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

  On 11 March 2011, seventy-five children in Japan died in the care of their teachers. Seventy-four of them were at Okawa Primary School. Later, many of their parents were tormented by self-reproach for not rushing there to collect them. But far from being neglectful or lazy, they had followed the course of action which, in every other circumstance, would have been most likely to secure their safety and survival.

  ‘I was hardly conscious of what I was doing,’ said Katsura Sato. ‘There were so many feelings. All I could do was to deal with life one piece at a time. We had lost Mizuho, my dearest girl. But we hadn’t lost anything else. My other two children were fine. Our house was untouched. People on the coast lost their families, their houses and their community. There were people who were still looking for their loved ones. They were much worse off than us. Once water and electricity returned, we got back to some kind of ordinary life.’

  Katsura was an art teacher at a high school in Ishinomaki and lived with her husband, parents-in-law and three children in Fukuji, a few hundred yards from Sayomi Shito and her family. Katsura and Sayomi’s daughters, Mizuho and Chisato, were best friends at Okawa Primary School. They were cremated on the same day. ‘Until then,’ Katsura said, ‘that was all I could concentrate on. After the cremation – well, I’m usually healthy, but I became ill. I couldn’t get up. I stayed in bed for three days. And I started thinking and thinking, and I became very suspicious about the circumstances in which we lost our daughter. I knew that this was a great natural disaster, and I assumed at the beginning that there must have been many other cases like this, other schools where the same thing happened. But why did I never hear of them?’

  In the villages along the river, as they began to catch their breath in the weeks following the disaster, other parents were asking the same question.

  Much of their suspicion focused on the actions of two men. The first of them was Junji Endo, the only teacher to have survived the tsunami, whom Hitomi Konno had seen, stunned and almost speechless, in Irikamaya in the early morning after the disaster. The second was the headmaster of the school, a man named Teruyuki Kashiba.5 By chance, Kashiba had been off work that Friday afternoon and was attending the graduation ceremony of his own daughter at another school miles inland. Whatever had gone wrong at Okawa, the testimony of these two – the only surviving adult witness to the events at the school, and its head, the man responsible for all its safety procedures – was clearly crucial. But since that first morning of dread and confusion, no one seemed to have seen or heard from Endo; and even the headmaster had been strangely elusive.

  The searchers picking through the mud were surprised not to see Kashiba at the ruins of the school. He eventually put in an appearance, six days after the tsunami, followed by a train of journalists and cameramen. Two weeks later, Katsura Sato was startled to see Kashiba’s face on the local television news, and even more amazed by the subject of the report – a ceremony at Okawa Primary School. The thirty surviving children were marking the start of the new school year, which in Japan begins in April. Okawa Primary had been reconstituted in a classroom at another school in the area. Katsura remembered clearly the words that the headmaster used in addressing the children: ‘Let’s forge a common effort to rebuild a school full of smiles, for the sake of our friends who died.’

  ‘At first the children were a bit nervous,’ Kashiba told the television interviewer. ‘But when I said these words to them, they nodded firmly.’

  School ceremonies, even for young children, are a matter of great importance in Japan, occasions of pleasure and pride for an entire family. Fifty-four families had lost children at the school; none had received notification of a ceremony in which their dead sons and daughters should have been participants. The intention was clear enough – to make some attempt at resuming normal life, and to create a place where the survivors could pick up again the business of simply being schoolchildren. But it was experienced by many of the grieving families as a punch to the stomach.

  ‘The invitations were sent out to the parents of the kids who survived,’ Katsura said. ‘I thought, “Our kids are gone, but aren’t we still Okawa parents?” We had had no explanation – no word from the school at all. This headmaster, Kashiba, turned up at the school once or twice, without even getting his hands dirty. And then we see him on television, talking about “smiles”.’

  Katsura went on, ‘It was as if they were abandoning us before the kids were even buried. That night I couldn’t sleep for anger. I said to my husband, “How can we let this happen?” And I wondered: was it just me who thought like that?’

  Explanations

  Four weeks after the tsunami, the Ishinomaki City Board of Education, supervisory authority of Okawa Primary School, convened an ‘explanatory meeting’ for families of the children who had died there. The meeting gave the impression of having been arranged hastily, in chastened response to the fusillade of anger that had been directed against the board after the mishandled opening ceremony. It was held on a Saturday evening at the inland school to which the surviving children of Okawa Primary had been relocated. Journalists were not admitted, but one of the parents made a video recording of the proceedings. It shows Kashiba, the headmaster, and five representatives of the education board seated on a row of chairs in the blue overalls which are the uniform of Japanese public officials. Opposite, with only their backs visible to the video camera, sit the parents and other relatives, ninety-seven of them all told. The room was unheated; in the film, everyone is swaddled in coats, hats and scarves.

  The meeting opened conventionally enough, with introductions by a Mr Konno, head of the secretariat of the board of education. He began with an apology: he had lost his voice, and would therefore deliver only brief opening remarks. ‘Good evening to you all,’ he croaked.1 ‘I extend my sincerest sympathies to those who fell victim to this disaster. In particular, I offer sincere prayers for those who died. This month, the children should have welcomed spring, their breasts swelling with hope. However, on the eleventh of March, the day of that huge disaster, a great tsunami snatched away in a moment the smallest pleasures of daily life. Having lost the irreplaceable, precious lives of many children and teachers, we face an unhappy spring.’

  Public meetings in Japan are blandly formulaic occasions, by and large, replete with stock phrases, and characterised by an absence of confrontation or verbal fireworks. But then Konno gave the floor to Kashiba, the headmaster, and it quickly became clear that this was not going to be an ordinary meeting.

  Grief and anger threatened the reputations of everyone connected to the school; for many people, it became impossible to look objectively on the character of Teruyuki Kashiba. He was a short, plump, grey-haired man in his late fifties, with oval spectacles and a habit of sucking in his lips at moments of stress or reflection. After a decade as deputy head in other schools, he had been appointed to Okawa the previous April. Even before the disaster, no one seemed sure quite what to make of Kashiba. After a year, not all the parents knew who he was.

  It was not his fault that he had been away from the school that afternoon; his horror and distress can only be imagined. But he made a grave error of judgement, first in taking so long to go to the site after the disaster, and then by his conduct when he did show his face. He was never forgiven for his failure to make any effort, even a token one, to help with the search for bodies. On his first visit, he answered questions from the media and took a lot of photographs with an expensive camera. On another occasion, he was seen expending anxious effort in a hunt for the school safe.

  By the time of the meeting in the school, the rage and misery of the parents had been gathering for a month. That evening they found their object in Kashiba.

  ‘Until the afternoon of the eleventh of March,’ he mumbled, when his turn came to speak, ‘there were smiles on the faces of the children, and laughter in the voices of the children, but, truly, seventy-four children, ten teachers were lost. I apologise sincerely.’

 
‘Can’t hear you!’ called a voice from the audience.

  ‘Don’t you have a mike?’ said someone else.

  Kashiba continued. ‘At the school, when I stood in front of the building, I could imagine the faces of the children. It was terrible.’

  ‘When did you go to the school?’ someone interrupted.

  ‘Yeah, when did you go?’ called another.

  ‘What day did I go?’ asked the ruffled headmaster. ‘It was the seventeenth of March.’

  ‘Our daughter died on the eleventh.’

  Kashiba bowed his head. ‘I apologise,’ he said. ‘The delay in responding, the failures – there were so many – I am truly sorry.’

  At that moment, a frisson passed through the gathered parents, as people in the room became aware of an unexpected presence – a man sitting at the far left, dressed in black. His head and shoulders were slumped forward, to the extent that it was difficult to see his face at all.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ someone called out. ‘If it isn’t Junji Endo.’

  Even those who later harboured the greatest distrust towards him admitted that, before the disaster, Endo had been a successful and popular teacher. He was a self-deprecating, bespectacled man in his late forties, third in the hierarchy of the school’s small staff. As head of teaching, he had no classroom of his own, but moved between the different year groups teaching nature and science. ‘The children were very close to him,’ Hitomi Konno told me. ‘Daisuke was a member of the nature club, and Mr Endo used to show them deer horns, and how to make fish hooks, and tell them all kinds of stories about crocodiles and piranhas. They thought he was amazing.’

  He had previously taught in the fishing village of Aikawa, seven miles up the coast. Among his responsibilities at Aikawa Primary School had been disaster preparedness. Plenty of teachers would have treated this as a routine matter, demanding nothing more than the organisation of evacuation drills and the updating of parents’ telephone numbers. But Endo went much further. The emergency manual at Aikawa stated that, in the case of a tsunami warning, pupils and staff should evacuate to the flat roof of the three-storey building. Endo judged this to be inadequate. He rewrote the plan to require escape up a steep hill2 to the Shinto shrine behind the school.

  Aikawa Primary had been built on flat ground virtually at sea level, just 200 yards from the water. When the tsunami struck here, it was more than fifty feet high and it overwhelmed the school completely. The roof was covered by the waves: anyone who had retreated there would have died. But, following the revised procedure, the teachers and children had quickly climbed the hill, and not a single one was hurt. At his old school, Junji Endo could rightly claim to have saved scores of lives.

  In different circumstances, he might have been an object of sympathy and admiration. But since the morning after the disaster, no one seemed to have heard from him. His whereabouts, and the story he had to tell, had become matters of intense speculation – and now here he was.

  ‘He saved his own life,’ someone called from the audience. ‘He’s still alive. So let him talk to us.’

  A board of education official named Shigemi Kato spoke. ‘Mr Endo himself has injuries – he suffered a dislocation and frostbite and had to go to hospital. He’s presently suffering from a serious psychological illness. Please keep this in mind as you listen to him.’

  ‘No fucking kidding,’ someone said. ‘Well, we parents are ill too.’

  With an appearance of great difficulty and distress, Endo began to speak. His head and upper body were bent almost parallel to the ground. He frequently became choked with emotion; sometimes he appeared to be on the verge of collapse.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t help. I’m so truly sorry for that.’

  The heckling ceased.

  ‘Allow me to describe what happened on that day,’ he said. ‘There may be gaps in my memory. Please forgive me if there are.’

  ‘It was a Friday,’ Endo began, ‘and lessons had just finished for the day when the shaking began. It must have been the time when the children were getting ready to go home, and they were with their teachers for the class meeting. The electricity was cut off and the tannoy didn’t work, so I ran up to the classrooms on the second floor and said to each class, ‘Get under your desks, and hold on to them.’ The children seemed scared, but the class teachers were telling them that it would all be OK. After the tremors subsided, I went back to each class in turn and told them to come out and evacuate.’

  Endo remained behind, and checked the classrooms and toilets for stragglers. By the time he emerged, the register had been taken and the children were sitting in the playground. ‘Some of them were vomiting from panic,’ Endo said, ‘and some could not stop crying. The teachers were trying to calm them down. It had begun to snow, and some of the children had escaped in bare feet. I went back in and brought jumpers and shoes, and had them put them on.’

  By now, local people from Kamaya were turning up at the school. They had fled their homes during the shaking, and asked to be allowed to shelter in the school gym. Endo explained that the broken glass there made it unsuitable. ‘While I was doing that,’ he said, ‘parents began arriving to pick up their children, and it was the deputy head, mainly, who checked off the names and handed them over.’

  A voice cried out from the audience of bereaved parents, ‘Why did you do that? If you’d just put everyone in cars and driven up a hill, they would all have been saved.’

  Endo continued without replying. ‘After that, I learned that a tsunami was on its way. Of course, one alternative was the hill. But because the shocks were so strong and it was shaking continuously, I …’

  He trailed off, then began again. It is difficult to translate what came next: the sentences were rambling and ungrammatical; the sequence of events was confused. ‘So when the tsunami hit,’ he said, ‘because we never imagined such a big tsunami coming, we discussed whether we should evacuate to the safest part of the school, the upper gallery of the gym or the second floor of the school building, and I – because the damage to the school building was so bad – I went into the school building to have a look. Various things had fallen over, but I thought that we could go back in there. I returned to the playground, but by then a move had begun to evacuate immediately.’

  The destination was the traffic island near the bridge, 400 yards away and around the corner on the main road. The children formed a column, which threaded out of the back of the school and through the car park of the Kamaya Village Hall. Endo brought up the rear.

  As he was passing through the car park, he became aware of a powerful rush of air.

  He said, ‘It was a tremendous gust of wind, and a noise like I’d never heard before. I didn’t know what was happening at first, but when I looked at the road in front of the school in the direction of the Kamaya high street, I could see an immense tsunami. It was coming down the road.’ The column of children was advancing directly into the coming wave. Endo immediately shouted, ‘The hill! The hill! This way!’ and urged the children in the opposite direction, towards the rear of the school. ‘But when I reached the hill,’ he said, ‘I was slipping on the snow and couldn’t climb, and there were children all around me.

  ‘Just as I reached the hill, two cedars collapsed. They struck me on my right arm and left shoulder, and I became trapped. I felt the tsunami wash over me, and I thought that was it, but the tree was lifted off me, perhaps by the water, and when I looked up the slope I saw a boy from the third year calling for help. I’d lost my glasses and my shoes, but I knew I had to do everything to save this child. “Go, go up!” I called. “Climb for your life!” … The noise of the water was getting closer. “Up, up!” I shouted, as I pushed him.’

  By now it had begun to snow. The boy had swallowed a lot of water, and both his clothes and the teacher’s were soaking wet. ‘I realised that it was impossible to go down,’ Endo said, ‘and that I would have to spend the night on the hill with this child.’ They found a hol
low at the foot of a tree, and sat shoulder to shoulder on a heap of pine needles. ‘But the noise of the water was still getting closer,’ Endo said. ‘And then – I don’t know if it was just a feeling – it seemed that with every aftershock there was a crunch of trees falling down. The boy said, “It’s coming! It’s still coming closer! I’m scared, I’m scared! Let’s go, let’s go higher.”’

  At the top of the hill, the ground was covered with thickening snow. Endo found that he was unable to move his arm, the one that had been struck by the tree. Propped against his teacher’s shoulder, the child nodded off, and Endo began to worry about the small sleeping body in its wet clothes. ‘It was getting dark and it was terribly cold,’ he said. ‘I thought if we stayed as we were, the child might freeze to death.’

  In the blacknesss, he could see little without his spectacles. But he supposed that, if they walked down the other side of the hill, they would eventually encounter cars and motorists on the Ogatsu road. ‘I asked the boy to be my eyes,’ Endo said, ‘and to tell me whether it was safe to go down. As we walked down step by step, I could make out headlamps on the road. We headed in that direction. We walked towards the light. And then there were people at a house, and we said, “Please help,” and they helped us.’

  They ended up at Irikamaya, where Hitomi found them. The next day, Endo was helped to the hospital in Ishinomaki; and from there he went home.

  Endo said, ‘There are moments that have slipped from my mind, but this is more or less how it was on that day.’

  He said, ‘Every single day I dream about the children playing happily in the schoolyard. I dream about the teachers and the deputy head, who were preparing so hard for the graduation ceremony which was coming up. I’m so sorry.’

  With that, his head and upper body slumped; at one point, it appeared that Endo was going to collapse onto the floor, and the members of the board of education jumped to their feet to support him. His naked distress, as raw as a wound, must have seemed to them to supply everything that they could not, with their formal politeness and their flowery clichés about swelling breasts. Who could question the abject pain of Mr Endo, and the agony of his survival? Konno, Kashiba, and the other suited officials might have hoped that this would be the end of the meeting, perhaps the beginning of the end of the whole dreadful business. There was a silence, as those present adjusted to the fact that Endo’s account was over. The meeting was poised at a moment of pivot: it might have turned either way. Then a man in the audience got to his feet.