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

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Richard Lloyd Parry

  Maps

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Solid Vapour

  Part 1: The School Beneath the Wave

  Having Gone, I Will Come

  Where Are the Children?

  Jigoku

  Part 2: Area of Search

  Abundant Nature

  The Mud

  The Old and the Young

  Explanations

  Ghosts

  What It’s All About

  Part 3: What Happened at Okawa

  Last Hour of the Old World

  Inside the Tsunami

  The River of Three Crossings

  Part 4: The Invisible Monster

  In the Web

  What Use Is the Truth?

  The Tsunami Is Not Water

  Predestination

  The Rough, Steep Path

  There May Be Gaps in Memory

  Part 5: Gone Altogether Beyond

  Consolation for the Spirits

  Save Don’t Fall to Sea

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  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.

  About the Author

  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.

  ALSO BY RICHARD LLOYD PARRY

  In The Time Of Madness: Indonesia On The Edge Of Chaos

  People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman

  Maps

  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

  On 11 March 2011 two catastrophes struck north-east Japan. The second began in the evening, when reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant melted down, following the failure of their cooling systems. Explosions in three of the reactors scattered radioactive fallout across the countryside. More than 200,000 people fled their homes. But, thanks to a swift evacuation and a good deal of luck, nobody died as a result of the radiation. It is too soon to be sure about the long-term consequences of Fukushima – but it may turn out that nobody ever will.

  The earthquake and tsunami that set off the nuclear disaster had a more immediate effect on human life. By the time the sea retreated, more than 18,500 people had been crushed, burned to death or drowned.1 It was the greatest single loss of life in Japan since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945.

  This book is about the first disaster: the tsunami.

  Prologue: Solid Vapour

  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. Al
ready 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.