Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone Page 13

  Children continued to leave with their parents, and said their goodbyes to friends and teachers. After-school activities were cancelled; plans by her friends in the sixth year to continue celebrations of Manno’s birthday were deferred. ‘Manno was right next to me,’6 said one girl. ‘I had promised her a birthday present after basketball practice. I said, “I won’t be able to give it to you after all. I’m sorry.” She said, “That’s OK.”’

  Not everyone in Kamaya was indifferent to the warnings. The chronological log produced by the education board refers to several local people who repeatedly urged an evacuation. In the official account, they are identified only by capital letters. It is not clear what became of them:

  Parent: F (local person) ran over yelling, ‘Run! There’s a tsunami coming.’ Someone, I don’t know who, said, ‘What? That’s a bit scary, isn’t it?’

  Parent: I was told by D, ‘The tsunami will come at 3.30’, and he showed me his mobile phone and said, ‘We only have twenty minutes left.’

  Parent: A man next to the bicycle shed pointed to the mountain and said loudly, ‘There’s a tsunami coming, so climb to high ground!’ I don’t know if the school staff heard him.

  At 3.25 p.m. Oikawa and the three loudspeaker vans drove past, blaring their desperate warning. In the school playground, the teachers were preparing to burn wood in the oil drums to keep the children warm.

  At 3.30 p.m., an elderly man named Kazuo Takahashi7 fled his home next to the river. He too had ignored the warnings, until he became abruptly aware of the sea streaming over the embankment beside his house. It seemed to be coming from below the earth, as well as across it: metal manhole covers in the road were being lifted upwards by rising water; mud was oozing up between the cracks that the earthquake had opened in the road. Takahashi directed his car towards the closest place of evacuation, the hill behind the school. On the main street of Kamaya he saw friends and acquaintances standing and chatting. He rolled down his window and called to them, ‘There’s a tsunami coming. Get out!’ He passed his cousin and his wife and delivered the same warning. They waved, smiled and ignored him.

  Takahashi parked his car next to the village community centre, adjacent to the school. The other Mr Takahashi, the village head who was so vigorously opposed to evacuation, was helpfully directing the cars. As he climbed out and made for the hill, Kazuo Takahashi became aware of a large number of children issuing forth from the school in a hurry.

  Among them was Tetsuya Tadano. He had remained in the playground with his class; after disappearing on her vague errand, his mother, Shiroe, had not returned. Mr Ishizaka, the deputy head, had been absent from the playground. He reappeared suddenly, with an unexpected instruction. ‘A tsunami seems to be coming,’ he called. ‘Quickly. We’re going to the traffic island. Get into line, and don’t run.’ Obediently, the children stood up and filed out of the playground. They left in their classes, the oldest children first. But as some walked, some trotted and others ran, the classes quickly began to merge and overlap.

  Tetsuya and his friend Daisuke Konno were at the front of the group. The traffic island was less than 400 yards away, just outside the village at the point where the road met the Kitakami Great Bridge. But instead of leaving through the front entrance of the school, the children were led out of the side, along the foot of the hill and then down a narrow alley that connected with the village street. It was as he approached this junction that Tetsuya saw a black mass of water rushing along the main road ahead of him.

  Barely a minute had passed since he had left the playground. He was conscious of a roaring sound, and a sheet of white spray above the black. It was not emerging from straight ahead, from the direction of sea. It was streaming in from the left, from the river, the direction in which the children had been ordered to run.

  Some of those at the front of the line froze in the face of the wave. Others, including Tetsuya and Daisuke, turned at once and ran back the way they had come. The rest of the children were continuing to hurry towards the main road; the little ones towards the back were visibly puzzled by the sight of the older children pelting hectically in the opposite direction.

  At the top of the alley, the two boys found themselves at the foot of the hill. This was the steepest and most thickly forested section of the slope, difficult to climb at the best of times. At some point Tetsuya became aware that Daisuke had fallen, and he tried, and failed, to pull his friend up. Then Tetsuya was scrambling up the hill. As he did so, he looked back over his shoulder and saw the darkness of the tsunami rising behind him. Soon it was at his feet, his calves, his buttocks, his back. ‘It felt like the huge force of gravity when it hit me,’ he said. ‘It was as if someone with great strength was pushing. I couldn’t breathe, I was struggling for breath.’ He became aware of a rock and a tree, and found himself trapped between them, with the water rising about him. Then darkness overcame him.

  Inside the Tsunami

  Everyone who experienced the tsunami saw, heard and smelt something subtly different. Much depended upon where you were, and the obstacles that the water had to overcome to reach you. Some described a waterfall, cascading over sea wall and embankment. For others, it was a fast-rising flood between houses, deceptively slight at first, tugging trippingly at the feet and ankles, but quickly sucking and battering at legs and chests and shoulders. In colour, it was described as brown, grey, black, white. The one thing it did not resemble in the least was a conventional ocean wave, the wave from the famous woodblock print by Hokusai: blue-green and cresting elegantly in tentacles of foam. The tsunami was a thing of a different order, darker, stranger, massively more powerful and violent, without kindness or cruelty, beauty or ugliness, wholly alien. It was the sea coming onto land, the ocean itself picking up its feet and charging at you with a roar in its throat.

  It stank of brine, mud and seaweed. Most disturbing of all were the sounds it generated as it collided with, and digested, the stuff of the human world: the crunch and squeal of wood and concrete, metal and tile. In places, a mysterious dust billowed above it, like the cloud of pulverised matter that floats above a demolished building. It was as if neighbourhoods, villages, whole towns were being placed inside the jaws of a giant compressor and crushed.

  From the hillside where they had narrowly escaped to safety, Waichi Nagano and his wife, Hideko, could see the whole scene spread out below them, as the water swept in pulsing surges over the embankment and across the village and the fields. ‘It was a huge black mountain of water which came on all at once and destroyed the houses,’ he said. ‘It was like a solid thing. And there was this strange sound, difficult to describe. It wasn’t like the sound of the sea. It was more like the roaring of the earth, mixed with a kind of crumpling, groaning noise, which was the houses breaking up.’

  There was another fainter noise. ‘It was the voices of children,’ said Hideko. ‘They were crying out – “Help! Help!”’ On the hill above, where he had half climbed, half floated to safety, Kazuo Takahashi heard them too. ‘I heard children,’ he said. ‘But the water was swirling round, there was the crunching sound of the wave and the rubble, and their voices became weaker and weaker.’

  How does it feel to die in a tsunami? What are the thoughts and sensations of someone in those final moments? Everyone who contemplated the disaster asked themselves these questions; the mind fluttered about them like an insect around a flame. One day, I mentioned it, hesitatingly, to a local man. ‘Do you really want to know the answer to that question?’ he asked. ‘Because I have a friend who can tell you.’

  He arranged the meeting for the following evening. His friend’s name was Teruo Konno and, like Toshinobu Oikawa, he worked in the branch office of the Ishinomaki town hall. Oikawa was the model of the local bureaucrat: quiet, patient, dogged. But Konno was an imaginative and restless character. As a boy, he had dreamed of leaving Tohoku and travelling the world. His parents, seeking to quell this impulse, had discouraged him from going to university, and Konno had spe
nt his life in the place where he grew up, and his career in local government. In March 2011, he had been deputy-head of the local development section, responsible, among other things, for ‘disaster counter-measures’.

  Few people were more knowledgeable about the menace of earthquakes and their particular threat to the Kitakami area. ‘Our assumption was that there would be another big quake,’ Konno said. ‘There hadn’t been a tsunami since the 1896 and 1933 quakes, so we expected that too.’ There was no doubt that the small village where the town office was located, situated at the mouth of the river, two and a half miles downstream of Kamaya, would be in its path. Konno and his colleagues bent their efforts to ensuring that they would ride it out.

  The two-storey branch office had been built on a rise fifteen feet above sea level, and its ground floor had been elevated a further ten feet above that. Essential utilities, such as electricity and communications, had been installed on the uppermost floor. On the wall was a digital read-out that recorded the intensity of tremors as they occurred.fn1 As recently as the previous August, the city government had conducted a drill in which police, fire brigade and local officials acted out their roles in case of an earthquake and tsunami.

  When the moment finally arrived, Konno experienced it with the calm detachment of a disaster professional.

  ‘It came in three stages,’ he told me. ‘When the shaking first began it was strong, but slow. I looked at the monitor. It showed an intensity of upper five, and I knew that this was it.’ Even as the rocking continued, he was calling to his staff to make a public announcement: a tsunami warning, he knew, would soon be issued. ‘But the shaking went on,’ Konno said. ‘It got stronger and stronger. The PC screens and piles of documents were all falling off the desks. And then in the third stage, it became worse still.’

  Konno gripped his desk in a tumult of competing sounds. Pieces of office furniture were rattling and colliding as they shunted across the room. Filing cabinets were disgorging their files. Now he looked up again at the wall-mounted read-out of seismic intensity: it displayed only an error message. Then, gradually, like the slowing of a beating heart, the shaking and the panic eased, and the employees of the Ishinomaki Kitakami General Branch Office sprang to their appointed tasks.

  The emergency generator rumbled into life, the toppled television was lifted off the floor and reconnected, and the tsunami warning was relayed through the municipal loudspeakers. Oikawa and his men were dispatched to those communities where the loudspeakers had failed. Just as had been planned, representatives of the police and the fire brigade relocated to the town branch office. ‘Everything functioned very well,’ Konno said. ‘No one was hurt, everyone was calm, and there was only slight damage to the building. We had drilled for this. Everyone knew who should do what, and what to do next.’

  Soon there were fifty-seven people in the branch office. Thirty-one of them were locals who had evacuated from more vulnerable premises to the safety of the strong, modern building. They included six children from a nearby school, the counterpart of Okawa Primary School on the north side of the river, as well as eight old people from the local day-care centre. Three of them were in wheelchairs; four more had to be physically carried upstairs. Volunteers sprang forward to help them safely and comfortably up to the sanctuary of the second floor.

  At 3.14 p.m., the Japan Meteorological Agency revised the estimated height of the imminent tsunami from twenty feet to thirty-three feet. But at some point the back-up electricity generator had failed, and Konno and his colleagues never received this information. It would have made no difference anyway.

  The building, mounted on its elevation, faced inland, with its back to the river and its front entrance facing the hills over the small village below. From his window, the only water Konno could see was a sluggish brown stream, little more than a drain, which trickled into the Kitakami. ‘That was the first thing I noticed,’ he said. ‘The water in the creek had become white. It was churning and frothing, and it was flowing the wrong way. Then it was overflowing, and there was more water coming in from the river behind, and it was surrounding the houses. I saw the post-office building, lifting up and turning over in the water. Some of the houses were being crushed, but some of them were lifting up and floating.’ The destruction was accompanied by that mysterious noise. ‘I never heard anything like it,’ Konno said. ‘It was partly the rushing of the water, but also the sound of timber, twisting and tearing.’ In the space of five minutes, the entire community of eighty houses had been physically uprooted and thrust, bobbing, against the barrier of the hills.

  Nothing in Konno’s simulations and hazard maps had prepared him for this. ‘People in the office were looking down on it, amazed,’ he said. ‘It was unbelievable. It was as if it was happening somewhere else. But at the time I was thinking, “Well, this is it – a twenty-foot tsunami.” And I assumed that would be the end of it.’

  Through the window, he observed that the car park below was being washed over by black water. At the same moment, a profound shudder went through the whole building. Even without being able to see it, Konno understood what had happened: the large plate-glass windows on the ground floor had broken under the pressure of the wave, which was washing through the lower part of the building.

  ‘It was like the bursting of a dam,’ he said. ‘Desks, chairs, documents were washing out of the other side. It felt like another earthquake. It was shaking the whole building again. The lights and the panels in the ceiling were falling down.’

  The town officials, the police, the firemen, the schoolchildren, the old people and their carers looked on helplessly as the water surged. Konno, remembering the disaster drills, gave the order that everyone should move into a corner room, structurally the strongest part of the building. As he closed the door on them, there was another mighty impact. One of his subordinates ran to report to Konno what happened: the roof of the large public hall next door had lifted off and collided with the branch office.

  Konno returned to his desk. The speed of events was difficult to grasp. Until moments ago, he had been leading a trained team in the execution of a well-rehearsed and rational plan. Now he, and all those around him, were facing death. The forces acting on the building were pushing it to the extremes of its resistance. The ground floor was completely underwater; now the wave was rising through the upper floor. Konno climbed onto his desk, as black water sucked and slapped around it with violent force. Then there was another, immense percussion, and suddenly he was tumbling through open air.

  The outside world was cold; Konno had the sensation of falling through it very slowly. He was able to take in the sight of the building from which he had just been propelled, with water surging out of all its windows. He was aware of another colleague, a man named Abe, falling through space alongside him: the image of Abe’s surprised, bespectacled face lodged in his mind. Then he was in the water.

  It was churning and raging with violent internal motion. Konno described it as ‘like being in a washing machine’; he was paralysed by the water’s grip. He was aware of having being forced down, and of touching asphalt – the surface of the car park, which was now the bottom of the sea. And he understood that his life was coming to its end. ‘It’s true what people say. You see the faces of your family, of your friends. It’s true – I remember it. All those faces. The last words in my mind were, “I’m done for – I’m sorry.” It’s a feeling different from fear. Just a frank feeling of sorrow, and regret.’

  As he was viewing the gallery of his past, Konno found himself able to move his neck, and then his arms and legs and, kicking and thrashing, he propelled himself upwards and broke the surface.

  He cast around for something to hold on to. A tree branch came into his grip, but it was too small. He exchanged it for a thicker spar of timber. On the surface, he could make out Abe, minus his glasses, gripping onto a sturdy log and being carried north, away from the river and towards the hills. But Konno was spinning in the opposite direction
, towards what had been the river and was now the sea.

  Having faced death without fear, now he became afraid. ‘It was like being sucked into a whirlpool,’ he said. ‘I went under again, and again I thought this must be the end. And then, somehow, I was released from it, and I was in the middle of the river in a slow and quiet stream.’

  He caught hold of a wide wooden panel, the section of a house’s outer wall, a stable support compared to the rotating tree branches. Gripping this, he drifted steadily towards the bank again and the hills that rose out of the flood. He could tell, more or less, where the submerged embankment and road must be; he imagined lowering his feet in the shallower reaches and wading to safety. But just as hope was returning, the tsunami began to withdraw, and the stampeding waters reversed direction.

  Konno found himself being carried back out into the stream and towards the river’s mouth. Familiar landmarks passed at racing speed. He saw the outline of his office building – it had not collapsed after all. Clinging to his raft, Konno was rushed downstream by the withdrawing tide, through the river’s gaping mouth and out towards the horizon of the Pacific Ocean.

  He lost all sense of time passing. He could see, or hear, no other living creature. It was as if the whole world had succumbed to the flood and he was its only survivor. His Ark was that section of wooden wall, six feet by three, which he half gripped, half sprawled over. It saved his life – a smaller, less stable support would quickly have exhausted his energy and cast him off. Although he had crossed the threshold from river to sea, he remained within the broad sweep of Oppa Bay, and he never lost sight of the land. After the first great pulse of the tsunami had pulled him back, the next one surged in and bore him back up the river again.