silver cross. The landscape through which they walked was broken, and corrupt with decay. Bulldozers had cleared ways through the rubble, and piled it into looming mounds of concrete, metal, wood and tile. The heaps had been incompletely searched; cadavers were folded inside them, unrecovered and invisible, but obvious to everyone who passed. ‘There were strange smells,’ said Kaneta, ‘of dead bodies, and of mud. There was so much rubble, and mementoes of people’s lives still lying around on the ground. We had to take care where we stepped to avoid trampling on photographs.’

  The procession of vividly dressed men moved through the ruins, holding aloft a placard bearing characters meaning ‘Consolation for the Spirits’. They walked for four hours. Machines were pawing at the rubble as they passed. Workers in hard hats picked at the debris, and waved them gruffly away from the caterpillar tracks. The men of religion began to feel self-conscious. They began to suspect that, rather than helping, they were an unwelcome obs
truction to the clean-up operation. But there were ordinary people here too, standing about with a dazed air, or picking at the rubble of their former homes. ‘They were looking for the bodies of their loved ones,’ said Kaneta. ‘When they saw us marching past, they turned and bowed their heads. They were praying desperately to find their loved ones. Our hearts were so full when that happened. I have rarely been more conscious of suffering.’

  As they marched, Kaneta and his group had intended to chant sutras and sing hymns. But here, among the stench and mess, their voices failed them. ‘The Christian pastor was trying to sing hymns,’ said Kaneta. ‘But none of the hymns in his book seemed right. I couldn’t even say the sutra – it came out in screams and shouts.’ The priests lurched uselessly through the rubble in their rich robes, croaking the scriptures, getting in the way. ‘And when we got to the sea,’ said Kaneta, ‘when we saw the sea – we couldn’t face it. It was as if we couldn’t interpret what we were seeing.’

  He said, ‘We realised that, for all that we had learned about religious ritual and language, none of it was effective in facing what we saw all around us. This destruction that we were living inside – it couldn’t be framed by the principles and theories of religion. Even as priests, we were close to the fear that people express when they say, “We see no God, we see no Buddha here.” I realised then that religious language was an armour which we wore to protect ourselves, and that the only way forward was to take it off.’

  Monku stood for the Japanese word ‘complaint’ and the English word ‘monk’, but there was a third allusion in the name of Café de Monku, the mobile event that Kaneta organised for survivors of the wave, to offer refreshment, companionship and counselling by stealth. ‘I love jazz,’ he said, ‘and above all I love Thelonious Monk. Bebop – such brilliant, peculiar music. Loose phrasing, those dissonant sounds. It seemed to me that it reflected what people’s minds were like after the disaster – the tempo of people’s minds and hearts. It was the perfect music for the occasion.’ At Café de Monku, Kaneta took off his priest’s robes – in the struggle to help the survivors of the disaster, a jazz fan was as much use as a Buddhist.

  The ‘temporary residences’ were laid out in rows on vacant land on the margins of the inland towns. Kaneta would arrive with a group of priests and helpers and set up in the community meeting room. They would brew tea and coffee, set out cakes and biscuits. The inhabitants of the metal huts would begin to arrive, most of them elderly. Kaneta would stand up and address the room, a tall, smiling, bespectacled figure, dressed in a simple indigo tunic. He would welcome everyone, introduce his helpers and make teasing jokes. ‘Mr Suzuki is here to give you a massage round the shoulders, if you want one,’ he said. ‘Ah, what a massage! You should try it. His massage is so relaxing that you may actually find yourself slipping into the next world. But you needn’t worry, if that happens – we have lots of priests on hand.’

  Hot drinks would be poured, and plates of food passed around. Trays were set out with lengths of coloured cord and beads of glass; the old people would sit on the floor at the low tables and string Buddhist rosaries. The priests inscribed and blessed ihai memorial tablets, for those who had lost them. There were more jokes and chuckling; but often Kaneta was to be seen sitting apart with one person or another, engaged in a private and visibly tearful conversation. Thelonious Monk would be playing.

  Everyone in Japan was looking for consolation. The more time passed, the harder it became to find. After the immediate struggle for survival, and the arduous weeks in the evacuation centres, the homeless were dispersed across the country in the homes of relatives, in rented accommodation and in the grim temporary residences. But the period of acute crisis, in some ways, had been the easy part. When survivors moved out of the cramped, but cheerful, communal shelters to the relative privacy of the metal containers, grief and loss rose up like a second wave.

  ‘Immediately after the tsunami, people were worried about surviving for the next hour,’ said Naoya Kawakami, a Protestant pastor whom I met at Café de Monku. ‘Then they got to the shelters and worried about getting through the day. Things settled down, they were provided with food and something to sleep on, and they were anxious about the next fortnight. Then they were given temporary homes and their lives were secure, in a sense. They were not going to starve or freeze. But after the practical problems were resolved, the anxiety they felt was as strong as ever. It stretched ahead indefinitely into the future. It could no longer be soothed by just giving them things. The things will never be enough.’

  The metal boxes were lonely and sterile after the companionable crowding of the evacuation centres, but as the years passed, they were made cosy. Flowers and ornamental cauliflowers were planted; neighbours became friends. But then permanent homes became available, and the new communities began to shrink and break up. The homes were awarded by lottery – those who won moved to new purpose-built apartments; those who lost were left behind, at least until the next allocation. ‘Some people lose, and keep on losing,’ one of the priests told me. ‘They have an acute sense of abandonment. Sometimes, they wake up and find that their neighbours, the winners, have disappeared without saying a word. They’re too embarrassed to say their goodbyes.’

  Pastor Kawakami said, ‘In the beginning, they could talk about their anxieties, and how they could be resolved. I need a rice ball for my child. I need a cardboard box to put my possessions in. People have those now. But they still have their anxiety, and the anxiety that remains is too big to speak of. It comes out in anger, in the breakdown of relationships, between individuals and between groups. There is resentment, disharmony, a failure of understanding. These are people of goodwill, but they are becoming stubborn. So many people are seeing ghosts these days, and it’s because of trauma. People talk of seeing ghosts, but what they’re talking about is troubles back home.’

  Japanese had been dying in tsunamis as long as the Japanese islands had existed. And every tsunami had brought forth ghosts. One of them was recorded in a famous old book of Tohoku folklore called The Tales of Tono. It told the story of a man named Fukuji1 who survived the Sanriku tsunami of 1896, and who lived with his two surviving children in a shack on the site of the family house. One moonlit summer night, he got up to relieve himself on the beach. ‘This night, the fog hovered low,’ the book records, ‘and he saw two people, a man and a woman, approaching him through the fog.’ The woman was his wife. The man was another villager, who had been in love with her, until the woman’s family had chosen Fukuji as her husband.

  As if in a dream, Fukuji followed the couple and called out his wife’s name. She turned to him, smiling, and said, ‘I am married to this man now.’ Fukuji, half or fully asleep, struggled to understand. ‘But don’t you love your children?’ he said. The woman’s pale face became paler, and she began to weep. Fukuji, uncomprehending, looked miserably at his feet. His wife and her lover moved soundlessly out of sight. He started to follow them, and then remembered that both his wife and the man had died in the tsunami. ‘He stood on the road thinking until daybreak and went home in the morning,’ the story ends. ‘It is said that he was sick for a long time after this.’

  No one knew the literature and folklore of Tohoku better than Masashi Hijikata and he understood immediately that, after the disaster, hauntings would follow. ‘We remembered the story of Fukuji,’ he said, ‘and we told one another that there would be many new stories like that. Personally, I don’t believe in the existence of spirits, but that’s not the point. If people say they see ghosts, then that’s fine – we can leave it at that.’

  Hijikata was born in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, but he had come to Sendai as a university student, and had the passion of the successful immigrant for his adopted home. He ran a small publishing company whose books and journals were exclusively on Tohoku subjects. It was Hijikata who explained to me the politics of ghosts, and the opportunity, as well as the risk, they represented for the people of Tohoku.

>   ‘We realised that so many people were having experiences like this,’ he said. ‘But there were people taking advantage of them. Trying to sell them this and that, telling them, “This will give you relief.”’ He met a woman who had lost her son in the disaster, and who was troubled by the sense of being haunted. She went to the hospital: the doctor gave her antidepressants. She went to the temple: the priest sold her an amulet, and told her to read the sutras. ‘But all she wanted,’ Hijikata said, ‘was to see her son again. There are so many like her. They don’t care if they are ghosts – they want to encounter ghosts.

  ‘Given all that, we thought we had to do something. Of course, there are some people who are experiencing trauma, and if your mental health is suffering then you need medical treatment. Other people will rely on the power of religion, and that is their choice. What we do is to create a place where people can accept the fact that they are witnessing the supernatural. We provide an alternative for helping people through the power of literature.’

  Ghosts were not only inevitable, they were something to celebrate, part of the rich culture of Tohoku. Hijikata revived a literary form that had flourished in the feudal era: the kaidan, or ‘weird tale’. Kaidan-kai, or ‘weird-tale parties’, had been a popular summer pastime, when the delicious chill imparted by ghost stories served as a form of pre-industrial air conditioning. Hijikata’s kaidan-kai were held in modern community centres and public halls. They would begin with a reading by one of his authors. Then members of the audience would share experiences of their own – students, housewives, working people, retirees. He organised kaidan-writing competitions, and published the best of them in an anthology. Among the winners was Ayane Suto, whom I met one afternoon at Hijikata’s office.

  She was a calm, neat young woman, with heavy black glasses and a drooping fringe, who worked in Sendai at a care home for the disabled. The fishing port of Kesennuma, where she grew up, had been one of the towns worst hit by the tsunami. Ayane’s family home was beyond the reach of the wave, and her mother, sister and grandparents were untouched by it. But her father, a maritime engineer, worked in an office on the town’s harbour front, and that evening he didn’t come home.