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

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  We were sitting in the priest’s quarters of Kaneta’s temple. His wife was pouring tea. Sunlight broke on the paper screens across the windows; the room smelled of incense and tatami mats. An everyday moment of beauty in a Buddhist temple in the heart of Japan: it was natural, in such a place, to assent to ideas of harmony, to acknowledge the existence of essential principles beyond the weak grasp of human thinking. There were few men whom I respected more than Kaneta. But in my guts, I rejected what he said.

  I had had enough of Japanese acceptance; I was sick with a surfeit of gaman. Perhaps, at some level of superhuman detachment, the deaths of the Okawa children did make possible insight into the nature of the cosmos. But long before that remote point, in the world of creatures who lived and breathed, they were something else as well – an expression of human and institutional failure, of timidity, complacency and indecision. It was one thing to recognise a truth about the universe, and man’s small place within it; the challenge was how to do this without also submitting to the cult of quietism that had choked this country for so long. Japan had enough serenity and self-restraint. What it needed now was people like the Shitos and the Tadanos and the Suzukis: angry, scathing, determined people, unafraid to step out of the ranks and fight, even if all that the contest amounted to was the losing struggle with death.

  How to balance affirmation of life with acceptance of its inevitable end? How to keep death in its place, to live under its regime, without submitting to it as tyrant? As if in response to these unvoiced thoughts, Kaneta told a famous story about the Buddha. One day, he was visited by a mother holding in her arms the body of her baby. The woman was grief-stricken and refused to accept the child’s death. She had come to beg the famous teacher to perform a miracle, and to bring the infant back to life. ‘Go out, and find a house where no son or daughter, no husband or wife, no father, mother or grandparent has ever died,’ the Buddha told her. ‘Bring from there white mustard seeds, put the seeds into a gruel, feed them to your child and his life will be restored.’

  The woman travelled from village to village, and from house to house, asking at each one if they had ever lost a loved one there. Everywhere she stopped she heard stories of heartbreak. Each one was different in its details, and all of them were the same. As she listened, the character of the woman’s grief changed. It did not diminish. But in time it altered, from a black and suffocating mass to a form bright and crystalline, through which she was able to recognise death, not as the contradiction of life, but as the condition that makes it possible. She buried her child, and went back to thank the Buddha. ‘By the time she returned to him,’ Kaneta said, ‘he didn’t need to explain.’

  There is no tidying away of loose ends to be done in a story about the deaths of young children, about the annihilation of a coast – only more stories to be told, and retold in different ways, and tested like radioactive material for the different kinds of meaning they give out. Stories alone show the way. ‘This is consolation,’ Kaneta said. ‘This is understanding. We don’t work simply by saying to people, “Accept.” There’s no point lecturing them about dogma. We stay with them, and walk with them until they find the answer on their own. We try to unthaw the frozen future. People feel as if they have staggered into a fantastic land of disaster and pain. But it is not a place of fantasy. It is the universe we inhabit, and the only life we have on these islands. Volcano, earthquake, tsunami and typhoon – they are our culture, they are as much a part of Japan as the rich crops in the fields. Everything that was built over a hundred years was destroyed by the tsunami. But in time it will be built again.’

  Up and down I travelled between Tokyo and the disaster zone, for six years. My son – the small kicking creature on the scanner’s screen – was born, and grew. His older sister grew up too, and before long she was entering Japanese primary school herself, as the single blonde-haired, blue-eyed child in the year’s new intake. It was on a different scale from little Okawa – a big Tokyo school, reassuringly positioned on a hill and separated from the sea by miles of dense inner city. But, institutionally, the two were identical. Both had a head and deputy head, teachers of diverse ages and experience, a municipal education board, an emergency manual. Both had sports days, and graduation ceremonies, and disaster drills. Like the children in Okawa, my daughter wore a round hat and a badge bearing her name in Japanese, and carried one of the distinctive square rucksacks. The atmosphere at the school was warm and benign; the staff exuded assurance and professionalism. But there are some situations that cannot be tested or drilled for. It was impossible not to wonder how these teachers might react in the face of extremity; or to forget the image of the hats, badges and rucksacks of the Okawa children being hauled out of the mud.

  I kept in touch with some of the people I had got to know in the north-east.

  Tetsuya Tadano flourished at high school, and became captain of its judo team. He always kept with him a photograph of his lost classmates. ‘If I carry it in my bag,’ he said, ‘I feel as if they are having lessons with me.’

  His father, Hideaki, joined with Toshiro, the husband of the art teacher Katsura Sato, in conducting guided tours of the school. Toshiro had been a teacher too, an employee of the Ishinomaki board of education. Like his wife, he had walked away from his career after the death of their daughter, Mizuho. Now, he led groups of adults, and children from schools all over the country, around the school grounds. He showed them photographs of the children in the playground, now a patch of dried mud. He pointed to the path up the hill, which they could so easily have taken. He showed them Mizuho’s name still there below the hook where she used to hang her coat, and on the black memorial stone erected at the back of the school. On the tour which I attended, many of the participants ended it in tears. “This,” Hideaki said to me, “this is why we must preserve the school.”

  Naomi Hiratsuka continued to work at the school where Koharu would have gone. Her middle child, Koharu’s brother, was autistic; sometimes Naomi imagined herself giving up teaching and establishing a new career, helping families with similar children. Miho Suzuki and her husband, Yoshiaki, finally bought a new house and moved out of their metal hut. The sad chill that had established itself between Miho and Naomi lingered, but both went to the site of the school from time to time, where Masaru Naganuma, their comrade during long weeks searching the mud, was still looking for his seven-year-old boy, Koto. Naganuma took no part in the action against the city, and refused all requests to talk to journalists. But his determination was unquenchable. He still spent virtually every day searching, alone or with his elderly father, digging ground that had repeatedly been worked over before. With every month that passed, the chances of finding any trace of his son dwindled; and Masaru knew this.4 ‘Five years, ten years – to him it’s nothing,’ Naomi said. ‘Masaru will keep looking for the rest of his life. He says that he cannot die. Even when the moment for his death comes, he cannot go.’

  Sayomi Shito’s mother and father had been ailing before the disaster; after the loss of their granddaughter, their decline accelerated. They died in 2015, three months apart; their ihai and portraits were added to that of Chisato on the household shrine. The burden of caring for two infirm and confused parents compounded Sayomi’s anguish and her grief. She was treated for depression. One day she was at the supermarket, where she overheard the conversation of two younger mothers. It was evident from the way they spoke that they lived inland and had been completely unscathed by the disaster; they were talking, Sayomi realised, about the parents of Okawa School.

  ‘If that happened to me,’ said the first woman, ‘I couldn’t go on living.’

  ‘I know – me neither,’ said the second. ‘I would definitely kill myself.’

  Sayomi said, ‘I had prayed so often that I could die and Chisato could live. I knew that I should have gone to the school and taken her home. Or stayed there, and died with her. When I heard that conversation, I felt that they were saying to me, “Why are you alive?”’


  She dropped her shopping basket and ran back to her car. She drove onto the straight road that ran along the river, heading in the direction of the sea. The car accelerated, until it was travelling much too fast for the narrow carriageway. Sayomi was looking at the river. She was imagining how small a movement of the steering wheel would be necessary to swerve across the bank and into the water.

  Her son, Kenya, her oldest child, was sitting in the car next to her.

  As she drove, in agony and shame, an awareness came to her of what it would mean to kill her son as well as herself. She pulled over suddenly and leaped out. She started to clamber over the bank and towards the water. ‘I was thinking to myself that it was so strange, ridiculous really, that Chisato was dead and I was still alive,’ she said. ‘How could that be? Why was I still living? I was making for the river, because I wanted to be in the water, just like Chisato was.’

  She became aware that Kenya was beside her, gripping her arm so tightly that it left a bruise. ‘Mum,’ he was saying to her. ‘Mum, Mum. If you die, what will become of those of us left behind?’

  One day Reverend Kaneta told me the story of his last exorcism, the experience that had robbed him of his peace of mind. We sat in the room where the sun struck the screens. Lined up on the tatami were dozens of small clay statues, which would be handed out to the patrons of Café de Monku. They were representations of Jizo, the bodhisattva associated with kindness and mercy, who consoles the living and the dead.

  It was in this room, Kaneta told me, that he had first met Rumiko Takahashi, the twenty-five-year-old woman who had telephoned him in a frenzy of suicidal despair. Late that evening, a car pulled up at the temple with her mother, sister, fiancé and, limp with exhaustion, Rumiko herself.

  She was a nurse from the city of Sendai – ‘a very gentle person,’ Kaneta said, ‘nothing peculiar or unusual about her at all’. Neither she nor her family had been hurt by the tsunami. But for weeks, her fiancé said, she had been assailed by the presence of the dead. She complained of someone, or something, pushing into her from a place deep below, of dead presences ‘pouring out’ invisibly around her.

  Rumiko herself was slumped over the table. She stirred as Kaneta addressed the creature within her. ‘I asked, “Who are you, and what do you want?”’ he said. ‘When it spoke, it didn’t sound like her at all. It talked for three hours.’

  It was the spirit of a young woman, whose mother had divorced and remarried, and who found herself unloved and unwanted by her new family. She ran away and found work in the mizu shobai, or ‘water trade’, the night-time world of clubs, bars and prostitution. There she became more and more isolated and depressed, and fell under the influence of a morbid and manipulative man. Unknown to her family, unmourned by anyone, she had killed herself. Since then, not a stick of incense had been lit in her memory.

  Kaneta asked the spirit, ‘Will you come with me? Do you want me to bring you to the light?’ He led her to the main hall of the temple, where he recited the sutra and sprinkled holy water. By the time the prayers were done, Rumiko had returned to herself. It was half past one in the morning when she and her family left.

  Three days later, she was back. She complained of great pain in her left leg; and, once again, she had the sensation of being stalked by an alien presence. The effort of keeping out the intruder exhausted her. ‘That was the strain, the feeling that made her suicidal,’ Kaneta said. ‘I told her, “Don’t worry – just let it in.”’ Rumiko’s posture and voice immediately stiffened and deepened; Kaneta found himself talking to a gruff man with a barking, peremptory manner of speech. He was a sailor of the old Imperial Navy who had died in action during the Second World War after his left leg had been gravely injured by a shell.

  The priest spoke soothingly to the old veteran; after he had prayed and chanted, the man departed, and Rumiko was at peace. But all this was just a prologue. ‘All the people who came,’ Kaneta said, ‘and each one of the stories they told, had some connection with water.’

  Over the course of a few weeks, Reverend Kaneta exorcised twenty-five spirits from Rumiko Takahashi. They came and went at the rate of several a week. All of them, after the wartime sailor, were ghosts of the tsunami.

  For Kaneta, the days followed a relentless routine. The telephone call from Rumiko would come in the early evening; at nine o’clock her fiancé would pull up in front of the temple and carry her out of the car. As many as three spirits would appear in a single session. Kaneta talked to each personality in turn, sometimes over several hours. He established their circumstances, calmed their fears, and politely but firmly enjoined them to follow him towards the light. Kaneta’s wife would sit with Rumiko; sometimes other priests were present to join in the prayers. ‘Each time she would feel better, and go back to Sendai and go to work,’ Kaneta told me. ‘But then, after a few days, she’d be overwhelmed again.’ Out among the living, surrounded by the city, she would become conscious of the dead, a thousand importunate spirits pressing in on her and trying to get inside.

  One of the first was a middle-aged man who, speaking through Rumiko, despairingly called the name of his daughter.

  ‘Kaori!’ said the voice. ‘Kaori! I have to get to Kaori. Where are you, Kaori? I have to get to the school, there’s a tsunami coming.’

  The man’s daughter had been at a school by the sea when the earthquake struck. He had hurried out of work and driven along the coast road to pick her up, when the water had overtaken him. His agitation was intense; he was impatient and suspicious of Kaneta.

  The voice asked, ‘Am I alive or not?’

  ‘No,’ said Kaneta. ‘You are dead.’

  ‘And how many people died?’ asked the voice.

  ‘Twenty thousand people died.’

  ‘Twenty thousand? So many?’

  Later, Kaneta asked him where he was.

  ‘I’m at the bottom of the sea. It is very cold.’

  Kaneta said, ‘Come up from the sea to the world of light.’

  ‘But the light is so small,’ the man replied. ‘There are bodies all around me, and I can’t reach it. And who are you anyway? Who are you to lead me to the world of light?’

  The conversation went round and round for two hours. Eventually, Kaneta said, ‘You are a father. You understand the anxieties of a parent. Consider this girl whose body you have used. She has a father and mother who are worried about her. Have you thought of that?’

  There was a long pause, until finally the man said, ‘You’re right’ and moaned deeply.

  Kaneta chanted the sutra. He paused from time to time when the voice uttered choked sounds, but they faded to mumbles and finally the man was gone.

  Day after day, week after week, the spirits kept coming – men and women, young people and old, with accents rough and polished. Rather than being angry or vengeful, they were confused and panicked at their sudden immersion in a world of darkness and cold. They told their stories at length, but there was never enough specific detail – surnames, place names, addresses – to verify any individual account, and Kaneta felt no urge to. One man had survived the tsunami, but killed himself after learning of the death of his two daughters. There was a young woman who had tried to escape the water, but could not run fast enough because she was heavily pregnant. There was an old man, who spoke in thick Tohoku dialect. He was desperately worried about his surviving widow, who lived alone and uncared for in one of the desolate tin huts. In a shoebox she kept a white rope, which she would contemplate and caress. He feared what she planned to use it for.

  Kaneta reasoned and cajoled, prayed and chanted, and in the end each of the spirits gave way. But days or hours after one group of ghosts had been dismissed, more would stumble forward to take their place.

  One night in the temple, Rumiko announced, ‘There are dogs all around me – it’s loud! They are barking so loudly I can’t bear it.’ Then she said, ‘No! I don’t want it. I don’t want to be a dog.’ Finally she said, ‘Give it rice and water to
eat. I’m going to let it in.’

  ‘She seemed to think it would do something terrible,’ Kaneta said. ‘She told us to seize hold of her, and when the dog entered her, it had tremendous power. There were three men holding on to her, but they were not strong enough and she threw them off. She was scratching the floor, and roaring, a deep growl.’ Later, after the chanting of the sutra, and the return to her peaceful self, Rumiko recounted the story of the dog. It had been the pet of an old couple who lived close to the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. When the radiation began to leak, its owners had fled in panic with all their neighbours. But they forgot to unchain the dog, which slowly died of thirst and hunger. Later, when it was much too late, the spirit of the animal observed men in white protective suits coming in and peering at its shrivelled corpse.

  In time, Rumiko became able to exercise control over the spirits; she spoke of a container, which she could choose to open or close. A friend of Kaneta, who was present at one of the exorcisms,5 compared her to a chronically ill patient habituated to vomiting: what at first was painful and disgusting became, over time, familiar and bearable. Eventually Rumiko reported being able to brush the spirits away when they approached her. She was still conscious of their presence, but at a distance, no longer shoving and jostling her, but skulking at the room’s edge. The evening telephone calls and late-night visits became less and less frequent. Rumiko and her fiancé married and moved away from Sendai; and, to his extreme relief, Kaneta stopped hearing from her.