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

  What It’s All About

  The young man who had given her the crystal, the psychic who described cinematic spectres writhing in the mud, said to Naomi Hiratsuka, ‘Your child will come to you in a dream. She will show you images of the place where she will be found. They will be like slides in your mind.’ But when she found what she was looking for, it didn’t happen like that at all.

  Naomi’s thinking about the search for the children changed over time. Her faith in the supernatural began to flag; instead, she invested it in her digger and its muddy yellow arm. The conversations with her daughter were consoling, but Sumi, who could relay eerily specific messages from Koharu, became evasive when asked about the location of her body. ‘So many of us were consulting psychics, and people with those powers,’ Naomi said. ‘And we were all hearing different stories. When you think about it, someone must have been making a lot of money.’

  Naomi took to visiting Koharu’s old classroom. In the weeks that they had spent there, the men of the Self-Defence Forces had restored to the school an extraordinary, and even disturbing, degree of order. The windows and doors were broken, but the rooms had been swept, almost scoured, and the sediment of sludge deposited by the wave had dwindled to a smear of muddy dust. Warped textbooks had been carefully stacked and shelved; sodden dressing up-clothes had been restored to their box – a red wig, a fairy’s wings. On Koharu’s locker, the four characters of her name were still visible; Naomi left sweets and soft drinks there, to lure her daughter back. And the cleaner the classroom got, the sadder she became.

  A many-fingered peninsula groped out into the sea between Ogatsu and Oppa Bay, a territory of rocks, pines and seagulls. The village of Naburi was at the end of the road, fifty houses in a tight triangle of land hard up against the hills. A concrete pier sheltered a little harbour; rocky, unpeopled islands were visible in the bay. A hundred and eighty people lived there, most of them over seventy years old. Japan had countless isolated, ancient populations such as this, places of sharp, harsh beauty and little else, which offered nothing at all for the young, and little reason for anyone else to stay, except habit, or resignation, or an overpowering love of fishing and the sea.

  The water had reached a height of thirty-five metres here:1 115 feet, as high as an eleven-storey building, almost four times as high as the tsunami predicted on the radio. But as soon as he had felt the earthquake, an old fisherman named Yuichiro Kamiyama had moored his boat and gone about the houses, chivvying the villagers up the steep hill. From there, they watched the water withdrawing from the harbour, and returning unstoppably to overwhelm first the sea wall, then the road and then the alleys dividing the wooden houses, until it lifted them up and spun them around on its frothing surface. The water rose and rose through the pines on the hillside towards the spot where the dumbfounded villagers were watching. A few feet below where they crouched, it slowed and withdrew.

  The sight reminded Kamiyama of the summer Festival of the Dead, when illuminated paper lanterns are set adrift on the tide to guide the spirits back across to the far world. ‘The houses receded all together, along with the sea,’ he said. ‘They were all in a row, like the festival lanterns, floating out over the sea wall. And the electricity poles too, with the wires between them. Those wires are strong – they didn’t break. They were all taken back intact into the sea. Perhaps I shouldn’t say so, but it was beautiful.’

  There was nothing left of Naburi. ‘It looked as if time had gone backwards,’ said Kamiyama. ‘It looked like a place in an ancient era, before humans came.’ But in the whole village only two people had died, both of them after returning down the hill to retrieve precious items forgotten in the evacuation. ‘With something like a tsunami, a decision has to be made very quickly,’ Kamiyama said. ‘What’s needed is immediate action by someone with initiative. You don’t have time to hold a meeting. So long as someone says, “Go to the mountain!”, without any doubt or hesitation, then people will go.’

  By August, five months later, the fishermen were buying new nets and boats and beginning to go out to sea again. Early one morning, they noticed a commotion among the gulls, thirty feet out in the harbour. The birds were crying and circling something, with dives and pecks. One of the boats went out to have a look, and then the police were called, and three officers arrived in a patrol car and went out with the fishermen to retrieve the object in the water. ‘It was the calmest day of the season,’ Kamiyama remembered. ‘The water was so still and clear. They brought her onto the quay here, with all the gulls overhead. We shouldn’t think ill of the birds. We shouldn’t imagine them pecking her flesh. We should thank the seagulls, who showed us where she was, so she could see her mother and father again. Though she died, she was protected by the sea.’

  Naomi was in Sendai at her mother’s house; later, she felt a sense of failure that she not been at the school when the news came, on duty in the cabin of her digger. It arrived in the form of a text message from the police: another set of remains had been found in Naburi. They had been provisionally identified as those of a woman aged twenty to forty years old. But the body was described as being incomplete. Naomi telephoned the head of the local police, a man she had come to know well, and asked for more information. He told her that, although most of the clothes were absent, the unidentified woman had been wearing an outer set of thick thermal underpants. They were pink, with the motif of a white heart. With this, Naomi knew in an instant that Koharu had been found. The forecast for 11 March had been for cold weather, and possibly snow. And so Naomi had put this warm undergarment out for her daughter, a few hours before the tsunami.

  She went to the police station with her husband, and examined the garment with her own eyes. ‘I knew immediately that it was hers,’ she said. ‘And it was reasonable that they thought it was an adult, because Koharu was tall for her age. But then they were asking me, over and over, “Are you sure? Are you sure this is hers? Is there no chance that someone else could have been wearing similar clothes?” And I lost my confidence.’

  Naomi asked to see the remains with her own eyes. The policemen looked uncertainly at one another. During the months she had spent in the mud, Naomi had beheld numerous dead bodies, in various states. The last one, in April, had been the twelve-year-old daughter of a friend. ‘She was wearing jeans, with a belt,’ Naomi remembered. ‘Of course, she was not in a normal condition. Some of her hair had come away. But she was recognisable. So I knew the kind of thing to expect. I had a sense of how human bodies change in time, and how it becomes difficult to identify them. But I asked to see Koharu in the hope of some kind of … spiritual understanding, some kind of recognition that in seeing part of her body, I was looking at my daughter.

  ‘The police kept asking me, “Are you sure? Will you be OK?” I said that I would.’ They led Naomi in, and removed the sheet from the object on the table. She looked at what lay beneath it, and held it in her gaze. ‘But it was just a lump of something,’ she said. ‘Without arms. Without legs. Without a head. And this was my daughter, my little girl. I don’t regret seeing her. But the hope that I had, the hope that I would recognise her, was not fulfilled.’

  This was the moment Naomi had been praying for through all these months, the moment of certainty and reunion, when death was supposed to settle for a few moments on her palm, like a squawking, flapping bird suddenly made still. But it was not to be. There was no real doubt, to the Hiratsukas or to the policemen, that this was Koharu. But without a positive identification, they would have to wait for the results of a DNA test, which would take months.

  Naomi and Shinichiro walked out to their car, dazed. As she was climbing in, Naomi experienced a sudden pain in her back. Her legs locked. She found herself unable to move. ‘This had never happened to me before,’ she said. ‘So I thought it had to be Koharu trying to hold me there.’

  She said to her husband, ‘I want to call Sumi.’ The medium picked up the phone immediately. As soon as she had heard what had happened, she said
, ‘It is Koharu.’ Naomi’s paralysis in the car park, the words of the medium – these were enough for the police, who released the body the next day.

  The Hiratsukas cremated Koharu on 11 August 2011. It was 153 days since the tsunami. A week later, Naomi was back at the school at the wheel of her digger, searching for Koto Naganuma, Hana Suzuki, Yuto Suzuki and Yui Takeyama, the four schoolmates of Koharu whose bodies had still not been found.

  ‘We used to think that we were bringing up our children,’ said Sayomi Shito. ‘But then we discovered that it was we, the parents, who were being brought up by them. We thought that the children were the weakest among us, and that we protected them. But they were the keystone. All the other pieces depended on them. When they were taken away, we realised this for the first time. We thought that we were looking after them. But it was the children who supported us.’

  I pictured the image that Sayomi had called to mind: an arched stone bridge collapsing; masonry crashing into a river. She went on: ‘Nothing is capable of changing the situation. It’s not about the passing of time. It’s not about kind words. It’s not about psychological support. It’s not about money. None of that can change anything. There’s a space which is empty and which will never be filled.’

  For survivors of the disaster, various kinds of assistance – practical and financial – were made available by the government, but there was little in the way of formal counselling or mental-health care. Many of the institutions to which people would instinctively have turned – village, family, workplace – were themselves broken by the wave. But out of the pieces, in the fragmented towns and temporary houses, new forms of community emerged, cemented by loneliness, grief and practical necessity. In Fukuji, a particularly strong and well-organised group of friends formed around Sayomi and Takahiro Shito.

  One evening, at Sayomi’s invitation, I went to meet them. All were parents of children who had died at Okawa Primary School. These were the hecklers and barrackers of the headmaster and his colleagues, the violators of protocol and convention – but in person they were warm, courteous and patient people, unmarked by visible scars of ego or aggression. At their core were the Shitos and their neighbours, the Satos – Katsura and Toshiro, whose daughter Mizuho had been Chisato’s playmate. Hitomi Konno and Kazutaka Sato, whose sons, Daisuke and Yuki, had been best friends in the fifth year, were also members of the group. Then there was a third Sato family: Tomoko and Mitsuhiro, who had lost their only child, a ten-year-old boy named Kenta. The friends met once a week or more; they communicated every day by telephone, email and text. It was through grief that they had found one another, but grief in itself was not what united them. The power of their grief, which gave it form, channelling it like the banks of a river, was rage.

  I spent many days with the bereaved of the tsunami, notebook in hand, digital recorder on the table. My questions, or the answers to them, often made them cry. I used to ask myself: What am I doing here? Why should these people talk to me? Sayomi and her friends cried too. But their rage justified it. The conversation propelled itself forward and back, round and round, and on and on. I scarcely had to ask questions at all.

  Hitomi Konno said, ‘Every day, I think about my children and how each of them would be, if they were here. Today would be a birthday, for example. Or this month one of them would have been taking an entrance examination. In my heart, the children are still growing up. But I can’t see them growing up.’

  Mitsuhiro Sato said, ‘When I think, “If he was alive, he’d be doing this and that”, it makes me despair even more. Our child was our dream, and now that dream will never come true.’

  His wife, Tomoko, said: ‘The feeling of desperately wanting to see him, but never being able to see him, is getting stronger and stronger. If we knew that they were somewhere, if we could only see them for a time, a little time, that would be enough. This need to see him, to hold him and touch him, is getting bigger and bigger.’

  There was a silence, marked by sighs. Then Kazutaka Sato spoke. He was a pale man in his mid-forties, with short, tufty hair and weary features. He had been sitting at the table, nodding from time to time, silently listening. Then he said, ‘It’s the matter of how they died.’

  He spoke calmly, almost matter-of-factly, without obvious anger or distress. ‘The more we look into it,’ Sato said, ‘the more we learn. And the better we understand that these were lives which could have been saved. The tsunami was a huge disaster. But there was only one school – just one school in the country – where the children lost their lives like this: Okawa Primary School. That is a fact, and that fact can only be explained by a failure, the failure of the school to save the children’s lives. They failed. And they have made no apology, and given no proper explanation. The tsunami – the damage has been huge, and we are all suffering from that. But on top of that, we have to go through the torment of losing our children in this way. That is what it’s about, that’s what all this is about. It’s about how they died.’

  The truth about what happened in the tsunami was itself the opposite of a tsunami. There was no grand climax, no crashing wave or rumbling of the earth. The facts came out in trickles and drips, some falling naturally, some squeezed out by wringing hands. The stray words of a surviving child, revealing an unrecognised failure. A document exposing contradictions in the official account. The official account itself, wobbling and bending. Every few months there was a new ‘explanatory meeting’, at which the bureaucrats of the Ishinomaki Education Board submitted themselves to the anger of the parents. Reluctantly and with trepidation, people came forward to tell their stories. A freelance journalist, Masaki Ikegami, did dogged work submitting freedom-of-information requests for city documents and scrutinising them for inconsistencies.

  The account furnished by the surviving teacher, Mr Endo, had seemed at first clear and credible enough. The pupils had evacuated their classrooms, and been lined up and counted off in the playground. A few parents had arrived to pick up their children. An orderly evacuation had begun. As it was under way, the wave had come in. Endo gave an impression of teachers acting with urgency and dispatch, professional men and women conscientiously following procedure, who were helplessly – and blamelessly – overwhelmed by an unimaginable disaster. And this might have made sense within a timespan of fifteen or twenty, or even thirty, minutes. But the earthquake had struck at 2.46 p.m. The hands of the school clock were frozen at 3.37 p.m., when the building’s electricity was quenched by the rising water. This was the central question of the Okawa tragedy: what exactly happened between the first event and the second? What was going on at Okawa school for the last fifty-one minutes of its existence?

  PART 3

  WHAT HAPPENED AT OKAWA

  The Last Hour of the Old World

  Tetsuya Tadano was a stocky boy of eleven, with close-cropped hair and an air of mild, amused mischief. His family’s house was across the rice fields in one of the hamlets at the back of the larger village of Kamaya; every morning, he made the twenty-minute walk to school with his nine-year-old sister, Mina, along the embankment of the river. The eleventh of March was the fortieth birthday of their mother, Shiroe; a small celebration was planned at home that evening. But otherwise it was an unremarkable Friday afternoon.

  At lunchtime on that day, the children rode on unicycles in the courtyard and foraged in its margins for four-leafed clovers. It was cold, and a piercing wind came off the river; Tetsuya and his friends stood in a row with their hands in their pockets, and turned their backs on it to keep the chill off their faces. Across the road, the families from the middle school were holding their graduation party. Sayomi Shito emerged from it and experienced that eerie moment of stillness and unease. At 2.45 p.m., the Okawa school bus was waiting in the car park,1 with its engine running; a few of the smaller pupils had already climbed in. But most of the children were still in their classrooms, finishing up the last school business of the week.

  A minute later, the sixth-year class were si
nging ‘Happy Birthday’ to one of their number, a girl named Manno. It was in the middle of this song that the earthquake struck. ‘It was shaking very slowly from side to side,’2 said Soma Sato, one of the sixth-year boys. ‘They weren’t small, fast shakes – it felt gigantic. The teachers were running up and down, saying, “Hold on to your desks.”’

  In the library, a man named Shinichi Suzuki was waiting for his son, who was in the sick room, having being taken ill earlier in the day. He watched as the water in the school fish tank slopped over its sides in waves. In Tetsuya’s class, the fifth year were getting ready to go home for the day. ‘When the earthquake first hit, we all took cover under our desks,’ he said. ‘As the shaking got stronger, everyone was saying things like, “Whoa! This is big. You OK?” When it stopped, the teacher said right away, “Follow me outside.” So we all put on our helmets and went out.’

  The school building was evacuated with exemplary speed. Scarcely five minutes after they had been crouching under their desks, the children were in the playground, lined up in their classes, in the hard plastic helmets that were stored in each child’s locker. Two days earlier they had gone through the same drill. Compared to Wednesday’s earthquake, though, this one was several times more frightening. Much later, the city authorities would compile a minute-by-minute log of the events of that afternoon,3 based on interviews with surviving witnesses. It conveys something of the atmosphere after a big earthquake, of excitement and resignation, light-heartedness and dread:

  Child: Everyone sat down and the register was taken. The lower-grade girls were crying, and Miss Shirota and Miss Konno were stroking their heads and saying, ‘It’s fine.’ One of the sixth-grade boys was saying, ‘I wonder if my game console at home is OK.’