I hadn’t understood that the tsunami, at its height, was 140 feet—40 meters—high. It had been about 33 meters high on the peninsula that protects Otsuchi to the south, and so the wall of water that hit the town, according to a map published in the Asahi Shimbun on the anniversary, may have been only about 22 meters high. I say only, but that’s a wall of water the height of a seven-story building, and because of the narrowness of the valley and the steepness of its walls, it ran far inland, scouring everything it touched, turning a fishing town into splinters strewn with corpses.
As the tsunami approached, Hirani took refuge in the city hall, which was surrounded by water and out of contact with the rest of the world. “So our biggest worry was what happened to our families.” His wife and father, who lived locally, were okay, though they feared he was dead, as did his children further away. He added with a faint smile, “They now appreciate me much more.” But he lost a lot of his friends. “This loss is so big. We can rebuild—but the heart, the sorrow.” There were practical things to deal with—cases of burnout among emergency service workers, trauma with all the survivors. One government employee killed himself, and many were in counseling. A friend of Hirani’s had examined 450 waterlogged bodies in the course of looking for his mother. He found her, but it didn’t end there. “In his dreams his mother comes with this changed body and the other bodies come and ask for help.” He took indefinite leave and died in a traffic accident.
From a practical standpoint Hirani thought they should adopt an approach whereby family members don’t look at a body until there is a DNA match. Bodies were still showing up. The previous day they had found two in a car, and officially 470 locals were still missing. Japanese officials are reluctant to classify all the missing as dead, and so the statistics still name thousands of missing along with the nearly 20,000 dead. “We live near the ocean,” Hirani said to me, “and our joy is the ocean. The ocean might get very harsh once in a hundred years, but usually people have respect but not fear.”
Some Sea Shepherd activists trying to document porpoise slaughter in the region were also in Otsuchi on March 11. One of them wrote soon afterward:
The police, who had taken up a post at the only place we could pass, were frantically motioning for everyone to get through the gates in the tsunami wall. We got through. These walls and gates are massive structures that appear to be built to withstand military bombardment. They extend high up into the air and rim the entire harbor area of the town. It was not long before the water drained from the harbor and then refilled. We learned from the firemen to expect to see several cycles of this draining and refilling. The water then rapidly refilled the harbor and rose right up to inundate all of the areas on the water side of the wall. It happened very quickly. It drained again, this time almost down to the mud. Then the returning water pushed past and over the draining water creating a wall of black howling water. This time the water rose even faster and topped the wall. It kept rising up on the hillsides and filling the valleys and crevices beyond. Several times this happened and all the while aftershocks were happening. Then it started to snow. Mixing in with the snow was ash from the many fires burning in the hills and damaged buildings. The smoke was choking.
They tried to rescue a woman stranded on floating debris and then to direct a boat to get her. But darkness shut them in and they didn’t succeed. Power was out in most of the disaster region and they spent the night in blackness, with the fires gleaming in the hills.
I heard a similar story from a carnation grower in Miyagi Prefecture to the south, who was trying to find his way back to his farm in the darkness that night and heard the cries of trapped people all around him. The roads were blocked with debris, so he walked, through water so cold he went numb, past rubble, past the sounds of the desperate and the dying. He eventually responded to one woman who was pinned against a wall with water up to her neck. He managed to get her to a safer place but ignored many of the others, convinced he could do nothing, torn and consumed with worry about his farm. In the light of day on the 12th he saw “many fires and dead bodies lying on the roadside.” It takes time to get carnations going, and so he had no income last year, but he did at least start growing them again. He complained that those who remained in their own homes, however shattered, did not receive the assistance that the displaced did.
An earthquake can be a great social leveler at first, but policy and prejudice will decide who gets aid and recompense and compassion later, and it will never be equitable, as this farmer knew well. Disaster solidarity often fractures along these lines. But it is important to keep the generosity in mind: Hirani estimated that between 10,000 and 20,000 volunteers had come to his small town alone. Last year young Japanese people were volunteering in large numbers and, at least in some cases, rethinking their ambitions and purpose in life. Every disaster leaves a small percentage of people committed to ideals they might not have found otherwise.
There is no such thing as a natural disaster, the disaster sociologists say. In other words, no matter what the origins of a disaster, human systems—physical, cultural, political—can amplify, channel, or mitigate what happens. In an earthquake it’s not the shaking of the earth but the collapse of buildings that’s responsible for nearly all loss of human life. Japan may be the best country in the world when it comes to seismic safety codes, and its tsunami alert system worked fine too. They even have an earthquake early-warning system that responds to the P-waves which precede the more damaging S-waves, giving people several seconds to prepare—not much, but maybe time enough to get under a table or into a doorway, pull over to the side of the road, turn off power or gas, take stock.
Later I met Yoshiteru Murosaki, the director of the National Research Institute of Fire and Disaster, who told me that one of the reasons for the many tsunami deaths was that a lot of people sought refuge in places that would have been safe in the last several tsunamis. But this one was much higher, as high as the 1896 tsunami, if not quite as high as the monster waves of 869 are said to have been. Others trusted the seawalls to protect them, but the water overtopped them and kept coming. Roughly two-thirds of the dead were over sixty, people less able or willing to evacuate. (In Hurricane Katrina the elderly made up a disproportionate percentage of the dead for similar reasons, and the same is true of many disasters.) Murosaki told me that the way to deal with tsunamis is to have good evacuation procedures rather than to avoid building on the seacoast. Twenty thousand died here, but in countries without building codes, without sirens and evacuation drills and awareness, the number of dead might have been many times higher. Nevertheless, many communities are retreating from the tsunami zone and rebuilding on higher ground.
That much can be said for the foresight and prudence of the Japanese government. Then there’s Fukushima Daiichi, the six nuclear reactors that were also battered by the tsunami: not by the highest waves, but by waves high enough to overtop the little protection that existed and to flood the basement where the emergency generators were fecklessly located—the generators that instantly became useless. Thus the nuclear power plant was completely disabled as no such plant had been before. As Arnie Gundersen, an energy consultant, put it,
There were numerous red flags indicating potential problems for anyone following Tepco [the Tokyo Electric Power Company] during the past decade. Crucial vulnerabilities in the Fukushima Daiichi reactor design; substantial governance issues and weak management characterized by major frauds and cover-ups; collusion and loose regulatory supervision; as well as understanding but ignoring earthquake and tsunami warnings, were key ingredients of the March 2011 disaster. Moreover, all these crucial vulnerabilities had been publicly highlighted years before the disaster occurred.
One of the casualties of the disaster was the relationship between the people and the government. Almost everyone I spoke to, even the most mild-mannered, said they no longer trusted the government, and they said it bluntly, or angrily, or with a deep sense of betrayal. Activists and radicals�
�with whom I also spoke—didn’t have a lot of trust to lose. But for many people, recognition of the initial failures and cover-ups—the secrecy, lies, and tolerance of contamination, the prioritization of business over protection of the vulnerable—has meant a great and terrible rupture. “We have to fear properly,” Murosaki said. “Not too much, but enough. What is proper fear?”
Governments fear their people. They fear we will exercise our power to change them, and they fear we will panic. The first is a realistic if undemocratic fear, since changing them is our right; the second is a self-aggrandizing fantasy in which attempts to alter the status quo are seen as madness, hysteria, mob rule. They often assume that we can’t handle the data in a crisis and so prefer to withhold crucial information, as the Pennsylvania government did in 1979 at the time of the Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown and the Soviet government did during the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. Panic is what you see in disaster movies, where people run about doing foolish things, impeding evacuation and rescue, behaving like sheep. But governments and officials are not very good shepherds. During the massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007, the university authorities locked down the administrative offices and warned their own families, while withholding information from the campus community. The Bush administration lied about the toxicity of the air near Ground Zero in New York after 9/11, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk for the sake of a good PR front and a brisk return to business as usual. Disasters often crack open fissures between government and civil society.
Around the time of the anniversary it emerged that, early on, the prime minister had looked at the possibility of evacuating Tokyo. But you cannot evacuate a city of 35 million densely packed people. Where would they go? It would have been a crisis on the scale of the Second World War for Japan and a huge blow to the international economy. A couple of weeks after the anniversary it was revealed that the most damaged Fukushima reactor had nothing like the water-cooling levels it was thought to have and was in fact hotter at that point than it had been at the time of the accident. This is the worst disaster the country has faced since the end of the war, and it occasioned the first public speech by a Japanese emperor since Hirohito announced defeat on August 15, 1945, less than a week after the second American nuclear bomb exploded over Nagasaki.
Emperor Akihito, Hirohito’s son, made his first public broadcast on March 16, 2011. At age seventy-eight and recovering from heart surgery, he made his second broadcast in Tokyo for the anniversary. Along with an audience of media personnel and local officials, with bereaved families in the front rows, I watched the feed in the huge theater of the International Center in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi Prefecture and the largest city in the disaster region. The stage held an enormous triple bier of white flowers, before which a huge screen dropped down to show the stage in Tokyo, with its own elaborate array of white flowers. The empress was dressed in a traditional kimono, her eyebrows raised into a single line of perpetual distress, next to the emperor in an elegant dark suit. They bowed deeply before the flowers and the inscription—“spirit of the victims”—and the emperor spoke. “As this earthquake and tsunami caused the nuclear power plant accident,” he said, “those living in the designated danger zone lost their homes and livelihoods and had to leave the places where they used to live. In order for them to live there again safely, we have to overcome the problem of radioactive contamination, which is a formidable task.” This passage was censored by the networks when the speech was broadcast.
Overcoming the problem of contamination remains a formidable task. The government’s preferred approach has been to play down the problem and call for team spirit. With radiation present in the vicinity of the nuclear reactors, the official exposure safety limit was at first raised to twenty times its previous level. When no one wanted vegetables from Fukushima, the Ministry of Education decided to buy them up and put them in school lunches. This put the burden on parents and children to opt out, not an easy thing to do in a society that values harmony and conformity. Nicely dressed mothers in Tokyo met with the heads of their municipalities to demand that school meals be tested; they were assured that everything was fine. In Fukushima just over half of the fifty-nine municipalities test for radiation in school lunches, some before the children sit down to eat, some afterward. Whether or not they change the menu when the levels are too high is not clear. Several municipalities complained that they didn’t have the measuring equipment, and citizens have sometimes obtained the equipment themselves. People often find that the government is obstructive or useless in disasters and do much of the crucial work themselves as members of ad hoc or nongovernmental organizations. In Japan measuring radiation is now one of those activities.
An old man in Tokyo proposed that the elderly should volunteer to consume the rice from Fukushima, since they are less susceptible to the effects of radiation, but in November it was still being prepared for school lunches in Fukushima Prefecture. There, notices to evacuate were given late or not at all, and, by stopping short of declaring many contaminated areas unsafe, the government has avoided the burden of compensation for residents, who of course have no buyers for their homes. Even so, more than 63,000 people have evacuated the vicinity of the plant. Like the people who fled Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the nuclear bombs were dropped in 1945, Fukushima evacuees feel they must conceal their origins when they move elsewhere. I also heard about a teacher who was ostracized by his colleagues for expressing a desire to leave. Fear of ostracism sometimes outweighs fear of radiation.
Disasters in the West are often compounded by the belief that human beings instantly revert to savagery in a calamity, with the result that the focus shifts from rescue to law enforcement and the protection of property, as it did recently in Haiti and New Orleans, and in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. In Japan the greater problem seems to be conformity. In Fukushima, children who refused to drink the milk in their school lunches were called to the front of their classes and humiliated by their teachers. “They were treated like traitors during the war,” a woman said in a video clip I saw on television. (She was telling the story to the chief cabinet minister and the trade and industry minister, who chuckled in response.) A mother I met in Sendai was told by the in-laws she lived with that she could leave if she wanted to, but her husband and child were not going anywhere. Leaving meant leaving the group.
Seigo Kinoshita, a sixty-seven-year-old evacuee in Iwate Prefecture, told me in the small parlor of his temporary housing that he was tired of people saying ganbare, an exhortation that roughly translates as “do your best.” Even the milk box next to his front door had a sticker on it that said “ganbare” and, in English, “Never give up!” It’s hard to be lectured by your milk box. There were four calendars on the walls of the tiny room in which we talked, maybe because they were the only decorations he had, maybe to make time pass faster or express how greatly it weighed on him in the little terraced house on a roadside high above the wiped-out town of Rikuzentakata. He had initially taken refuge in a chilly Buddhist temple with three hundred others, including eighty children from a daycare facility, not all of whom had parents to claim them when the roads opened three days later. Now he was a displaced person.
Some of the most powerful antinuclear demonstrations since March 2011 have been orchestrated and dominated by mothers. Many disaster-zone families are emotionally or physically divided, since women tend to be more concerned about the radiation, and often it is the women and children who have fled, leaving the husband/father behind because his job ties him down or because he worries less about his health. On November 1, 1961, women in more than sixty American cities demonstrated against nuclear weapons, and for years Women Strike for Peace remained one of the most extraordinary activist organizations in the United States. The atmospheric nuclear detonations—dozens a year between 1945 and 1963, mostly in Nevada—were contaminating breast milk and leading to fears about children’s health. Women Strike for Peace played an important role
in bringing about the end of above-ground testing and, later, in the creation of the anti–Vietnam War movement. After Fukushima, too, breast milk was contaminated, meaning the most elemental act of nurture could be deadly. You can clean up after an earthquake or hurricane but you can’t see what may be inside you, ready to harm the children you may one day have—that is terrifying at first, then demoralizing. Often in disasters people feel tremendous solidarity with all the others who have undergone the same upheaval and loss, but in a situation like this, it isn’t clear who has sustained what damage and when, if ever, it will be over.
I met a graduate student in Sendai who told me that one of the major problems survivors reported was the presence of restless ghosts: the spirits of the dead that were still hanging around in need of comfort and propitiation. Right after the disaster and on Obon, the day of the dead in Japan, huge bonfires were lit on the beaches for the ghosts to find their way to shore. In the Tōhoku region, my friend Ramona Handel-Bajema co-directs large-scale relief with AmeriCares, an independent humanitarian relief organization, and I drove out with her to see a small garden project that was not yet planted—mid-March is still wintry in northern Japan. Gardens are one way of restoring people’s lives, particularly those of the elderly with time on their hands. Ramona told me about people tending gardens in the foundations of their destroyed houses. To see “cabbages growing where their bedroom once was” represented a consolation and rebirth of sorts. She also told me about a community she works with where the schoolteachers fell into an argument about evacuating the elementary school. One teacher took a handful of students to safety and the rest were drowned. Another of Ramona’s projects is taking care of the older siblings of these drowned children, whose parents are lost in mourning, and helping them to enjoy the natural world again.
The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Page 22