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

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  Daisuke was the first to be recovered, a week after the wave, followed by Hiroyuki’s father. Rika, who had died four days before her seventeenth birthday, was found at the end of the month. Old Mrs Konno and eighteen-year-old Mari were found in early April.

  Daisuke was at the bottom of the hill behind the school, not far from the traffic island, in one of several small heaps of children. The girls and their grandparents lay in different places, but there were clues that suggested what had happened to them. Old Mr Konno had his car keys in his pocket. His wife was carrying bags of clothes, and the girls had snacks and charger cables for their mobile phones. They were preparing a departure; they might have been about to get into the car when the tsunami struck. Perhaps they were worried about Daisuke, or about Hitomi. Perhaps they were waiting for one or both of them to return before making their escape.

  Hitomi went to see Daisuke at the high-school gymnasium, and found him uninjured. ‘He looked as if he was sleeping,’ she said. ‘He looked as if he would wake up if I called his name. I still remember his face as it was then.’ But when she came back the next day, a jolting change had taken place. Drops of blood had issued from Daisuke’s eyes, like tears. She wiped them away, but overnight, and every night after that, Daisuke shed more tears of blood. Hitomi understood that this was because of changes that were taking place inside the container of her son’s body. But she couldn’t help also seeing it as a symbol of the pain of his hovering spirit, and of how desperately he had wanted to live.

  It had been difficult even to find coffins. Every crematorium within reach of the coast was backed up for several days. People were driving for hundreds of miles to hold a funeral. What Hitomi and Hiroyuki most urgently needed now was a supply of dry ice, first for one, then for two and eventually for five sets of remains. An undertaker explained that each body needed four pieces of ice – two to go under the arms and two under the legs. As the spring warmth came on, each piece lasted only a few days. Hiroyuki would drive around for hours and finally locate ice in a neighbouring town – but the next time he went there, its supply would be gone. In the month it took for all five bodies to be recovered and cremated, Hitomi and Hiroyuki’s lives were dominated by the daily struggle to protect their children and parents from decay.

  Apart from their family, the Konnos had also lost their home and everything in it. While they were organising ice and funerals, Hitomi and Hiroyuki stayed first with his elderly grandmother, and then moved to a vacant house owned by an aunt and uncle. For them, as for many of the parents from the school, those early weeks were a time of numb frenzy rather than supine grief, a losing struggle to remain on top of a hundred pressing practical matters.

  It was about a month after the disaster that Hitomi had a phone call from Kazutaka Sato, a man she knew as Yuki’s dad.

  Yuki Sato was Daisuke’s best friend and confrère in mischief. The two boys walked to school together, practised judo together and fished together in the Kitakami River. Yuki had also died on 11 March.

  By this stage, the scale of the tragedy at Okawa Primary School had become clear. The school had 108 children. Of the seventy-eight who were there at the moment of the tsunami, seventy-four, and ten out of eleven teachers, had died. But a handful of parents had gone to the school after the earthquake, picked up their children and taken them to safety. One of the girls who had been saved in this way, Amane Ukitsu, had been in the sixth-year class with Daisuke and Yuki. Mr Sato had recently talked to Amane, and now he was telephoning, full of emotion, to share with Hitomi the story that he had heard from their sons’ surviving classmate.

  Sato had asked Amane about the moments before her mother took her away from the school, the period after the earthquake and before the tsunami. His beloved son had died at the age of twelve; now he wanted to know everything that it was possible to know about Yuki in the last minutes of his life. How had he appeared? What had he spoken of? Had he been afraid?

  Amane described how the building shook violently, but suffered no serious damage, and how the children and teachers evacuated the building, just as they had for the lesser tremor two days earlier. The pupils had lined up by class. Amane stood with Yuki, Daisuke and the rest of the sixth year.

  The names were quickly checked off, and the children were told to remain where they stood. Soon, sirens and announcements could be heard, urging evacuation to higher ground. It was cold in the playground. But there was no move to go back inside, or anywhere else. Chilled by the wind, the children became restless. And now there was a loudspeaker van driving around, broadcasting warning of a ‘super-tsunami’ coming in from the sea.

  Amane recounted how Daisuke, the class captain, and Yuki, his sidekick, addressed their class teacher, a man named Takashi Sasaki.

  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!

  The teacher shushed them, and told them to remain where they were.

  Soon afterwards Amane’s mother arrived and hurriedly drove her away. The family lost their house, but she was one of only five children left alive from the sixth-year class.

  Mr Sato’s telephone call left Hitomi trembling. She had had no time or energy left over to contemplate them before – but this story lit up like a floodlight questions that had been flickering dimly in her grief-darkened mind. What, after all, had been going on at the school in the period between the earthquake and the wave? Why had everyone not evacuated to the hill behind it, as her own son had apparently suggested? If he had been able to see the sense of this, why had not his teachers? Why had they, and Daisuke, and everyone else, had to die?

  PART 2

  AREA OF SEARCH

  Abundant Nature

  The territory of the Okawa Primary School appears on globes and atlases as an unlabelled blank. The two great plains surrounding Tokyo and Osaka, the mega-cities at Japan’s core, are a density of roads, railways and place names, which dwindle and fade to the north of the main island of Honshu. Even before disaster struck its coast, nowhere in Japan was closer to the world of the dead.

  In ancient times, the region known as Tohoku was a notorious frontier realm of barbarians, goblins and bitter cold. Even today, it remains a remote, marginal, faintly melancholy place, the symbol of a rural tradition that, for city dwellers, is no more than a folk memory.

  The seventeenth-century haiku poet Basho wrote about Tohoku in his famous travel sketch The Narrow Road to the Deep North, in which it figures as an emblem of loneliness and isolation. Even after Japan’s rapid modernisation in the late nineteenth century, Tohoku was poorer, hungrier and more backward than anywhere else. Northern men, tough and uncomplaining, filled the imperial armies. The fields were rich in grain and fruit, but their produce was consumed in the richer south, and a bad harvest often left Tohoku in famine. There were three commodities, it used to be said, which the north supplied to Tokyo: rice, fighting men and whores.

  Today, Tohoku makes up one-third of the area of Honshu, but one-tenth of its population. It is associated with an impenetrable regional dialect, a quality of eeriness and an archaic spirituality that are exotic even to modern Japanese. In the north, there are secret Buddhist cults, and old temples where the corpses of former priests are displayed as leering mummies. There is a sisterhood of blind shamanesses who gather once a year at a volcano called Mount Fear, the traditional entrance to the underworld. Tohoku has bullet trains and Wi-Fi, and the rest of the twenty-first century conveniences. But the mobile network gives out in the remoter hills and bays and, beneath the glaze of affluence, something lingers of the old stereotype of Tohoku people as brooding, incomprehensible and a little spooky.

  I knew the region’s largest city, Sendai, which was as blandly pleasant as most of Japan’s prefectural capitals. But the other names reeled off by the television news on the night of 11 March – Otsuchi, Ofunato, Rikuzen-Takata, Kesennuma – were as o
bscure to many Japanese as they were to foreigners. And between Kesennuma and the fishing port of Ishinomaki, an intricately spiky coastline, indented with deep and narrow bays, the atlas displayed no place names at all.

  A larger-scale map revealed the name of this obscure zone: the Sanriku Coast. Three physical features distinguished it: two obvious and spectacular, the other stealthy and invisible. The first was the Kitakami, Tohoku’s greatest river, which rose in the mountains and flowed south to empty itself through two distinct mouths, one in Ishinomaki, one at a thinly populated place called Oppa Bay. The second was those sharp, fjord-like bays, called rias, formed by river valleys which over the millennia had been drowned by the rising sea. The third was the meeting point, deep beneath the ocean, of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates,1 titanic segments of the Earth’s crust, from whose grating friction earthquakes and tsunamis are born.

  On this jagged coast, close to Oppa Bay, was Okawa Primary School. I travelled there for the first time in September 2011. Half a year had passed since the disaster, and in that time I had made repeated journeys to the tsunami zone. At first it had been accessible only by car, along roads strewn with rubble, after hours of queuing for a single jerrycan of rationed fuel. In time, petrol supplies resumed and, after anxious checks on the safety of its tracks, the shinkansen, or bullet train, restarted its northbound service. Early September is high summer in Japan; the air was hot and full, and the sky was a cloudless, fine-grained blue. The shinkansen raced smoothly and effortlessly north, slurping up the distance so quickly that the ninety-minute journey felt closer to commuting than to travel. But to come to Tohoku was always to experience a transformation. In spring, the snow in the north-east lingered longer and deeper on the ground. Plum and cherry blossoms flowered and fell later; summer here was less harsh, less sticky and gave way sooner to the chill of autumn. Arrival from Tokyo brought a palpable shift in the air and its qualities, a sense of transition experienced on the skin and in the back of the throat.

  Sendai station, where my companions and I alighted, displayed no visible signs of the disaster. Our hire car manoeuvred north, through a city centre of silver office buildings and department stores, and mounted the overhead expressway, also recently reopened after months of structural checks. After an hour, the city of Ishinomaki came into view on the coastal plain ahead: hangar-like factories and shopping malls, and billows of white smoke out of aluminium chimneys.

  No city suffered more in the tsunami than Ishinomaki. Most of its centre had been inundated; one-fifth of those who died in the disaster died here, in a town of 160,000 people. The fishing port had been entirely destroyed by the wave, along with the shipyard and an immense paper mill. But three-quarters of the Ishinomaki municipality was another world altogether, a hinterland of steep hills and forests, penetrated by the broad agricultural plain of the Kitakami River; and fishing villages at the head of the deep ria bays, separated from one another by elaborately ramifying peninsulas, which extended talon-like fingers into the ocean.

  Beyond the town, we descended from the expressway and entered a realm of bright fields bordered by dark hills. Some of them contained heavy-stalked rice, ripe for harvest; others held greenhouses of tomatoes and fruit. The houses along the road were built of wood with stately tiled roofs. The sky, which was already huge overhead, gaped wider as the hills fell away and we turned east along the bank of the Kitakami.

  Most Japanese rivers are a wretched sight, even outside the big cities. Upstream dams drain them of power and volume. Towns and factories suck off their waters and pump back effluent, human and chemical. The Kitakami, by contrast, is wide, full, clean and alive. Its single dam is in the upper northern reaches, leaving the salmon free to swarm every autumn to their spawning grounds. Its breadth – hundreds of yards across, even deep inland – opens up vistas of sky and mountains in the built-up towns through which it passes. Herons, swans and teal live among the dense beds of reeds that grow along its banks; every year the reeds are harvested to furnish thatch for temples and shrines. The river’s southern outlet, where it meets the sea at Ishinomaki, is a tumult of wharves, cranes and containers. But its other mouth, at Oppa Bay, is that rare thing in a populous industrialised country – a great river estuary left to sand, eagles, rocks and currents.

  This was the prospect revealed to us as we drove along the Kitakami into Okawa that morning: the arching sky; the green hills divided from one another by valleys packed with rice; villages at the edge of the fields; and, in the hazy distance, lagoon and sea. It was an ideal, an archetypal scene: farm and forest, fresh and salt water, nature and humanity in balance. Trees covered the mountains, and the sea dashed the rocks, but both were welcoming to the hunter and fisherman. The river was wide and powerful, but tamed by bridge and embankment. The tiled houses were small and few, but the fields, hills and water paid tribute to them. Human civilisation was the pivot about which the natural world turned.

  On the Sanriku Coast you experienced the sensation of entering an altered world. It was a subtle change – for all the jokes about spooky Tohoku yokels, there was nothing unsophisticated about northerners. But there was a shagginess about them, compared to the lacquered neatness of Tokyo people – a robust, tousled quality suggestive of bracing weather, and an indifference to indulgences such as indoor heating. Everyone had strong boots and thick socks; in the colder months, they all wore nylon fleeces, often two, even inside. The hair of both men and women stuck up in tufts, as if it had just been tugged through several layers of thick sweaters and incompletely patted down. Certain surnames – Konno, Sato, Sasaki – cropped up again and again, as if there was a limited supply of them, as in a society composed of clans. People in Sanriku had clear, pale complexions, and the transition from bitter wind to warm interior flushed their cheeks rosy and bright. Everyone talked about the beauty of nature, and his or her relationship with it. Everyone seemed to have deep family roots in the area, reaching decades and centuries into the past.

  I met an old man named Sadayoshi Kumagai whose memory went back before the Second World War. His ancestors had been samurai riflemen; the family had lived in the area for 300 years. Old Mr Kumagai was a master thatcher who had travelled the country constructing temple roofs out of the fine Kitakami reeds. ‘It was a while before I understood,’ he said. ‘But there’s no doubting it. I’ve been everywhere in this country, from Hokkaido to Okinawa. And nowhere else has the abundance of nature we have here: mountains, river, marsh, sea. People who never leave the area don’t understand how lucky they are. There’s no place like this.’

  He grew up in Hashiura, a village opposite Okawa Primary School on the north bank of the river. It was an isolated, even backward community of horse-drawn carts and unmade roads. But for a young boy it was a place of wonder and adventure. In the summer, the village children swam in the river and the sea. In autumn, they followed the trails into the hills and gathered nuts and chocolate vine. A little way off the road was the site of a Neolithic village: classmates of Kumagai used to come to school bearing fragments of 4,000-year-old pots. Kumagai’s grandfather taught him to shoot – there were duck and pheasant in the hills above the river and, in Oshika to the south, wild deer. ‘We didn’t hunt for fun, but for a living,’ he said. ‘When we took game, we sold it.’ Once, in a moment of opportunistic mischief, the young Kumagai shot and slayed a swan. ‘I was so proud of myself, and I told everyone what I’d done. Well, the police heard about it, and they came round and gave me a good telling off.’

  On their hunting expeditions, Kumagai’s grandfather told the boy about the wonder and horror of the tsunami. The old man had lived through two of them in his own lifetime, and the historical record went back much further than that. ‘The province of Mutsu’ – eastern Tohoku – ‘trembled and greatly shook,’ recorded a chronicle of ad 869, the eleventh year of the Jogan Era:

  People cried and screamed, and could not stand.2 Some died beneath the weight of their fallen houses; some were buried alive in eart
h and sand when the ground sheared open beneath them … Great walls, gates, warehouses and embankments were destroyed. The mouth of the sea roared like thunder, and violent waves rose up, surging through the rivers, until, in the blink of an eye, they reached the wall of Taga Castle. The flood extended for so many ri that you could not tell where the sea ended and the land began. Fields and roads were transformed into ocean. There was no time to board boats or to climb the hills; a thousand people drowned.

  Geologists found layers of fine sand3 across the sedimentary layers of the Sendai plain – the wash of immense tsunamis that had recurred at intervals of 800 to 1,000 years. Lesser waves were more frequent. Among many other years, they struck the Sanriku Coast in 1585, 1611, 1677, 1687, 1689, 1716, 1793, 1868 and 1894. Their effects were especially devastating when they encountered the long, narrow ria bays, which concentrated the waves and channelled them like funnels onto the fishing villages within. The most destructive of modern times was the Meiji Sanriku Tsunami of 1896, when 22,000 died after what had felt – because it occurred far out at sea – like a mild and inconsequential earthquake. In 1933, the year before Sadayoshi Kumagai was born, another moderate tremor generated waves as high as 100 feet, which killed 3,000 people. ‘My grandfather lived through both of those, and he talked about them,’ he said. ‘I was always told that when an earthquake strikes we must be prepared for a tsunami.’ There were even ‘tsunami stones’ marking the extent of previous inundations, engraved by earlier generations with solemn warnings not to build dwellings below them. The fishermen on the Pacific coast to the east, whose homes faced directly onto the ocean, were brought up to know instinctively what to do after the earth shook: ascend without hesitation to high ground, and stay there. But the people of Kitakami lived on a river, not the sea. And what if there was no shaking at all?