On 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of north-east Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than 18,500 people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned.
It was Japan’s greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It set off a national crisis, and the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. And even after the immediate emergency had abated, the trauma of the disaster continued to express itself in bizarre and mysterious ways.
Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, lived through the earthquake in Tokyo, and spent six years reporting from the disaster zone. There he encountered stories of ghosts and hauntings. He met a priest who performed exorcisms on people possessed by the spirits of the dead. And he found himself drawn back again and again to a village which had suffered the greatest loss of all, a community tormented by unbearable mysteries of its own.
What really happened to the local children as they waited in the school playground in the moments before the tsunami? Why did their teachers not evacuate them to safety? And why was the unbearable truth being so stubbornly covered up?
Ghosts of the Tsunami is a brilliant work of literary non-fiction, a heartbreaking and intimate account of an epic tragedy, told through the personal accounts of those who lived through it. It tells the story of how a nation faced a catastrophe, and the bleak struggle to find consolation in the ruins.
RICHARD LLOYD PARRY has lived in Tokyo for twenty-two years as a foreign correspondent, first for the Independent and now as Asia Editor of The Times. He has reported from twenty-eight countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq and North Korea. His work has also appeared in the London Review of Books, Granta and the New York Times. He is the author of In the Time of Madness, an account of black magic and violence in Indonesia in the late 1990s, and People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman.
In The Time Of Madness: Indonesia On The Edge Of Chaos
People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman
For Stella and Kit
What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,
This fallen star my milk sustains,
This love that makes my heart’s blood stop
Or strikes a sudden chill into my bones
And bids my hair stand up?
W. B. Yeats
The eleventh of March 2011 was a cold, sunny Friday, and it was the day I saw the face of my son for the first time. I was in a clinic in central Tokyo, peering at the images on a small screen. Beside me, F—— lay, exposed, on the examination bed. Her oval belly was smeared with transparent gel; against it, the doctor pressed a glowing wand of plastic. As the wand moved, the images on the screen shifted and jumped.
We knew what to look for, but it was still astonishing to see so much of the small creature: the familiar top-heavy outline; the heart, with its flickering chambers; brain, spine, individual fingers, and so much movement – paddling arms, bucking legs and nodding head. The angle of vision altered and revealed at once a well-formed, unearthly face, which gave a charming and very human yawn. Our second child – our boy, although we did not know this yet – was still in there, still patiently alive.
Outside the clinic it was chilly, gusty and bright, and the wide avenue was filling with midday shoppers and workers coming out of the offices for lunch. We pushed our toddler daughter to a café and showed her the murky photograph of her sibling-to-be, printed out from the scanner’s screen.
Two hours later, I was sitting at my desk in a tenth-floor office. What exactly was I doing at the moment it began? Writing an email? Reading the newspaper? Looking out of the window? All that I remember of the hours before are those moments in front of the screen, which had already made the day unforgettable, and the sensation of looking into the face of my son, at the halfway point between his conception and his birth.
I had lived in Japan for sixteen years, and I knew, or believed that I knew, a good deal about earthquakes. I had certainly experienced enough of them – since 1995, when I settled in Tokyo, 17,257 tremors had been felt in the capital alone. A spate of them had occurred two days earlier. I had sat out the shaking, monitored the measurements of magnitude and intensity, and reported them online with a jauntiness that now makes me ashamed:
@dicklp
Wed Mar 09 2011 11:51:51
Earthquake!
Wed Mar 09 2011 11:53:14
Epicentre, Miyagi Prefecture. Tsunami warning in place on northern Pacific coast. In Tokyo, we are shaken, but not stirred.
Wed Mar 09 2011 12:01:04
More tremors …
Wed Mar 09 2011 12:16:56
@LiverpolitanNYC All fine here, thanks. Its wobble was worse than its bite.
Wed Mar 09 2011 16:09:39
Latest on today’s Japan earthquake horror: 10cm tsunami reported in Iwate Prefecture. That’s almost as deep as my washing-up water.
The following day there had been another strong tremor in the same zone of the Pacific Ocean off north-east Japan. This one, too, could be felt as far away as Tokyo, but even close to the epicentre it caused no injury or significant damage. ‘The Thursday morning quake brought the number of quakes felt in Japan since Wednesday to more than thirty,’ Kyodo news agency reported; and plenty of them were strong tremors, not the subterranean shivers detectable only by scientific instruments. The seismologists warned of the potential for a ‘powerful aftershock’ in the next week or so, although ‘crustal activities’ were expected to subside.
Clusters of proximate earthquakes are known as ‘swarms’, and they can be the precursor to larger tremors and even volcanic eruptions. But although many seismic disasters are preceded by such omens, the converse is not true; most swarms buzz past without any destructive crescendo. I had reported on this phenomenon a few years earlier, when a swarm of earthquakes hinted at a potential eruption of Mount Fuji. Nothing of the kind had happened then; clusters of lesser earthquakes continued to come and go; and there was no reason for particular attention or alarm this week.
Not that there was much else happening in Japan that day, certainly not of international interest. The prime minister was resisting half-hearted demands that he resign over a political funding scandal. The governor of Tokyo was expected to announce whether he would stand for another term. Ibaraki Airport marks first anniversary, noted one of the news agency’s headlines. Snack maker debuts on Tokyo Stock Exchange, mumbled another. Then, at 2.48 p.m., came an urgent single-line bulletin: BREAKING NEWS: Powerful quake rocks Japan.
I had felt it about a minute earlier. It began mildly and familiarly enough with gentle, but unmistakable, vibrations, transmitted upwards through the floor of the office, followed by a side-to-side swaying. With the motion came a distinctive sound – the glassy tinkling of the window blinds as their vinyl ends buffeted against one another. The same thing had happened two days earlier and passed within moments. So even when the glass in the windows began to rattle, I stayed in my chair.
@dicklp
Fri Mar 11 2011 14:47:52
Another earthquake in Tokyo …
Fri Mar 11 2011 14:47:59
Strong one …
Fri Mar 11 2011 14:48:51
strongest I’ve ever known in 16 yers …
By the time the sliding drawers of the filing cabinets gaped open, my sangfroid, as well as my typing, was beginning to fail me. From the tenth-floor window I could see a striped red-and-white telecommunications mast on the roof of a building a hundred yards away. I told myself: ‘When that mast starts to wobble, I’ll move.’ As the thought took form in my mind, I noticed that a much closer structure, an arm of the same building in which I was sitting, was flexing visibly. Very quickly indeed I bent myself into the narrow space beneath my desk.
Later I read that the vibrations had lasted for six minutes. But while they continued, time passed in an unfamiliar way. The chinking of the blinds, the buzzing of the glass and the deep rocking motion generated an atmosphere of dreamlike unreality; by the time I emerged from my funk hole, I had little sense of how long I had been there. It was not the shaking itself that was frightening, but the way it continued to become stronger, with no way of knowing when it would end. Now books were slumping on the shelves. Now a marker board fell off a partition. The building, a nondescript twelve-storey structure which had never seemed particularly old or new, sturdy or frail, was generating low groans from deep within its innards. It was a sound such as one hardly ever hears, a heart-sickening noise suggesting deep and mortal distress, like the death-sound of a dying monster. It went on long enough for me to form distinct images about what would happen in the next stage of the earthquake’s intensification: the toppling of shelves and cabinets, the exploding of glass, the collapse of the ceiling onto the floor, the floor itself giving way, and the sensation both of falling and of being crushed.
At a point difficult to define, the tremors began to ease. The building’s moans faded to muttering. My heartbeat slowed. My balance, I found, had been mildly upset and, like a passenger stepping off a boat, it was hard to tell whether motion had ceased completely. Five minutes later, the cords hanging from the blinds were still wagging feebly.
Over the internal loudspeakers, an announcement from the Disaster Counter-Measures Room – every big building in Tokyo has one – assured us that the structure was safe and that we should stay inside.
@dicklp
Fri Mar 11 14:59:44
I’m fine. A frighteningly strong quake. Aftershocks. Fires round Tokyo bay.
In Japan there is no excuse for not being prepared for earthquakes, and in my small office we had taken the recommended precautions. There were no heavy picture frames; the shelves and cabinets were bolted to the walls. Apart from a few fallen books and a general shifting of its contents, the room was in good order. Even the television, the most top-heavy object in the room, remained undisplaced. My Japanese colleague turned it on. Already, all channels were showing the same image: the map of Japan, its Pacific coastline banded with colours, red indicating an imminent danger of tsunami. The epicentre, marked by a cross, was upper right, off the north-east of the main island of Honshu. It was the same area that had been swarming these past days, the region of Japan known as Tohoku.fn1
I was dialling and redialling F——’s number, without success. The problem was not that the infrastructure was damaged, but that everyone in eastern Japan was simultaneously using his or her mobile phone. I got through by landline to the lady who looked after our nineteen-month-old daughter; the two of them were wobbly but unhurt, and still sheltering beneath the dining-room table. F——, when I finally connected to her, was in her own office, brushing up the glass from a fallen picture frame. Our conversation was punctuated by pauses, as each of us in our distinct districts of the city experienced separately the aftershocks that had begun minutes after the mother quake.
The lifts were suspended, so I walked down nine flights of stairs to inspect the district of shops and offices immediately around the building. There was almost no visible damage. The stripy pole in front of an old-fashioned barber’s shop lolled at an angle. I saw one crack in a window of plate glass, and a perforated gash in a wall of plaster. The streets were crowded with evacuated office workers, many of them wearing the white plastic helmets that Japanese companies provide for just such an occasion. Above the density of city buildings, a distant line of black smoke was visible in the east, where a petrol refinery had caught fire. Later, some accounts gave the impression that the earthquake had been a moment of hysteria in Tokyo, in which large numbers of people experienced the sensation of a close brush with death. They were exaggerations. Modern engineering and strict building laws, evolved out of centuries of seismic destruction, had passed the test. A fleeting spasm of alarm was followed by hours of disruption, inconvenience and boredom. But the prevailing emotion was bemused resignation rather than panic.
A man in an old-fashioned ceramics shop, where a vase sold for £5,000, had not lost a single plate. We talked to a group of elderly ladies in kimono who had been watching a play in the nearby kabuki theatre when the earthquake struck. ‘They’d just started the last act, and people cried out,’ one of them said. ‘But the actors kept going – they didn’t hesitate at all. I thought it would subside, but it went on and on, and everyone stood up and started flooding out of the door.’ The star performers, the famous kabuki actors Kikugoro Onoe and Kichiemon Nakamura, bowed deeply to the audience as they fled, apologising for the interruption.
Fri Mar 11 16:26:40
Central Tokyo calm and undamaged. In 30 mins stroll in Ginza I saw one cracked window and a few walls.
Fri Mar 11 16:28:56
Seems to be just one fire in an oil facility in Chiba Prefecture.
Fri Mar 11 16:40:31
Eleven nuke power plants shut down in Japan. No problems reported after quakes.
Fri Mar 11 17:47:25
I’ve lost count of aftershocks. 15 or more. Latest one was from a different epicentre to 1st big quake, accdng to Jpn TV.
Fri Mar 11 18:20:10
To anyone struggling to get through to Tokyo – use Skype. Internet in Tokyo seems fine.
Back in the office, we turned to the television again. Already Japan’s richly resourced broadcasters were mobilising aeroplanes, helicopters and manpower. The foreign channels, too, had given over their programming to rolling coverage of the situation, with that thinly disguised lust which appalling news excites in cable-news producers. I began to file reports for my newspaper’s website, attempting to make sense of the packets of information that were arriving in the form of images, sounds and text, through cable, satellite, internet, fax and telephone. But the facts were still frustratingly vague. An earthquake had come and gone, and the human response to it was obvious enough: a disaster unit established at the prime minister’s office; airports, railways and highways shut down. Yet what actual damage had been done so far? There were patchy reports of fires, like the one at the oil refinery. But for the first few hours the seismologists could not even agree on the magnitude of the earthquake; and from the Tohoku coast itself came only silence.
Casualty figures were especially elusive. At 6.30 p.m., the television news was reporting twenty-three killed. By nine o’clock, the figure had risen to sixty-one and, after midnight, the news agencies were still speaking of sixty-four deaths. Clearly, these numbers were going to increase as communications were restored. But it also seemed obvious that in a situation such as this there was a tendency to irrational pessimism and to embrace the very worst imaginable possibility; and that probably, in the end, it wouldn’t be so bad as all that.
@dicklp
Fri Mar 11 17:58:43
No reports of deaths in Tokyo so far. My hunch is that there will be scores, perhaps low hundreds in NE Japan, but no more. Not megadeath.
There are several aerial films of the incoming tsunami, but the one that plays and replays in my imagination was shot above the town of Natori, south of the city of Sendai. It begins over land rather than sea, with a view of dun winter paddy fields. Something is moving across the landscape as if it is alive, a brown-snouted animal hungrily bounding over the earth. Its head is a scum of splintered debris; entire cars bob along on its back. It seems to steam and smoke as it moves; its body looks less like water or mud than a kind of solid vapour. And then a large boat can be seen riding it inland, hundreds of yards from the sea, and – unbelievably – blue-tiled houses, still structurally intact, spinning across the inundated fields with orange flames dancing on their roofs. The creature turns a road into a river, then swallows it whole, and then it is raging over more fields and roads towards a village and a highway thick with cars. One driver is accelerating ahead of it, racing to escape – before the car and its occupants are gobbled up by the wave.
It was the biggest earthquake ever known to have struck Japan, and the fourth most powerful in the history of seismology. It knocked the Earth six and a half inches off its axis; it moved Japan1 thirteen feet closer to America. In the tsunami that followed, more than 18,000 people were killed. At its peak, the water was 120 feet high. Half a million people were driven out of their homes. Three reactors in the Fukushima Dai-ichi power station melted down, spilling their radioactivity across the countryside, the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. The earthquake and tsunami caused more than $210 billion of damage,2 making it the most costly natural disaster ever.
It was Japan’s greatest crisis since the Second World War. It ended the career of one prime minister and contributed to the demise of another. The damage caused by the tsunami disrupted manufacturing by some of the world’s biggest corporations. The nuclear disaster caused weeks of power cuts, affecting millions of people. As a result, Japan’s remaining nuclear reactors – all fifty of them – were shut down.3 Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in anti-nuclear demonstrations; as a consequence of what happened in Fukushima, the governments of Germany, Italy, and Switzerland abandoned nuclear power altogether.
The earth around the nuclear plant will be contaminated for decades. The villages and towns destroyed by the tsunami may never be rebuilt. Pain and anxiety proliferated in ways that are still difficult to measure, among people remote from the destructive events. Farmers, suddenly unable to sell their produce, committed suicide.4 Blameless workers in electricity companies found themselves the object of abuse and discrimination. A generalised dread took hold, the fear of an invisible poison spread through air, through water – even, it was said, through a mother’s milk. Among expatriates, it manifested itself as outright panic. Families, companies, embassies abandoned even Tokyo, 140 miles away.
Few of these facts were clear on that evening, as I sat in my office on the tenth floor. But they were becoming obvious the following morning. By then, I was driving from Tokyo towards the ruined coast. I would spend weeks in Tohoku, travelling up and down the strip of land, three miles deep in some places, which had been consumed by the water. I visited a hospital where the wards at night were lit by candles; a hundred yards away, to add to the atmosphere of apocalypse, burning industrial oil tanks sent columns of flame high into the air. I saw towns that had been first flooded, then incinerated; cars that had been lifted up and dropped onto the roofs of high buildings; and iron ocean-going ships deposited in city streets.
Cautiously I entered the ghostly exclusion zone around the nuclear plant, where cows were dying of thirst in the fields, and the abandoned villages were inhabited by packs of pet dogs, gradually turning wild; masked, gloved and hooded in a protective suit, I entered the broken plant myself. I interviewed survivors, evacuees, politicians and nuclear experts, and reported day by day on the feckless squirming of the Japanese authorities. I wrote scores of newspaper articles, hundreds of fizzy Tweets and was interviewed on radio and television. And yet the experience felt like a disordered dream.
Those who work in zones of war and disaster acquire after a time the knack of detachment. This is professional necessity: no doctor, aid worker or reporter can do his job if he is crushed by the spectacle of death and suffering. The trick is to preserve compassion, without bearing each individual tragedy as your own; and I had mastered this technique. I knew the facts of what had happened, and I knew they were appalling. But at my core, I was not appalled.
‘All at once … something we could only have imagined was upon us5 – and we could still only imagine it,’ wrote Philip Gourevitch. ‘That is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.’ The events that constituted the disaster were so diverse, and so vast in their implications, that I never felt that I was doing the story justice. It was like a huge and awkwardly shaped package without corners or handles: however many different ways I tried, it was impossible to hoist it off the ground. In the weeks afterwards, I felt wonder, pity and sadness. But for much of the time I experienced a numb detachment and the troubling sense of having completely missed the point.
It was quite late on, the summer after the tsunami, when I heard about a small community on the coast that had suffered an exceptional tragedy. Its name was Okawa; it lay in a forgotten fold of Japan, below hills and among rice fields, close to the mouth of a great river. I travelled to this obscure place, and spent days and weeks there. In the years which followed, I encountered many survivors and stories of the tsunami, but it was to Okawa that I returned time and again. And it was there, at the school, that I eventually became able to imagine.
The first time I met her, in the big wooden house at the foot of the hills, Sayomi Shito recalled the night when her youngest daughter, Chisato, sat suddenly up in bed and cried out, ‘The school has gone.’
‘She was asleep,’ her mother told me. ‘And then she woke up in tears. I asked her, “Why? What do you mean ‘gone’?” She said, “A big earthquake.” She was really shouting. She used to sleepwalk occasionally, and she used to mutter odd things now and then. Sometimes she’d get up and walk around, not knowing what she was doing, and I had to guide her back to bed. But she had never had a fright like that before.’
It wasn’t that Chisato, who was eleven, was particularly afraid of earthquakes. A few weeks after her nightmare, on 9 March 2011, there was a strong tremor, which shook the concrete walls of Okawa Primary School, where she was a pupil – the onset of the swarm that I also experienced 220 miles away in Tokyo. Chisato and the other children had crawled under their desks while the shaking continued, then put on their plastic helmets, followed their teachers out to the playground and stood in neat lines while their names were called out and ticked off. But rumbles large and small were common all over Japan, and at home that evening she had not even mentioned it.
Sayomi Shito was curly-haired, round-faced and bespectacled, an unabashed, confiding woman in her mid-forties. Japanese conventions of restraint and politesse sometimes made hard work of interviews, but Sayomi was an effusive talker, with a droll and gossipy sense of humour. I spent long mornings at her home, in a tide of jokes, cakes, biscuits and cups of tea. She could talk unprompted for an hour at a stretch, frowning, smiling and shaking her head as if taken aback by her own recollection. Some people are cast adrift by loss, and when Sayomi spoke of her grief, the pain was as intense as anyone’s. But anger and indignation had kept her tethered, and bred in her a scathing self-confidence.
The Shitos (their name was pronounced ‘Sh’tore’, like a cross between ‘shore’ and ‘store’) were a very close family. Sayomi’s older son and daughter, Kenya and Tomoka, were fifteen and thirteen, but the children all still slept on mattresses alongside their parents in the big room on the upper floor. That Friday, 11 March, Sayomi had risen as usual at quarter past six. It was the day of her son’s graduation ceremony from middle school,1 and her thoughts were filled with mundane, practical matters. ‘I used to wake Chisato after everyone else had got up,’ she said. ‘I’d sit her on my knee and pat her back, and hug her like a koala bear, and she’d lean into me. It was something I liked to do every morning. I’d hug her, and say, “Wakey, wakey” and we’d start the day. It was our secret moment. But that day she got up on her own.’
Chisato had been out of sorts that morning. It came out later that she had quarrelled, in trivial, childish fashion, with her older brother and sister. In the kitchen she prepared breakfast for herself; Sayomi still remembered hearing the ting of the grill when the toast was ready. The school bus reached the stop around the corner at 6.56, and Chisato always left the house exactly three minutes before. ‘She walked past me with her bag on her shoulder, and I realised that I hadn’t talked to her yet,’ Sayomi remembered. ‘So I said, “Chi, my love, wait a moment. What’s up? Not so happy today?” She said, “It’s nothing,” but rather gloomily. Some days, I used to give her a hug before she went out. That morning, to cheer her up, I gave her a high five. But she was looking at the ground when she walked away.’
In Japanese, domestic leave-taking follows an unvarying formula. The person departing says itte kimasu, which means literally, ‘Having gone, I will come back.’ Those who remain respond with itte rasshai, which means ‘Having gone, be back.’ Sayonara, the word that foreigners are taught is the Japanese for ‘goodbye’, is too final for most occasions, implying a prolonged or indefinite separation. Itte kimasu contains a different emotional charge: the promise of an intended return.
All along the lowest reach of the Kitakami River, from the lagoon in the east to the hills in the west, with varying degrees of alacrity and reluctance, young pupils of Okawa Primary School and their parents were conducting the same exchange.
– Itte kimasu.
– Itte rasshai!
Even before it began, Sayomi told me, Chisato’s life had had about it something fated and magical. She had been conceived on Sayomi’s thirty-third birthday; she was born on Christmas Eve 1999, a sentimental day even in Japan, where practising Christians are few. Sayomi went into labour in the afternoon; within an hour, she was back in her bed, eating Christmas cake. The following day, on Christmas morning, the ground was covered in immaculate snow; and a week later, the world celebrated the beginning of the third millennium. The infant Chisato was as undemanding in the world as she had been entering it. ‘She was always with me,’ Sayomi said. ‘In the sling on my front. On my back, when I was cooking. Beside me, in the child seat in the car, or in my lap when I was sitting down. It was as if she was attached to my skin. And she always slept beside me, in the same room, at my right hand, up until that day.’
Fukuji was a gathering of hamlets around a triangular expanse of paddy fields. On two sides were low hills, forested densely with pine; the Shito family house stood on their lowest slope. On the third, northern side was the great Kitakami River, the longest and widest in northern Japan, flowing east towards the Pacific, six miles away. Within a few minutes of the Shitos’ home, depending on the season, you could hike, toboggan, skate, hunt, fish and swim in fresh or salt water. Chisato played with dolls and drew pictures with her sister, but what she liked most was to run at large with her friends Mizuho and Aika, and the dog and cat that belonged to the old lady next door.
She had what her mother identified as a sixth sense. ‘She used to do things for you before you said you wanted them,’ Sayomi said. ‘She had that gift of anticipation. For example, my husband is a joiner. The first time Chisato saw him do his carpentry at home she was standing watching him. And she’d know what tool or material he needed next. She’d say, “Here you are, Dad,” and pass it to him. He’d say, “How much she understands! She’s a remarkable girl.”’
Her friends used to tease Chisato by calling her ‘the security camera’, because she was aware of things to which other eleven-year-olds were oblivious. She noticed, before the other girls, when a gang of boys in the class went into a sniggering cluster, plotting some prank. She knew who had a crush on whom, and whether the feeling was reciprocated. Okawa Primary School was a small place, with barely a hundred children; in Chisato’s fifth-year class there were just fifteen. It was a warm, close, oppressively intimate arrangement, unforgiving of anyone who stood apart. Chisato hated it.
‘There was no doubt about it,’ said Sayomi. ‘She hated the teachers. She used to say that school is where teachers tell you lies. But she never refused to go. She said, “If I miss school, it’s you who’ll get into trouble.” She knew that she had to do something she didn’t want to do.’
Sayomi said, ‘I feel very bad now about letting her go to school with such a feeling. But I didn’t want to be the mother who stops her child’s education. It wasn’t that she was bullied, or anything like that. But perhaps there are children who are better off staying at home, who love their mum more than being with their friends. Everyone you talk to says, “At least when it happened my child was at the school she loved, with the friends she loved, and the teachers she loved.” Of course, parents want to believe that. But if they asked their kids, “Do you really like that school? Do you really love those teachers?” then not all of them would say yes.’
Many people spoke of it as just another day, but Sayomi Shito remembered a strangeness about that Friday.
After breakfast, she had driven to the local middle school for her son Kenya’s graduation ceremony. She took the narrow road across the fields, turned right onto the highway along the river, and passed through the larger village of Yokogawa. Just beyond the village shrine, a small hill bulged out, forcing the road hard up against the water and blocking the view of its lower reaches. Beyond it a wide and magnificent vista opened up, of the broad river with its deep reed beds and stubbled brown paddies on both sides, and huge blue skies above green hills. In the distance was the low line of the New Kitakami Great Bridge, 600 yards across, connecting Okawa in the south with the Kitakami district on the northern bank.2
After the ceremony, Sayomi and Kenya drove further down the river to the next village, where a modest celebration was being held for the middle-school graduates. This was Kamaya, where Okawa Primary School was also situated. Twenty or thirty teenagers and their mothers were gathering in a hall, virtually across the road from Chisato’s classroom. Friends who might not see one another again said their goodbyes and exchanged gifts; there was a table of comforting home-cooked foods. Sayomi expected the event to go on until the mid-afternoon, but soon after two o’clock people began to drift away. Kenya wanted to go home. But first there was the question of what to do about Chisato.
Lessons at Okawa Primary School finished at 2.30, but it was always another ten or fifteen minutes before anyone began to leave, as the children gathered up their things, and the teachers handed out notices or made announcements. Should they linger in wait for Chisato, for what might be another half-hour? Or should they go home now, and leave her to take the bus as usual? Sayomi stood by her car in front of the school, considering this small dilemma. And, as she remembered it later, a powerful sense of the uncanny overcame her, in this, the last hour of the old world. ‘It had been a clear, fine day until noon,’ she said. ‘By the time the party came to an end, it was already becoming cloudy, but there was no wind. Not a single leaf was moving on the trees. I couldn’t sense any life at all. It was as if a film had stopped, as if time had stopped. It was an uncomfortable atmosphere, not the atmosphere of an ordinary day. I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t hear the children in the school – even when they were in their lessons, you could always hear the voices of the little ones. Normally, I might have walked in and said, “I popped in to pick up my daughter.” But the school felt … isolated.’
I asked Sayomi what explained this curious atmosphere. She said, ‘Living here in this countryside, people coexist with nature. With animals, with plants, with all of this environment. When the wind blows, I hear the sound of the trees, and I know from that sound the condition of the wind. When it’s about to snow, I sense the snow in the air. I feel by instinct the character of the atmosphere surrounding me. That air and that atmosphere are important, almost more important than people. I think Chisato was a girl who also had those instincts.
‘But then Kenya said, “Shall we go?” And I thought that it was time to go home. Perhaps it was some kind of intuition that I had to leave. Perhaps that was it. But what I said to myself was: “If we go home now, he will have more time to see his friends.” So we went home.’
Sayomi was upstairs changing when the shock struck. Her older daughter, Tomoka, had been at home when they returned and had had no lunch. Sayomi set a pan of noodles on the flame, and went to her room. As soon as the shaking began, at 2.46 p.m., she shouted down to the children to turn off the stove and to get outside. Her keenest anxiety was not for them, but for her elderly parents, who lived with the family on the ground floor. Sayomi’s mother was frail and slow; her father was both mildly confused and very stubborn. She ran downstairs to find him attempting to gather up the polished black funeral tablets of the family’s dead ancestors, which were tumbling from the household Buddhist altar. Sayomi gave up trying to reason with him and stumbled outside, to the big tree where the rest of the family had gathered.
‘The shaking was so strong, I couldn’t stand up,’ she said. ‘Even outside, crouching down, we were almost falling over. I looked at the metal shutters on the garage – they had ripples going through them. The electricity lines and poles were swaying. It was as if the whole world was collapsing – it was like the special effects in a film about the end of the world. I was amazed that the house didn’t fall down. I tried to get the kids into the car, but I couldn’t even get the door open. Even holding on to the car, I was afraid that it was going to roll over. So I told the children, “Stay away from the car,” and then all that that we could do was crouch on the ground.’
She remembered being conscious of sounds, and of their absence. Despite the proximity of the forest, there was no birdsong, or any sign of birds on the wing. But the next-door neighbour’s dog, a placid animal and a favourite of Chisato, was barking raucously, while the cat pelted into the hills and out of sight. ‘It felt as if it continued for a long time, perhaps five minutes,’ Sayomi said. ‘And the feeling of being shaken carried on, even after the shaking had stopped. The electricity poles and wires were still wobbling, so it was difficult to know whether the earth was still moving or whether it was the trembling in myself. The children were upset. Kenya was looking round and shouting, “Grandpa! What happened to Grandpa?”’
The old man finally tottered from the house, without his ancestors.
But now the poles and wires and shutters were vibrating again, in the first of a long succession of aftershocks. Sayomi herded her parents and the children into the car, and drove down the lane to a spot in the rice fields where much of the population of Fukuji was already converging. Chairs and mattresses were being laid out for children and old people, and neighbours were exclaiming to one another over what had happened. But from this vantage point, it was clear that any physical damage had been remarkably slight. Apart from the displacement of a few roof tiles, none of the houses in the area, as far as Sayomi could tell, had collapsed or suffered serious damage. There was wonder, and a residue of alarm, but no one was panicking or hysterical. Like the reflection of the sky in rippling water, normality seemed steadily to be reasserting itself.
Sayomi sent a text message to her husband, reporting on the family’s situation, and received one in return. The building site where Takahiro was working had been thrown into disarray by the shaking, but he was unhurt. She looked around, at friends and neighbours performing acts of kindness, a community spontaneously organising itself to help the old, young and weak. It occurred to her then that the returning bus, which would bring Chisato home from school, was due at any moment. After settling her parents and children among their neighbours, she drove the few hundred yards to the river to meet it.
Half a dozen cars had pulled up on the main road along the river; their drivers stood beside them, discussing the situation. Wood from a timber yard was said to have spilled onto the road up ahead, making the way hazardous. None of the drivers had seen the obstruction for himself. But none made any move to investigate. People were calm; none gave any sign of impatience or trepidation. But in the inertness of the scene, Sayomi intuited anxiety and strain. She tried to text her husband again. Immediately after the earthquake, messages had gone through without difficulty, although voice calls were impossible. But now the network had shut down.
Over the next hour, Sayomi drove backwards and forwards between the road, where she waited for the appearance of the school bus, and the rice field, where she checked on the well-being of her family. As she shuttled to and fro, the soothing sense of normality winning out over disaster drained rapidly away.
Sayomi’s attention was drawn to one of the channels that connected with the great river, part of a network of slack creeks that irrigated the paddies. Its level rose and fell with the cycles of the rice crop, but it was never completely dry. Now, though, the water in it had almost entirely disappeared; the muddy bottom was visible, glistening greyly. The next time she looked, the situation had reversed: the stream was engorged with surging water from the river, and pieces of dark unidentifiable debris were racing along its churning surface. Soon, the adjoining fields were flooded with water. The spectacle was remarkable enough for Sayomi to make a film of it on her mobile phone. The brief clip recorded the time, 3.58 p.m., and a snatch of news from the car radio: ‘… as a result of the tsunami which hit Onagawa, houses are reported to have been inundated up to their roofs and vehicles have been washed away. Maintain strict vigilance …’
The word ‘tsunami’ was well known to Sayomi, of course; stronger earthquakes, if they occurred under the sea, were commonly followed by a tsunami warning. The size of the waves would be reported on the television as they came in: thirty inches, fifteen inches, four inches – phenomena scarcely visible to the untrained eye, often measurable only by harbour gauges. But the radio was speaking of Ō-tsunami – a ‘super-tsunami’, twenty feet high – and all of this in Onagawa, a fishing port just an hour’s drive to the south. ‘I knew that twenty feet was big, although knowing it is different from feeling it,’ Sayomi said. ‘But to hear that it was capable of washing away cars, that brought it home. I tried to stay calm. There was nothing else I could do.’
Sayomi went back to the main road and waited for her daughter, as dusk swallowed up the day.
She had been standing in front of Okawa Primary School an hour and a half ago; it should have been the most natural thing in the world to drive back down the road along the river to collect Chisato. It was only four miles downstream, but there were no cars at all coming from that direction. The drivers loitering at the lock said that the way was dangerous, although no one seemed willing to explain exactly why. Wet, sleety snow had begun to fall. The river was behaving as if it was possessed. The surface of the water was bulging and flexing like the muscles beneath the skin of an athlete; large, irregularly shaped objects were dimly visible on its surface. Sayomi lingered by the river, watching the road, until after it was dark.
At home, she found her house intact, but littered with fallen and broken objects, and without electricity, gas or water. She improvised a meal out of leftovers, and forced herself not to worry about Chisato. Plenty of families in Fukuji were waiting for children who had not come back from the primary school, and none showed excessive concern. Chisato’s teachers were trained to deal with emergencies. The concrete school was built more strongly than the wooden houses of Fukuji, all of which had ridden out the earthquake. Most reassuring to Sayomi, who had attended the school herself, was its position immediately in front of a 700-foot hill. A track, rising from the back of the playground, ascended quickly to a point beyond the reach of even a ‘super-tsunami’. Without electricity, people in Fukuji had no access to television or the Internet; none had yet seen the images of the devouring wave, which were being played over and again across the world. Instead, they listened to the local radio station, which was retailing the cautious, official casualty figures: scores confirmed dead, hundreds more likely. Then came an unambiguous report, which everyone waiting up that evening remembered: 200 people, locals and children, were sheltering in Okawa Primary School, cut off and awaiting rescue.
Sayomi’s relief at hearing this was a measure of the anxiety that she had been reluctant to admit even to herself. ‘One of the other mums was saying that they were probably staying in the upper gallery of the gym, and enjoying a pyjama party,’ Sayomi remembered. ‘We said to one another, “Poor old Chisato. She’s going to be hungry and cold.” We were no more worried than that.’
But when Takahiro finally reached home that night, after an exhausting journey along cracked and congested roads, the first thing she said to him was, ‘Chisato’s not back.’
The family spent the night in the car, as a precaution against aftershocks. Squeezed side by side in the upright seats, no one slept much. Sayomi was kept awake by a single phrase, which sounded over and over in her head: ‘Chisato’s not here, Chisato’s not here, Chisato’s not here.’
It was bitterly cold, and the darkness was overwhelming. Everyone who lived through that night was amazed by the intense clarity of the sky overhead and the brightness of the stars. They found themselves in a land without power, television, telephones, a place suddenly plucked up and folded into a pocket of time, disconnected from the twenty-first century. Sayomi got up at dawn, stiff and cold. Gas and water had been restored, so that she could at least make tea and cook. Then came news that spread excitedly among the mothers of Okawa Primary School. A helicopter was flying there to pick up the trapped children and to lift them out. Takahiro and the other men of the village were preparing a place for it to land. Chisato was coming home at last.
Daisuke Konno was a stalwart of the judo team and captain of the sixth-year class, but he was a gentle, soft-hearted boy and that day he didn’t want to go to school, either. There was barely a week to go until graduation; his mother, Hitomi, pushed him out of the door. It was a cold morning in the unreliable period between winter and spring. But there was nothing ominous about it, and neither mother nor son was the kind to be troubled by supernatural intimations of disaster. Photographs of Daisuke show a cheery round face with a self-deprecating smile. ‘He loved judo,’ Hitomi said. ‘And to his friends he put on a tough face. But to me, back at home, he used to complain about the pain of being thrown. And at school it seems that a group of the boys had been told off by the teacher. That was the only reason he didn’t want to go.’
– Itte kimasu, said the reluctant Daisuke.
– Itte rasshai, Hitomi responded.
The Konno family lived in the village of Magaki, three miles downstream of Sayomi’s home in Fukuji. The bus passed through here, but Okawa Primary School was close enough that the children of Magaki made the journey by foot. Daisuke (his name was pronounced ‘Dice-keh’) walked along the river’s edge with a slouching gang of classmates. The river bank at this point was hardly elevated at all; the breadth of the road was all that separated the houses from the lapping water.
Hitomi’s husband had already gone to work. She followed soon after her son, leaving behind her parents-in-law and two teenage daughters. She drove south, away from the river and up a road that ascended into the hills through hairpin bends and entered a mile-long tunnel, to emerge above the fishing port of Ogatsu. By eight o’clock she was seated at her keyboard in the small doctor’s surgery where she worked as a receptionist, awaiting the arrival of the first patient of the day.
It was an unexceptional morning. Hitomi ate a packed lunch at her desk. She was a warm, calm woman of forty, with a core of firm-minded common sense beneath an exterior of kindly humility, well suited to dealing with the clinic’s mostly elderly, and frequently confused, patients. Apart from handling appointments, processing payments and keeping the accounts, she supervised the operation of an elaborate apparatus which used an electrical current to massage the muscles. She had just plugged two old ladies into the current when the earthquake began its violent shaking.
She tried to rise, but couldn’t. The patients in the waiting room were crying out in alarm. Behind Hitomi were tall flasks in which metal instruments were being sterilised. The boiling water inside them was slopping noisily over the sides, to form steaming pools on the floor.
When the motion had subsided, Hitomi removed the electrodes from the old ladies and handed back the insurance cards as the patients hurried out.
She sent a text message to her oldest daughter, Mari, who was at home in Magaki. The reply quickly came back: We’re all fine. Don’t worry.
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