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

  On 22 May 1960, a 9.5-magnitude earthquake,4 still the most powerful ever recorded, struck the seabed off the west coast of Chile. Waves eighty feet high inundated the city of Valdivia, killing a thousand people along the coast. Twenty-two hours after the earthquake, the tsunami struck Japan, having traversed 10,500 miles of sea. It was the morning of 24 May; none but a handful of seismologists in Tokyo knew what had happened in Chile, and even they never imagined the effect it would have one day later on the far side of the Pacific. The Sanriku Coast saw the worst of it; in places, the water was more than twenty feet high. One hundred and forty-two people were killed that day, because of an occurrence in the depths of the ocean bed literally half a world away.

  In Hashiura, Sadayoshi Kumagai saw the tsunami from Chile surging up the Kitakami River. ‘It was this mass of black,’ he said. ‘Huge stones were rolling over and over upstream. It wasn’t just one wave, but one after another. The water rose so high – it came halfway up the bank. I had never seen that happen before. I thought at the time what a strange and powerful thing it was. But I never imagined that it could ever come up over the bank.’

  When the earthquake struck on 11 March 2011, Kumagai recognised immediately that a tsunami could follow, and what a menace it would be to anyone on the river. With a prickling of alarm, he remembered that eight of his employees were gathering reeds on an island close to the mouth of the Kitakami. He rushed down to the bank and supervised their evacuation by boat. Filled with relief that his people had been brought to safety, he drove back to Hashiura.

  He was in the open when the tsunami arrived. He watched the black shape breach the bank and tumble towards him. He leaped into his car and reached the road into the hills seconds ahead of the water. From there, he looked down as the second tsunami of his life destroyed Okawa and Hashiura, including his own house and office. ‘It was like a black mountain coming over,’ he said. ‘It was incredible that the mountain was moving. I saw a car with its tail lights on going under the water. There must have been somebody inside. Another few seconds and I would have been in the water too.’

  Much of the beauty of Okawa derived from the many things that were not there – those everyday uglinesses unthinkingly accepted by city dwellers. Even as we drove in on that September afternoon, I was conscious of their absence. Between the outskirts of Ishinomaki and the sea, there were few traffic lights, road signs, vending machines or telegraph poles. There were no strip-lit restaurants or twenty-four-hour convenience stores, no advertising hoardings or cash dispensers. Most transforming of all was the character of local sound: the song of birds and cicadas in the trees, the low noise of the river, the slap of waves and a subtle, pervasive, barely audible susurration, which took me days to identify – that of air passing through the reeds.

  Ryosuke Abe, who spent those weeks searching through its remains after the disaster, was the headman of Kamaya; no one I met talked more passionately about the life of the village. The home he described, and the childhood he remembered, was that of the archetypal furusato, the Japanese Arcadia, the village of the imagination, with its forested hills, paddies cut by a meandering river, a small local school and family-run shops.

  There was Aizawa the tobacconist and, across the road, Mogami the sake-seller, with its distinctive green-and-orange awning. Suzuki the tofu-seller was further down the road, next to the Takahashi Beauty Parlour. Kamaya had its own koban, or police box, manned by a single officer, and the Kamaya Clinic run by the well-regarded Dr Suzuki. And dominating the centre of the village, fronted by a row of cherry trees, was the school.

  ‘Kamaya was a place of abundant nature,’ Abe said. ‘The natural world was so rich. These days, when kids go for a picnic, they get on a bus. They don’t really know their way round their own area. But we roamed far and wide – Nagatsura, Onosaki, Fukuji. We’d play baseball on the beach – each hamlet had a little team. We played in the river – you could swim anywhere. We spent the whole summer outside.’

  Most families had more than one source of income: a job, or at least part-time work, in Ishinomaki, supplemented by a small household farm and gleanings from the forest and river. The hills produced their own harvest of mushrooms, berries and chestnuts. The local rice variety was called Love-at-First-Sight. The briny mingling of the fresh water and the salt had intriguing effects on natural life. It made the reeds thin, but very strong. It nurtured unlikely fish, such as the spiky-finned, bull-headed sculpions,5 and shijimi clams, which were sold across Japan as a delicious ingredient for soup. ‘We had so much from the river,’6 Ryosuke Abe said. ‘We used to make a trap out of an oak branch and leaves. You put it on the river bed, and when you pulled it up onto the boat with a landing net, it was full of eels – big fat eels.’

  Three hundred and ninety-three people lived in Kamaya7 at the time of the tsunami. More than half of them – 197 people – died, and every one of their houses was destroyed. Virtually all who survived did so because they were away from the village at the time, at work or school. Of those who were present in Kamaya that afternoon, only about twenty had not drowned by the time the sun went down. And these numbers did not include the teachers and children who died at the school. It was easy, often too easy, to reach for superlatives in describing the tragedy of the tsunami. But in all the disaster zone, I reflected as I drove in that September afternoon, I knew of no single community that had lost so much of itself.

  The road, which had been fully repaired, at first gave no clues about what had happened six months earlier. The vegetation along the riverside had begun to grow back, and the rubble had been tidied away. But the fields, which a mile back had the glow of ripe rice, were muddy and unplanted, and here and there were discreet relics of destruction: a buckled pickup truck among long grass; a windowless, roofless building alone in the mud. My eye was drawn to the screen of our car’s satellite navigation system. Kamaya was visible upon it as a mesh of lines and rectangles, with each block of houses distinct, the school, the police station and the community centre individually marked. We reached the turning to the New Kitakami Great Bridge, which was teeming with repair workers in yellow vests. On the satnav screen, the moving dot representing our car paused on the threshold of the glowing village. But in the real world there was nothing there.

  I knew what had happened at Okawa. Everyone knew. It was the worst of the tsunami, the story hardest among all the stories to hear. I was always conscious, on reaching the school, of a faint dizziness, a quailing of the heart at the idea of the place. And yet the site itself possessed an air of quiet, even tranquillity: a two-storey block beneath an angled red roof, with concrete arms enclosing what would once have been the playground. The buildings were windowless and battered, their surfaces abraded by impacts, with walls warped and toppled in places, but still sound on their steel frame. Above was a steep and thickly wooded hill, buttressed at its foot by a concrete wall.

  At the front was a weather-beaten table bearing a jumble of objects that identified it as a makeshift shrine. There were vases of flowers, incense holders and wooden funeral tablets bearing characters brushed in ink. There were bottles of juice and sweets, soft toys and a framed photograph of the village in sunshine, with the river, hills and summer sky magnificent in the background.

  Standing in front of the shrine, tidying a vase of flowers, was a figure in boots and a heavy coat, her hair tied up in a ponytail. Her name was Naomi Hiratsuka. She lived upriver; her daughter, Koharu, had been a pupil at the school. She was the woman I had come here to find.

  The Mud

  Naomi lived in a big house in the village of Yokogawa, with four generations of her husband’s family. Its oldest occupant, his grandmother, was in her late nineties; Naomi’s younger daughter, Sae, was two and a half. Naomi had been in her bedroom at the moment of the earthquake, lulling the small girl to sleep. The fast, vertical motion was ‘like being inside a cocktail shaker’. By the time the shocks had dissipated, the house was an obstacle course of books, furniture and broken g
lass. Her six-year-old son Toma was trapped in another room, its door blocked by fallen objects. It took Naomi half an hour to free him, as the walls and floor flexed and wobbled in the aftershocks.

  Nobody in the family had been physically hurt, but downstairs the house was in even greater disarray. Naomi’s mother-in-law was tending to the distraught great-grandmother; her father-in-law, who held high office in the local neighbourhood association, was taking stock of the situation outside.

  He was an uncommunicative man; ‘traditional’ would have been the polite way of describing his conception of family and the appropriate behaviour of its members. When he returned from his reconnoitring, Naomi was preparing to go to Okawa Primary School to collect her twelve-year-old daughter, Koharu. ‘I had no doubt that the school was OK,’ she said. ‘But it had been such a strong quake, I thought I ought to pick her up.’ Mr Hiratsuka Senior resisted this idea, for reasons that were obscure. ‘He said, “This is not the moment,”’ Naomi remembered. ‘I didn’t know exactly what he meant.’ The old man had walked round the village; Naomi realised later that he must have looked over the bank and observed the condition of the river. But he was a man who rarely felt the need to explain his decisions, certainly not to a daughter-in-law. ‘I think that he himself was in a panic, although he didn’t show it,’ she said. ‘We didn’t have much conversation. He’s the kind who keeps his thoughts to himself.’

  Naomi had sent a text message to her husband, but received no reply before the network went down. There was no electricity and therefore no television. Even the municipal loudspeakers, which broadcast information in times of emergency, were silent; and it was snowing. ‘I remember thinking about Koharu stuck at the school, and I thought that it must be so cold there,’ Naomi said. ‘I was glad that I’d told her to put on an extra layer of underwear. I thought that as long as they wrapped up well, they’d be OK.’ In the absence of any news – good or bad – about the state of the wider world, all she could think of was to stay inside and tend to those members of the family who were safe at home.

  This course of action coincided exactly with her father-in-law’s view of the role and duties of a young woman and mother.

  Shortly before dusk, old Mr Hiratsuka announced that he was going out again. His intention was to walk downriver and retrieve a radio from the hut at his nearby allotment. It was still light when he left. He returned in darkness an hour later, gasping and reeling, drenched in water, plastered with mud and leaves and lucky to be alive.

  Physically, Yokogawa was untouched by the disaster that was taking place. The high embankment and the bend in the river had shielded it from the water, to the extent that Naomi still had no idea there had been a tsunami. But on the far side of the jutting hill, five and a half miles from the sea, Mr Hiratsuka found himself on a road rinsed by the ocean. As he walked along it, a new surge broke the river’s edge and quickly covered the asphalt. It tugged at his feet, and then at his ankles and knees, and before he understood what was happening he had lost his footing and was flailing in currents of black water. They were dragging him back towards the river, where he would certainly have drowned, when he became painfully, but securely, entangled in a tree, which held him fast while the water drained away.

  He staggered back home past the bend in the river, without his radio. ‘He said later that he nearly died,’ Naomi remembered. ‘He was upset. He didn’t say so, but perhaps that was the moment when he understood what had happened.’

  The following morning, Naomi persuaded her father-in-law to make an effort at reaching the school. Immediately beyond Yokogawa the water had receded, and they were able to drive to the point where the road disappeared into the water. A group of people had gathered there; some of them seemed to be crying. Mr Hiratsuka told Naomi to stay in the car, and strode over to investigate. He came back a few minutes later; the terseness of his replies suggested that he hadn’t found out very much. Naomi was not especially worried. Like everyone else, she had heard the report that 200 children and local people were cut off by water at Okawa Primary School, awaiting rescue. Like the other mothers, she had turned up that morning to meet the helicopter that never came. But mostly she was preoccupied with the burden of feeding and cleaning a household in which she was expected to be the source of nurture for both young and old. ‘The children were scared by the aftershocks,’ she said. ‘And the old people were all in a dither. I was on maternity leave – I was supposed to be looking after my child. But for the next few days, all I can remember was cooking. When the time came to go out and find food, my mother- and father-in-law did that. I was at home taking care of the children, and cooking and cooking again, morning, noon and night.’

  On Sunday morning, two of Naomi’s friends, the mother and father of two children at Okawa Primary School, called by to say that they were going to make another attempt at getting through. Would Naomi like to come? She badly wanted to go with them – but who would look after the other two children in her absence? Her father-in-law had a solution: she would stay at home, and he would go instead.

  He returned at lunchtime.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Naomi.

  ‘We got to the school,’ he said.

  ‘How was it?’ asked Naomi.

  ‘I saw Arika’s body there.’ Arika was a twelve-year-old classmate of Koharu. ‘There were several other bodies of children there. But not Koharu. I could not find Koharu. I heard that a few of the children survived and went to Irikamaya. But Koharu was not there. So I think it is hopeless. You need to give up.’

  Naomi found herself unable to speak. ‘I wanted to ask so much more, I wanted to know the details,’ she said. ‘But there was something about the way he said, “Give up.”’

  Then Mr Hiratsuka said, ‘We have to accept this. You need to give up hope. The important thing now is to look after the children who are still alive.’ With that, the conversation was over.

  Naomi told me: ‘He had said it – and so I realised there really was no hope. That was the moment when I knew that Koharu was not alive. But I couldn’t show my grief. Mr Hiratsuka is … Mr Hiratsuka is a very strict, controlled person. He is not the kind of man who allows his natural feelings to show. He had lost his granddaughter. I know that he may have felt very sad, but he contains his feelings. Nonetheless, if he found me in a state of sadness, he should have refrained from saying words that would hurt me. But he did not refrain.’

  Naomi’s mother-in-law had heard the exchange and stood nearby, weeping. Mr Hiratsuka spoke scoldingly to his wife and ordered her to quell her tears.

  Naomi’s husband, Shinichiro, reached home the following day. Like his wife he was a teacher at a high school in Ishinomaki, which had become the refuge for a thousand people made homeless by the tsunami. His presence diluted the authority of his father and made acceptable Naomi’s absence from the house. With Shinichiro, she drove down the road as far as the waters allowed. There she met the mother of another girl from Okawa Primary School, who told them that she had just identified her own daughter at the school gymnasium upriver. She thought she might have seen Koharu’s body there too.

  The Hiratsukas drove inland to the gymnasium mortuary. More and more bodies were coming in, and the place was in the grip of bureaucratic confusion. There were papers to be filed, and incoming bodies had to be examined by a doctor and formally logged, a process that sometimes took days. Naomi and Shinichiro had young children and needy old people back at home; they couldn’t wait. They filled out the necessary documents and left.

  The following day, Shinichiro said goodbye to his family and went back to his school in the city to help with the care of the refugees there. His wife did not question the decision; none in his family regarded it as bizarre or remarkable, any more than it was bizarre to expect a mother newly grieving for her young daughter to cook, wash and clean. None of his colleagues would have reproached Shinichiro if he had walked away from his school to look for his child’s body. But no self-respecting Japanese teacher could
have done so with an easy conscience. It was just one example of the dutifulness routinely expected of a public servant.

  Shinichiro came home whenever he felt able. When he did, he and Naomi went to the school gymnasium. There were 200 bodies there by the end of the week. ‘They were laid out on blue tarpaulins,’ she said. ‘A lot of them were people I knew. There were parents of pupils of mine. There were classmates of Koharu. I was able to say, “I know him, and I know him, and I know her.” But none of them was Koharu.’

  After ten days they decided to go to Okawa Primary School to see what was happening there. The water had receded to the point where they could drive and wade to Kamaya. Rough paths had been cleared by the volunteer firemen, who were using a digger to part the debris. But rubble still overwhelmed the school buildings, and on top of the clagging mud was a thin layer of snow. Next to the traffic island at the entrance to the village there were blue vinyl sheets, on which bodies were laid out to be washed before being taken to the mortuary. Half a dozen mothers lingered there, waiting for their children to be lifted out.

  Naomi looked at the faces of the people on the blue sheets, hoping all the time to recognise Koharu. She was a tall girl with unruly, shoulder-length hair and a plump, humorous face. Naomi thought about the last moments they had spent together. As her mother tended to Koharu’s little brother and sister, as her septuagenarian grandfather prepared breakfast for her grandmother, and the grandmother fussed over her near-centenarian great-grandmother, Koharu had quietly dressed, eaten and left for the school bus. She was about to enter her last week of primary school; she and Naomi had discussed what she would wear for the graduation ceremony. Most of the other girls favoured jackets and tartan skirts, in emulation of the starlets of a toothsome pop band. But Koharu had chosen a hakama, an elegantly formal traditional skirt of high pleats worn over a kimono. The skirt had been Naomi’s, but Koharu was almost as tall as her mother, and it required little alteration.