Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone Page 12

  Child: The lower grades were messing around. There were kids running about.

  Child: It must have been a kind of ‘earthquake sickness’, because there were little kids throwing up.

  Child: My friend said, ‘I wonder if there’ll be a tsunami.’

  The alarm of the younger children was renewed by repeated, jolting aftershocks. There were secondary earthquakes at 2.51 p.m., 2.54 p.m., 2.55 p.m. and 2.58 p.m. As early as 2.49 p.m., while the vibrations of the mother quake were still jangling outwards across northern and eastern Japan, the Meteorological Agency issued a warning: a twenty-foot-high tsunami was expected; everyone on the coast of north-east Japan should evacuate to higher ground.

  Eleven adults were present in the playground, among them the six class teachers; the special-needs teacher, Ms Suzuki; the school nurse, Ms Konno; Ms Kawabata, the school secretary; and Junji Endo, the head of teaching. In the absence of the headmaster, Teruyuki Kashiba, the senior teacher was Toshiya Ishizaka, his fifty-four-year-old deputy. It was Ishizaka who was listening to the battery-powered radio on which the tsunami warning was being broadcast, again and again. It was on him that the fate of those waiting in the playground depended.

  Many people found it impossible to forgive Ishizaka, even in death. But those who knew him well remembered him with love. He grew up inland; the Chile tsunami, which struck when he was three, would have been just a story to him. He was a soft, sensitive man, who formed deep friendships with his young pupils, which continued long after they had grown up. ‘He certainly wasn’t a handsome kind of guy,’ I heard from one woman who had been taught by Ishizaka twenty-five years earlier in another, inland school. ‘A bit short, not fat, but certainly chubby. He was always smiling. His smile was what struck me. He didn’t drink or smoke, which was unusual for a man back then.’

  She described the summer night when Ishizaka took his pupils out to look up at the sky and learn the names of the constellations; and the weekend when he had invited the entire class of thirty children to his mother’s home. ‘He put us on the train, and then drove in his car alongside the track,’ she said. ‘He was keeping parallel with the train, and waving to us. We were so excited! He attached great importance to solidarity within the class, to getting everyone to work and act together. In all my days of school life, the two years with him were the most memorable and important.’

  Some of the Okawa parents conveyed a different impression. They agreed about his gentleness, his warmth and affability. All remarked on the depth and frequency of his bows, and the politeness of his language. But there seemed in this to be an unvoiced suggestion that, even in a society that esteems formal courtesy, the deputy head’s behaviour went beyond the demands of good manners, and crossed the line between respect and obsequiousness.

  There were more aftershocks at 3.03 p.m., at 3.06 p.m. and at 3.12 p.m. At 3.14 p.m., the Meteorological Agency updated its warning: the tsunami was expected to come in at a height of ten metres, or thirty-three feet.

  The teachers in the playground formed a huddle beneath the cherry trees and engaged in a discussion in low voices.

  Like many Japanese institutions, the operations of Okawa Primary School were governed by a manual: among the documents that Ms Kawabata, the school secretary, brought out from her office into the playground, there would certainly have been a copy of this. The Education Plan,4 as it was called, was reviewed annually and covered everything from moral and ethical principles to the protocol for sports days, parents’ meetings and graduation ceremonies. One section was devoted to emergencies, including fire, flood and epidemic. It included a form that was to be filled out and returned by each family, listing the names, telephone numbers and addresses of parents, guardians and anyone authorised to pick up a child from the school. This information was supposed to be updated every year. Kashiba, the headmaster, had not done this, which suggests, at the least, mild laxity in disaster preparedness.

  The Education Plan was based on a template which was adjusted according to the circumstances of each school. Even in Japan, none but a handful of schools needed to make provision for volcanic eruptions, for example; those located inland could confidently strike out the section on tsunamis. Ishizaka, who had revised the manual under Kashiba’s supervision, had chosen to retain it, but he had left unchanged the generic wording of the template:

  Primary evacuation place: school grounds.

  Secondary evacuation place, in case of tsunami: vacant land near school, or park, etc.

  The vagueness of this language was unhelpful. The reference to ‘park, etc.’ made little sense out here in the countryside, where there were fields and hills, but no parks as such. As for ‘vacant land’, there was an abundance of that – the question was: where?

  The school bus was waiting in the car park. It had a capacity of forty-five; at a squeeze, the whole school and its staff could have relocated to the heights of the Ogatsu Pass in two journeys. On the eastern edge of the village were two more roads that led up into the hills, one of them to a hilltop Shinto shrine in a forest clearing. But there was a still closer and more obvious place of safety.

  Three features bounded the village of Kamaya in a rough triangle: the river to the north-west, the paddy fields to the east and, to the south, an unnamed, forested hill, 725 feet at its highest point. In places, the slope presented a strenuous, even perilous climb up steep and thicketed sides. But at one point there was a gentle and accessible path, familiar to all at the school. Until a few years ago, the children had gone up there as part of their science lessons, to cultivate a patch of shiitake mushrooms. This was a climb that the smallest among the children could have easily managed. Within five minutes – the time it had taken them to evacuate their classrooms – the entire school could have ascended hundreds of feet above sea level, beyond the reach of any conceivable tsunami.

  But the Education Plan, so minutely prescriptive about other elements in the life of the school, made no clear adjudication about a place of evacuation. In the villages by the sea, including Aizawa, where Junji Endo used to teach, teachers and children were ascending without hesitation up steep paths and cliff steps. In Okawa, deputy headmaster Ishizaka stood in the playground and found only these words to puzzle over: vacant land near school, or park, etc.

  The school appeared to have suffered no important damage, but while the aftershocks continued, it was judged to be imprudent to go back inside. It was Junji Endo, as the second-ranking teacher present, who darted in and out of the school buildings on this or that errand, while the class teachers kept an eye on their pupils and discussed what they might do. The roll call revealed that a third-year girl was missing; Endo went back in, and found her cowering in the toilet stalls. Many of the children were cold; it was Endo who retrieved their coats and gloves, and who took them to a discreet corner of the playground when they needed to relieve themselves. Occupied thus, he spent little time in active conversation with the other teachers. But it was clear what course of action Endo favoured, and what would have happened if he had been in charge.

  ‘The deputy head took the helm, and the class teachers were attached to their classes,’ he wrote later. ‘I was running round, and I had no idea what they were discussing.’ He recalled one brief conversation with Ishizaka, after checking for stragglers inside the school. ‘I asked, “What should we do? Should we run to the hill?” I was told that it was impossible with the shaking.’

  But Amane Ukitsu, one of the survivors from the sixth year, recalled a much more dramatic intervention. Endo, she said, had re-emerged from the school, calling out loudly, ‘To the hill! The hill! Run to the hill!’

  His alarm was picked up by Hitomi’s son, Daisuke, and his friend, Yuki Sato, who made their own appeals to their sixth-year teacher, Takashi Sasaki.

  We should climb the hill, sir.

  If we stay here, the ground might split open and swallow us up.

  We’ll die if we stay here!

  The boys began to run in the direction of t
he shiitake-mushroom patch, Amane remembered. But Endo was overruled, the boys were ordered to come back and shut up, and they returned obediently to their class.

  Two distinct groups of people were beginning to gather at the school. The first were parents and grandparents, arriving by car and on foot to pick up children. The second were local people from the village – to complicate matters further, Okawa Primary was itself designated an official place of evacuation for Kamaya. And a drastic difference of opinion, verging at times on open conflict, was manifesting itself in the attitudes of the two groups.

  The parents, by and large, wanted to get their children out and away as soon as possible. ‘I kept looking at the cars arriving and wondering, “Is Mum going to come?”’5 said Fuka, the twin sister of Soma Sato. ‘I was so worried. When she appeared I burst into tears. Mum couldn’t stop crying, either.’ At least one teacher, Takashi Sasaki, actively discouraged families from leaving the school. ‘Teacher said, “You’ll be safe here,” Soma remembered. ‘Mum said, “Our house is higher up. We’ll be safer there.”’

  From the education board’s log:

  Child: My mum came to pick me up, and we told Mr Takashi that I was going home. We were told, ‘It’s dangerous to go home now, so better stay in the school.’

  Parent: I told Mr Takashi, ‘The radio says that there’s a ten-metre tsunami coming.’ I said, ‘Run up the hill!’ and pointed to the hill. I was told, ‘Calm down, ma’am.’

  The local people also pooh-poohed the danger. The village head of Kamaya, Toshio Takahashi, appears to have been particularly outspoken on the subject. Everyone central to the discussion is dead – but from the fragmentary glimpses provided by the survivors, it is clear that there was an active effort to lobby the deputy headmaster to keep the children in the school playground:

  Child: There were teachers who said, ‘Let’s escape to the mountain’, but then there were teachers and local people who said, ‘It’s safer at the school.’

  Parent: The deputy head was consulting with local people, four or five of them, in their seventies or older. ‘Will the mountain at the back collapse? I want the children to climb it. Is it impossible?’

  Child: The deputy head said it was better to run to the mountain, but someone from Kamaya said, ‘We’re fine just here.’ They seemed to be arguing.

  Child: The deputy head and the headman of Kamaya were quarrelling. [The deputy head said] ‘Let them climb the mountain.’ The headman said, ‘It won’t come this far, so let’s go to the traffic island.’

  ‘The teachers were panicking,’ said one parent. Another described how the hair and clothes of Ishizaka were plastered to his head and body by sweat, despite the coldness of the day. But a third said that although the teachers ‘were not calm, they weren’t panicking, I think’. This atmosphere of strain and irresolution confused people who stepped into it. Tetsuya Tadano and his sister Mina were relieved to see their mother, Shiroe. ‘It seemed that she actually wanted to escape with us to higher ground,’ said Tetsuya. ‘But all the parents and guardians were just standing around. She said, “Wait a minute, I need to pick something up from home.” So I just gave her my bags and stayed where I was.’

  It was a weekday afternoon, and the working people of Kamaya were away at their shops, factories and offices. Most of the parents who came to the school were full-time mothers and housewives; most of the villagers offering their opinions were retired, elderly and male. It was another enactment of the ancient dialogue, its lines written centuries ago, between the entreating voices of women, and the oblivious, overbearing dismissiveness of old men.

  Toshinobu Oikawa was a white-shirted, grey-suited man in his late fifties who worked in the local branch of the Ishinomaki town government. He was in his office, across the bridge from the school on the north bank of the river, when the earthquake struck. Within five minutes the first warning, of a twenty-foot tsunami, was received from the Meteorological Agency. The town office had a back-up generator, but the failure of electricity in the rest of the district had disabled many of the loudspeakers through which the municipality broadcast important announcements. Within fifteen minutes, Oikawa and five of his colleagues were climbing into three cars mounted with rooftop speakers of their own, and setting out to deliver the warning in person.

  The roads they drove along were fissured by cracks. In places, earth and stones had slid onto them from the hillsides above. They crossed the Kitakami Great Bridge and drove through Kamaya towards the communities most at risk from a tsunami, the villages closest to the sea around the Nagatsura lagoon. They were driving through the outer margins of Kamaya when Oikawa became aware of something extraordinary taking place two miles ahead of them, at the point where the sea met the land.

  The place was Matsubara, the spit of fields and sand where a ribbon of pine forest grew alongside the beach. There were 20,000 of the trees. They were a century old. Many of them were more than sixty feet high. And now, as Oikawa watched, the sea was overwhelming them, swallowing up their pointed green peaks and tearing up the forest in a frothing surge. ‘I could see the white of the wave, foaming over the top of the trees,’ he said. ‘It was coming down over them like a waterfall. I could see it with my own eyes. And there were cars coming in the other direction, and the drivers were shouting at us, “The tsunami is coming. Get out! Get out!” So immediately we made a U-turn and went back the way we’d come.’

  Within seconds they were driving through Kamaya again. More aftershocks were taking place. But it was as if the entire village had fallen under a spell.

  Oikawa’s colleague, Sato, was shouting through the car’s loudspeaker, ‘A super-tsunami has reached Matsubara. Evacuate! Evacuate to higher ground!’ Municipal announcements in Japan are typically delivered in tones of glazed calm; those who survived remembered the pleading, almost crazed quality of this one. ‘There were seven or eight people standing around the street, chatting,’ Oikawa remembered. ‘They paid us no attention. I saw the patrol car parked in front of the village police box. But the policeman wasn’t passing on the warning, and he wasn’t trying to escape, either. We passed the school. We were driving fast, we didn’t stop, and we couldn’t clearly see the playground. But they must have heard our message too. The school bus was just standing there.’

  The old men of Kamaya didn’t think of themselves as living by the sea.

  A tsunami was a coastal hazard, an affliction of beaches, harbours and fishing communities, places hard up against the waves. But Kamaya was a farming village, a category apart. Between Okawa Primary School and the beach at Matsubara was a distance in a straight line of two and a quarter miles. Screened by the houses and shops of Kamaya, the sea was inaudible and invisible. One local woman described to me the surprise, among many other shocks, of looking out from what had formerly been Kamaya after its human structures had been wiped away. ‘It was only after the houses had gone that I noticed it,’ she said. ‘I had always thought of us as living inland, alongside a river. But now, with the houses gone, all of a sudden there was the ocean.’

  The Kitakami was the gate through which the tsunami gained admittance to the land. And the river channelled and concentrated it, binding it tighter and stronger, and loosed it over the fragile embankment.

  In Kamaya, people were doing what they always did after an earthquake: tidying up. Among them was a farmer in his sixties named Waichi Nagano, who lived in a big house out in the fields. ‘I heard all the warnings,’ he said. ‘There was the loudspeaker car from the town hall going up and down, saying, “Super-tsunami imminent: evacuate, evacuate!” There were a lot of sirens too. Everyone in the village must have heard them. But we didn’t take it seriously.’

  Nagano was the fifth generation to have inhabited and farmed this land. Families such as his possessed an ancestral consciousness, composed of personal memory, historical anecdote and local lore: nowhere in that storehouse of hereditary experience was there any recollection of tsunamis. ‘Until then, no tsunami had ever damag
ed Kamaya,’ Nagano said. ‘We knew people in Ogatsu once had a tsunami, and we knew about the Chile earthquake. But they didn’t have the slightest effect on this village. So people thought it could never reach here. People felt safe.’

  The experience of the generations, the reassurance of the ancestors – these beat louder in the blood than the voices from the loudspeaker cars, screeching, ‘Evacuate! Evacuate!’

  Nagano was in his shed, gathering up his scattered farming tools, when his wife called to him from the front of the house. There he saw the tsunami coming over the embankment 600 yards away and smashing into the buildings in front of it. He bolted inside and shouted to his daughter and granddaughter. The four of them jumped into two cars and began to manoeuvre onto the road. Nagano’s wife suddenly opened the door, saying, ‘My bag – I forgot my handbag.’ ‘No! No!’ Nagano shouted. ‘Please get back in the car.’ It was 200 yards to the point where the road began to rise in its ascent up the hill. Seconds after they reached it, the waters rushed in behind them.

  Nagano looked back from the hill to see his home in the rice fields, and Kamaya behind it, being overwhelmed by the sea. Within a few seconds the house had broken up and disappeared. Little more than a minute had passed between the moment when he first glimpsed the tsunami and now, as he stared down, panting, over the destruction of his home, his fields, his village, the inheritance of five generations. ‘It was a scene of hell,’ Nagano said. ‘It was just hell. It was as if we were in a dream. We could not believe what was happening.’

  In the playground, the children were becoming restless. A mood of bored resignation had established itself. The tidy lines in which each class had been standing dissolved into seated circles on the ground. Local people from the village sat on mats and cushions, which they had brought from their homes. It was cold. People shared blankets and hand-warmers, and the teachers extracted from a storeroom two open-topped metal drums in which fires could be lit. There was no sense of anything much happening, or that anything was likely to happen very soon.