Ghosts of the Tsunami Read online

  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.

  PART 1

  THE SCHOOL BENEATH THE WAVE

  Having Gone, I Will Come

  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 o
n 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?”’