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

  His name was Toshimitsu Sasaki. His seven-year-old boy, Tetsuma, and his nine-year-old daughter, Nagomi, had died at the school. ‘Teachers, headmaster, members of the board of education,’ he said – and the formality of this address must have raised the hope that matters would continue hereafter on a stable and predictable footing. Then he continued.

  ‘Why didn’t you come quickly to the school the next day?’ he asked Kashiba. ‘Why didn’t you come until the seventeenth? Do you know how many children are still missing now? Can you name them? Can you name the children who died? The families left behind – all of us have been going mad. There are ten of them still missing out there. Do you understand? Imagine how we feel, those parents who are still searching every day. Every day in dirty clothes. And if we don’t go there to search, we go mad.’

  Sasaki stood up in front of the table behind which the officials sat, their eyes on the ground. He was wearing a blue windcheater and brandishing something in his hand, which he waved in their downturned faces.

  ‘Just this shoe,’ he said, his voice rising. ‘That’s all we’ve found. All ruined, like this. My daughter – is this it?’ He slammed the shoe down on the table, and Konno flinched. ‘My daughter!’ he screamed. ‘Is she a shoe?’

  The meeting went on for two and a half hours. In all that time, Kashiba and the others spoke in total for no more than a few minutes. Now and then, a request for information would be formulated, and a faltering and incomplete answer given – about what tsunami warnings had been given and received, and what Kashiba had done and failed to do, and when. But most of the time was taken up by the parents, one after another, shouting, snarling, pleading, whispering and crying, with an anger directed almost exclusively towards the figure of the headmaster. On the video, he sits with his eyes on the ground. The faces of his accusers are invisible; their backs tremble as they denounce him:

  – Tricky old bastard.3

  – Fuck off, you sod!

  – I will devote my whole life to this, you bastard. I will spend my whole life avenging those children. I won’t let you hide anywhere.

  People almost never speak like this in Japan – not in public, not to teachers and government officials. It is difficult to exaggerate the violence of these interventions, and the intensity of emotion that they betrayed.

  One woman said: ‘We believed that they would come back the next day. Everyone believed that. Everyone had faith in the school. Everyone believed they must be safe, because they were at school.’

  A man said: ‘Every day I hear our son and daughter crying, screaming, “Dad, help me!” They are crying out in my dreams. They never leave my dreams.’

  Much of the torrent of words took the form of questions. ‘Did you see those swollen faces?’ a father asked. ‘They had changed so much after one month. A rotten thing. That was a human being, you know. A person. Humped up onto a truck, covered with a rag. Come and talk to us after you find your own child like that, you bastard.’

  Another asked: ‘Do you know the number of missing children in each class, Headmaster? Without looking at that piece of paper. You don’t, do you? You have to look at your piece of paper. Our kids – are they just a piece of paper? You don’t remember any of their faces, do you?’

  Their grief was unquenchable, but what they were seeking was not mysterious – and a group of more sensitive men, less oppressed by protocol and panic, could have transformed the atmosphere in the room. All the parents wanted was a reflection of their own grief, a glimmer of recognition of their loss, a sense that they were facing not a government department, but fellow human beings. As their passion rose, they abandoned the indirectness of standard Japanese and expressed themselves ever more bluntly in the slurring dialect of Tohoku. And rather than emerging to meet them, the bureaucrats retreated in the opposite direction, into ever fussier and more bloodless speech.

  Asked about the search for the missing, Konno said: ‘At present, personnel from the Japan Self-Defence Forces, central government and the police are making their best efforts to recover remains of those regrettably not found yet. Hereafter, we will continue the search beneath the detritus, and the like.’

  Pressed on a proposal to hold a joint funeral for the children, Kashiba, the head, responded: ‘By consulting with members of the board of education, and talking to bereaved family members, I suppose I think that I want to decide whether we will do this or not.’

  ‘Don’t patronise us, like bumpkins,’ someone shouted.

  ‘Is it because we are in the country that you treat us like this?’ asked another.

  ‘If we were in the city, this wouldn’t happen,’ said a third voice.

  The words came, and kept coming:

  – Headmaster, have you ever thought about the feelings of the children during that hour that they were waiting? How scared they must have been – have you thought about that? How cold they were, and their screaming for their mums and dads. And there was a hill, a hill right there!

  – You people who came to the school after the road was cleared – you don’t know anything. I was there when it was just trees, pine trees scattered all around. We didn’t know where to start. Walking through the water in boots, with that sound, squelch-squelch. You’ll never understand what it was like to walk through that water, with the squelching, and the mud getting into your boots. Even when they found their own children, mums and dads came back to look for the others. What did you look for? Fuck you. You looked for the school safe.

  – Will you come to the school, Headmaster? Will you search?

  – We’ll lend you a shovel, if you don’t have one.

  – If you haven’t got the boots, we can give you as many as you want.

  – You’ve only got nice leather shoes, haven’t you?

  – And he’s got a nice camera.

  – It took us four years to have a child …

  – Us too. We managed only after long years. And now he’s gone.

  – Can’t you do something?

  – Please return our child to us.

  – Every night, I … What … ? What can we do?

  – They were our future.

  – Please, please, return him.

  – Yes!

  – Release him!

  It was after nine o’clock by the time the meeting broke up. Kashiba looked dazed. There were plenty of people present who had not spoken, but who felt sympathy for the headmaster and had been mortified by the shouting. Now their minds were racing. Much remained unresolved – but they had, at least, finally heard from the wretched Endo, and received an account of the missing time in the playground, on which everyone had been so unbearably fixated. His account made it clear that there had been tsunami warnings, that they had been received by the teachers and acted on – even if much too late.

  The nine-year-old boy who had been with Endo on the mountain, whom he had huddled against in an effort to save him from the cold, was called Seina Yamamoto. His mother was present at the meeting and went to the teacher to thank him. While they were talking, another mother, whose son had died, also approached. She wanted to ask Endo if he remembered anything about her own boy; like many of the parents, she was avid for a last glimpse of him, just the memory of a word or two, or the look on his face. But the education officials told her that Endo was ‘unwell’, and prevented her from speaking to him. Quickly, it would become clear that much of what he had said that evening was not true at all. And after that evening, he vanished from sight.

  Ghosts

  I met a priest in northern Japan who exorcised the spirits of people who had drowned in the tsunami. The ghosts did not appear in large numbers until autumn of that year, but Reverend Kaneta’s first case of possession came to him after less than a fortnight. He was chief priest at a Zen temple in the inland town of Kurihara. The earthquake on 11 March was the most violent that he, or anyone he knew, had ever experienced. The great wooden beams of the temple’s halls had flexed and groaned with the strain. Power, water and t
elephone lines were fractured for days; deprived of electricity, people in Kurihara, thirty miles from the coast, had a dimmer idea of what was going on there than television viewers on the other side of the world. But it became clear enough when first a handful of families, and then a mass of them, began arriving at Reverend Kaneta’s temple with corpses to bury.

  More than 18,000 people had died at a stroke. In the space of a month, Reverend Kaneta performed funeral services for 200 of them. More appalling than the scale of death was the spectacle of the bereaved survivors. ‘They didn’t cry,’ Kaneta said. ‘There was no emotion at all. The loss was so profound, and death had come so suddenly. They understood the facts of their situation individually – that they had lost their homes, lost their livelihoods and lost their families. They understood each piece, but they couldn’t see it as a whole, and they couldn’t understand what they should do, or sometimes even where they were. I couldn’t really talk to them, to be honest. All I could do was stay with them, and read the sutras and conduct the ceremonies. That was the thing I could do.’

  Amid this numbness and horror, Reverend Kaneta received a visit from a man he knew, a local builder whom I will call Takeshi Ono.

  Ono was ashamed of what had happened, and didn’t want his real name to be published. It was difficult at first to understand the reason for this shame. He was a strong, stocky man in his late thirties, the kind of man most comfortable in blue overalls, with a head of youthfully dense and tousled hair. ‘He’s such an innocent person,’ Reverend Kaneta said to me. ‘He takes everything at face value. You’re from England, aren’t you? He’s like your Mr Bean.’ I wouldn’t have gone so far, because there was nothing ridiculous about Ono. But there was a dreamy ingenuousness about him, which made the story he told all the more believable.

  He had been at work on a house when the earthquake struck. He clung to the ground for as long as it lasted; even his lorry shook as if it was about to topple over. The drive home, along roads without traffic lights, was alarming, but the physical damage was remarkably slight: a few telegraph poles lolling at an angle, toppled garden walls. As the owner of a small building firm, he was perfectly equipped to deal with the practical inconveniences inflicted by the earthquake. Ono spent the next few days busying himself with camping stoves, generators and jerrycans, and paying little attention to the news.

  But once television was restored, it was impossible to be unaware of what had happened. Ono watched the endlessly replayed image of the explosive plume above the nuclear reactor, and the mobile-phone films of the black wave crunching up ports, houses, shopping centres, cars and human figures. These were places he had known all his life, fishing towns and beaches just over the hills, an hour’s drive away. And the spectacle of their destruction produced in Ono a sensation of glassy detachment, a feeling common at that time, even among those most directly stricken by displacement and bereavement.

  ‘My life had returned to normal,’ he told me. ‘I had petrol, I had an electricity generator, no one I knew was dead or hurt. I hadn’t seen the tsunami myself, not with my own eyes, so I felt as if I was in a kind of dream.’

  Ten days after the disaster, Ono, his wife and his widowed mother drove over the mountains to see for themselves.

  They left in the morning in good spirits, stopped on the way to go shopping and reached the coast in time for lunch. For most of the way, the scene was familiar: brown rice fields, villages of wood and tile, bridges over wide, slow rivers. Once they had climbed into the hills, they passed more and more emergency vehicles, not only those of the police and fire services, but green lorries of the Self-Defence Forces. As the road descended towards the coast, their jaunty mood began to evaporate. Suddenly, before they understood where they were, they had entered the tsunami zone.

  There was no advance warning, no marginal area of incremental damage. The wave had come in with full force, spent itself and stopped at a point as clearly defined as the reach of a high tide. Above it, nothing had been touched; below it, everything was changed.

  This was the point at which shame entered Ono’s narrative, and he became reluctant to describe in detail what he did or where he went. ‘I saw the rubble, I saw the sea,’ he said. ‘I saw buildings damaged by the tsunami. It wasn’t just the things themselves, but the atmosphere. It was a place I used to go so often. It was such a shock to see it. And all the police and soldiers there. It’s difficult to describe. It felt dangerous. My first thought was that this is terrible. My next feeling was, “Is it real?”’

  Ono, his wife and his mother sat down for dinner as usual that evening. He remembered that he drank two small cans of beer with the meal. Afterwards, and for no obvious reason, he began calling friends on his mobile phone. ‘I’d just ring and say, “Hi, how are you?” – that kind of thing,’ he told me. ‘It wasn’t that I had much to say. I don’t know why, but I was starting to feel very lonely.’

  His wife had already left the house when he woke the next morning. Ono had no particular work of his own, and passed an idle day at home. His mother bustled in and out, but she seemed mysteriously upset, even angry. When his wife returned from her office, she was similarly tense.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Ono asked.

  ‘I’m divorcing you!’ she replied.

  ‘Divorce? But why? Why?’

  And so his wife and mother described the events of the night before, after the round of needy phone calls. How Ono had jumped down onto all fours and begun licking the tatami mats and futon, and squirmed on them like a beast. How at first they had nervously laughed at his tomfoolery, but had been silenced when he began snarling, ‘You must die. You must die. Everyone must die. Everything must die and be lost.’ In front of the house was an unsown field, and Ono had run out into it and rolled over and over in the mud, as if he was being tumbled by a wave, shouting, ‘There, over there! They’re all over there – look!’ Then he had stood up and walked out into the field, calling, ‘I’m coming to you. I’m coming over to that side’, before his wife physically wrestled him back into the house. The writhing and bellowing went on all night until, around five in the morning, Ono cried out, ‘There’s something on top of me’, collapsed and fell asleep.

  ‘My wife and my mother were so anxious and upset,’ he said. ‘Of course, I told them how sorry I was. But I had no memory of what I did or why.’

  It went on for three nights.

  The next evening, as darkness fell, he saw figures walking past the house: parents and children, a group of young friends, a grandfather and a child. ‘The people were covered in mud,’ he said. ‘They were no more than twenty feet away, and they stared at me, but I wasn’t afraid. I just thought, “Why are they in those muddy things? Why don’t they change their clothes? Perhaps their washing machine’s broken.” They were like people I might have known once, or seen before somewhere. The scene was flickering, like a film. But I felt perfectly normal, and I thought that they were just ordinary people.’

  The next day, Ono was lethargic and inert. At night, he would lie down, sleep heavily for ten minutes, then wake up as lively and refreshed as if eight hours had passed. He staggered when he walked, glared at his wife and mother and even waved a knife. ‘Drop dead!’ he would snarl. ‘Everyone else is dead, so die!’

  After three days of pleading by his family, he went to Reverend Kaneta at the temple. ‘His eyes were dull,’ Kaneta said. ‘Like a person with depression after taking their medication. I knew at a glance that something was wrong.’ Ono recounted the visit to the coast, and his wife and mother described his behaviour in the days since. ‘The Reverend was looking hard at me as I spoke,’ Ono said, ‘and in part of my mind I was saying, “Don’t look at me like that, you bastard. I hate your guts! Why are you looking at me?”’

  Kaneta took Ono by the hand and led him, tottering, into the main hall of the temple. ‘He told me to sit down. I was not myself. I still remember that strong feeling of resistance. But part of me was also relieved – I wanted to be helped,
and to believe in the priest. The part of me that was still me wanted to be saved.’

  Kaneta beat the temple drum as he chanted the Heart Sutra:

  There are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue,1

  no body, mind; no colour, sound, or smell;

  no taste, no touch, no thing; no realm of sight,

  no realm of thoughts; no ignorance, no end

  to ignorance; no old age and no death;

  no end to age and death; no suffering,

  nor any cause of suffering, nor end

  to suffering, no path, no wisdom

  and no fulfilment.

  Ono’s wife told him later how he pressed his hands together in prayer and how, as the priest’s recitation continued, they rose high above his head as if being pulled from above.

  gone gone gone beyond

  gone altogether beyond

  O what an awakening

  – all hail!

  The priest splashed him with holy water, and then abruptly Ono returned to his senses and found himself with wet hair and shirt, filled with a sensation of tranquillity and release. ‘My head was light,’ he said. ‘In a moment, the thing that had been there had gone. I felt fine physically, but my nose was blocked as if I’d come down with a heavy cold.’

  Kaneta spoke sternly to him; both of them understood what had happened. ‘Ono told me that he’d walked along the beach in that devastated area, eating an ice cream,’ the priest said. ‘He even put up a sign in the car in the windscreen saying disaster relief, so that no one would stop him. He went there flippantly, without giving it any thought at all. I told him, “You fool. If you go to a place like that where many people have died, you must go with a feeling of respect. That’s common sense. You have suffered a kind of punishment for what you did. Something got hold of you, perhaps the dead who cannot accept yet that they are dead. They have been trying to express their regret and their resentment through you.”’ Kaneta suddenly smiled as he remembered it. ‘Mr Bean!’ he said indulgently. ‘He’s so innocent and open. That’s another reason why they were able to possess him.’