Tsunami
It was in 1666 that the local potentate, a former engineer by the name of Heitazaemon Yamazaki, ordered the wealthy merchants of what became Rikuzentakata to plant pine trees. The sturdy black pines were to be located on a one-and-a-half mile strip of sandy beach that stood between the small town and the vast Pacific Ocean. The jagged stretch of coastline in this distant and isolated northeastern part of Japan, itself in those days a remote feudal island, was then, as it is now, among the world’s richest in seafood. All along the coast, the waters were abundant in kelp and a startling variety of fish and crustaceans. But it could also be a deadly place. The salt winds and high tides were poison to the farmland. And once every generation or so – infrequently enough to push to the back of one’s mind, but not so uncommon as to forget entirely – a monstrous wave would surge in from the horizon to wreak destruction upon the town.
And so, some 350 years ago, the residents of Rikuzentakata planted trees in the hope of providing their homes and farms with some protection from the wind, the salt and the sea. In the first seven years of their endeavour, 18,000 pines were planted. Subsequent generations added to the natural barrier. The project became more urgent when the goldmines in the nearby mountains were exhausted, obliging Rikuzentakata to step up its production of rice and other crops. By the mid-eighteenth century, there were no fewer than 70,000 pines lined up like a defensive army in close formation beside the ocean. Locals strolled through the grove’s shaded pathways or took picnics by the shore. Young couples doubtless courted in its secret shadows. In more modern times, the 70,000 pines became a tourist attraction. In 1927, the year after Emperor Hirohito came to the throne, the beach was designated as one of the 100 most beautiful landscapes in all of Japan. The venerable trees stood along the white sandy beach, between the wooden houses of Rikuzentakata and the narrow cove that, together with the other steep inlets along this wild and beautiful coast, form a serrated pattern like the teeth of a hacksaw.
In yet more recent times, in 1989 to be exact, the year of Emperor Hirohito’s death, a building went up just behind the beach. At seven storeys tall, built of little white bricks and boasting a spiral staircase to match the one on the Titanic’s first-class deck, the Capital Hotel was the tallest – and certainly the grandest – structure in town. In the lobby was hung a large painting depicting young children playing, carefree, by the beach. Glass doors led out to an oval-shaped swimming pool on the veranda. There was even a special retreat for the use of young brides as they changed for the wedding ceremonies that were held in the hotel’s sumptuous surroundings. The room’s location was such that, as the young women prepared for their nuptials, they were afforded a perfect view of Rikuzentakata’s celebrated pines.
The Capital Hotel had been built with money made during the go-go years of the 1980s bubble era, a time of legendary excess. When the bubble burst, the hotel was taken over by the local municipality, as were so many bubble-era follies. The principal investors had been the president of a construction company and a local singer of tear-filled enka ballads, both of whom had wanted to put something back into the local economy. And the Capital Hotel was certainly something. In the rugged town of 23,000 people, its white-painted façade and beachside location made it the natural place for locals to hold their celebrations, their trade association dinners and their funerals. As Kazuyoshi Sasaki, the hotel’s sales manager, said, ‘For a small town in the countryside, this really was a beautiful hotel.’
Sasaki was stockily built for a Japanese man, with a pleasant round face and a self-deprecating sense of humour. Even when he was talking about the gravest of matters, there was always the faintest flicker of a smile on his lips. Now in his late fifties, he was born in Rikuzentakata, as were his parents and their parents and their parents before that. Indeed, it was in 1734, when Japan was almost completely shut off from the outside world, that Sasaki’s ancestors had established a small business to extract tea-seed oil from camellias. Their shop was called Aburaya. Over the years, the business grew to become a general food manufacturer and wholesale distributor, passed down from generation to generation into the nineteenth, twentieth and, finally, into the twenty-first century. In 2006, after more than 270 years in business, Aburaya went bust, brought low as Rikuzentakata’s population dwindled and amid stiff competition from bigger, slicker outlets. Sasaki’s first impulse was to flee the town, unable to stand the shame, as he saw it, of having let down his employees and his ancestors. But the company needed to be wound up in orderly fashion. And so he and his wife stayed on in Rikuzentakata, and Sasaki found another job – at the Capital Hotel.
On the morning of 11 March 2011, a Friday, Sasaki had gone on behalf of the hotel to pay his last respects to Yukio Shimizu, a city council member who had just passed away. Many people had gathered for the vigil in which friends and relatives bid farewell to the deceased so that the soul can more readily make its journey to yomi no kuni, the other world. Mourners burn incense and stay up through the night, chanting prayers to keep the deceased company. Sasaki had gone to the house to discuss the final seating arrangements for the Buddhist funeral service that was to take place at the Capital Hotel on the following day. The house where Shimizu’s vigil was held was on higher ground in the hills above the flat valley floor in which the town of Rikuzentakata was spread out. Sasaki would later note the irony. ‘If they hadn’t been at the wake,’ he said, with a half smile, ‘many of those people would likely have died.’
Sasaki himself did not stay long at the house. Instead, in the early afternoon, he returned to the Capital Hotel, where he entered his office at 2.46 p.m. He recalls the time exactly, to the minute in fact. For it was at precisely that moment that the ground started shaking.
• • •
The Japanese have long been accustomed to earthquakes. In years gone by, they blamed these periodic events on Onamazu, a giant catfish on whose back the Japanese islands were said to rest. Usually, the catfish was pinned beneath the mud by a mammoth slab of rock held in place by the powerful Shinto god of the earth, Kashima. But when Kashima let down his guard, Onamazu would twist free and thrash about, causing the earth to heave and shake.1 Within days of the Great Ansei Earthquake of 1854, which caused damage from Kyushu to Tokyo, woodblock prints of catfish went on sale in the capital. The Japanese also live with constant reminders of the tsunamis that frequently follow large earthquakes. The monumental bronze Buddha at Kamakura sits open to the elements, the hall in which it was once housed washed away by a giant wave in 1498. Japan’s coastline is dotted with gnarled stone tablets, the size of mini-tombstones, warning future generations to build their houses further from the shore. Lafcadio Hearn, an Irish-Greek who spent fifteen years in Japan in the late nineteenth century, described it as ‘a land of impermanence [where] rivers shift their courses, coasts their outline, plains their level’.2 One Japanese seismologist calculated that, since the fifth century, the archipelago had been subjected to some 220 earthquakes of catastrophic force.3 In modern times, the Japanese learned that the islands on which their ancestors had settled are, in fact, located on the most unstable section of the earth’s crust, at a confluence of several tectonic plates along what is termed the Pacific Ring of Fire. Nine out of every ten earthquakes occur along this volatile section of Earth, making Japan the single most vulnerable nation to such disasters. On most days of the year, some part of Japan suffers a minor tremor. So used are people to these distractions that short earthquakes, even if they set wooden screen doors rattling or light shades swinging, barely elicit a pause in conversation.
But the earthquake at 2.46 p.m. on 11 March was no minor tremor. Everyone who felt the ground turn to liquid on that afternoon knew instantly that this was something entirely out of the ordinary. Measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, it was the fourth most powerful earthquake in recorded history, unleashing the energy equivalent of some 600 million Hiroshima bombs. The epicentre was beneath the seabed, about forty-five miles off the northeast coast of Japan, somewhat to the south of Rikuzentakata. Geologists later said the so-called undersea megathrust earthquake – the sort that happens at the boundary of tectonic plates – had occurred where the Pacific plate had been pushing under the North American plate on which Japan rests.4 That slab of the earth’s crust had been pushed upwards as if, as one commentator put it, a playing card were being squeezed between thumb and forefinger.5 When it bent too far, it suddenly released the pent-up tension, forcing the North American plate to snap back. In an instant, parts of the Japanese archipelago shifted as much as thirteen feet to the east.
This sudden rupture had occurred some twenty miles beneath the seabed, a relatively shallow depth that meant much of the energy was released to the surface. Throughout a large part of Japan, the earthquake went on for a time-stopping six minutes. Many later recounted how the earth’s movement seemed to build in intensity even as they prayed for it to stop. In Tokyo, the modern skyscrapers, many built on rubberized or fluid-filled foundations, lurched towards each other like bamboo in the wind. So violent was the swinging that, in the midst of their terror, some office workers felt as sick as if they had been on a boat in the heaving ocean. In Rikuzentakata, far nearer the epicentre, the shaking was more violent still. One witness described the accompanying sound as being like thunder.6 When the hellish shuddering finally stopped, there was only one thought in most people’s minds: tsunami.
Sasaki, still clutching the papers relating to Shimizu’s funeral, clambered up the staircase towards the roof of the Capital Hotel, three floors higher than the next tallest building in town. The lights of the hotel had gone out, as they had across all of Rikuzentakata, and the stairwell was dark as he and some thirty hotel employees fumbled upwards. From the roof, they looked out. Despite the intensity of the earthquake, there did not appear to be extensive damage to the buildings. Out at sea, the water looked flat and calm, though a tsunami-warning siren was already sounding. A few minutes later, the hotel manager announced that a bus was waiting below to evacuate staff. At around 3 p.m., after hotel employees had checked to see that no one was left in the building, the bus departed. The road directly in front of the hotel was blocked with cars trying to escape. The gate at the level-crossing a few blocks inland was down, causing traffic to back up behind it. So the bus took an alternative, longer route, skirting the coastline for a few minutes before heading inland towards the hills that ringed the cove. By 3.08 p.m., all the staff of the Capital Hotel, Sasaki included, had reached safety.
Far out to sea, where the earth’s crust had jolted upwards, a great swell of water set off on what would be a journey of annihilation. When, many hours later, it reached Sulzberger Ice Shelf some 8,000 miles to the south in Antarctica, the force would break off chunks of ice as large as Manhattan island.7 Long before that, the surging tide had wreaked terrible destruction along more than 250 miles of Japan’s northeastern coastline. Travelling initially at 500 miles an hour, the speed of a jet airliner, the wave slowed as it neared the shoreline, first to the speed of a bullet train and then to that of a car. Soon after 3.20 p.m., a little more than thirty minutes after the first tremors struck, it surged into the bay on which Rikuzentakata sits.
We have an image of a tsunami from the magnificent woodblock prints of Hokusai as a great, arched wave, curling its watery fingers over the land. Real tsunamis are more prosaic, but more dreadful. At sea, the height of the wave is nothing special, though a tsunami can be hundreds of miles long. They travel, often unnoticed by passing ships, as a forceful swell, gathering to great heights only as they approach land. Nor do tsunamis come as a single wave. Rather than through their initial impact, they often cause most damage as they suck back out to sea before thundering towards the shoreline in even greater volume. In Rikuzentakata, it was only a matter of minutes before the swell had breached the sea wall, built at what town planners had imagined was an impregnable height of twenty feet. Once the water had spilled over the concrete slabs, knocking parts of the wall over with its mighty force, the town lay before it. Water spilled into Rikuzentakata at different points, surging up the central riverbed and rushing up the valley floor until land and sea became indistinguishable. The only thing to do was flee.
From ground level, the first thing most people saw of the tsunami was a ghostly dust, rising from buildings that were collapsing in the water’s path. The eerie white powder floated ahead of the wave like some terrible omen of death. It was accompanied by a crunching and wrenching of collapsing buildings, some of which were torn whole from their foundations and transformed into violent projectiles, smashing all in their path. Those who could fathom what was happening and had the wherewithal to escape drove or ran towards the hills as the water made its relentless surge up the valley floor. Many of those who died were too old to move, though many younger citizens of Rikuzentakata perished trying to help their older relatives and neighbours to escape. There were also some, within easy reach of safety, who didn’t see the need to evacuate, so far were they from the shoreline. ‘They stayed in their houses when they could so easily have made it to higher ground,’ Sasaki said. The tsunami, according to witnesses, took just minutes to sweep across the entire valley, a distance of some three miles. ‘The whole city just disappeared in four minutes,’ Sasaki recalled, still shocked at the recollection. ‘If you actually saw the tsunami, for you, basically, it was too late.’
Photographs taken by a high-school girl in Rikuzentakata document the first minutes of destruction. Early frames show water moving up the river that runs through the town. The river in the picture is swollen, but looks less than capable of causing widespread destruction. A few frames later, the water is wilder and about to wash away a small bridge. Before the first tidal surge could recede, another wave sloshed over the tsunami wall, increasing the volume of water. It was later reckoned the wave reached forty feet as it raced up the valley. By now, the photos show uprooted wooden houses, their tiled roofs still intact, carried up the valley as if in a stream of molten lava. An entire Mos Burger restaurant, Japan’s equivalent of McDonald’s, floats across the valley like some unmoored boat, its red roof and ‘M’ logo distinctly visible as it sweeps towards the hospital. By the time it gets there, it has been ripped in two. Now the water looks like raging mud. Another set of photographs, these taken by a volunteer fireman who had clambered to the top of an antenna, shows what looks like the high seas during stormy weather. The only clue that this is land is the incongruous sight of the town clock peeking out from the boiling waves.
As water churned back and forth, in and out of the cove, it dragged with it the deadly debris it had collected, hurling boats and houses and cars and factories and nails and glass at everything – and everyone – in its path. Neither wood nor concrete, nor bones nor teeth, were spared these waterlogged missiles. Whole tree stumps and mangled steel beams crashed through the third-floor windows of the Maiya shopping centre. At the public hospital, scenes of horror were unfolding. Water rushed into the fourth-floor ward, where many elderly patients lay immobile. They floated up on their mattresses on the rising water. Some were dragged to safety on the roof. Others drowned where they were in their beds. The survivors, sopping wet, were wrapped by staff in black bin-liners to protect them from the near-zero temperatures. Most spent the night on the rooftop. In the dark, the waters raged about them.8
Similar desperate struggles for survival were playing out all over town. At the city hall, government employees scrambled to the fourth-floor roof. From there, they scanned the ocean with binoculars and saw the first wave slop over the tsunami defence wall. Within a matter of minutes, the water was all around them, lapping over the top of the roof itself. Those who could, hauled themselves and others onto an elevated section of the roof, just out of the water’s reach. From there, Futoshi Toba, the town mayor who would later achieve national fame, stared out at the elementary school where his two children were studying. ‘I knew my children were at the school and that the teachers were looking after them,’ he said.9 He was more anxious about his wife. She had most likely been at home when the earthquake struck and, from his rooftop vantage point, Toba could see that his house had been inundated. All the phone lines were down. There was no way of checking on her safety until the following morning when the water had receded. Toba felt torn between his duties as a government official and those of a father and husband. ‘I am also a human being,’ he said later. ‘And worry is worry.’ In the event, his children survived. At Takata Elementary School, his son, twelve-year-old Taiga, had been told by a teacher to make a run for it. Later the boy told a reporter, ‘It was like Godzilla. You could see the wave coming towards you, knocking down the houses. It was quite slow, but very powerful.’10 Taiga’s mother, the mayor’s wife, was less fortunate. She was one of the more than 1,900 people washed away that terrible day.
Across town at Takata High School, the swimming team was missing. Before the earthquake struck, the ten or so members had set off on a half-mile walk to their practice at the city’s brand-new indoor swimming pool. The B&G swimming centre bore a sign reading: ‘If your heart is with the water, it is the medicine for peace and health and long life.’ Neither the team, nor their young female coach, were seen again.11
More than seventy people had taken refuge in the gymnasium, one of several official evacuation centres. The experts who had produced tsunami hazard maps had judged the building beyond the reach of even the hugest wave. When people heard the first wave had breached the defence wall, they rushed up to the gymnasium’s second-floor seating, where spectators from the town had, over the years, watched countless basketball matches and taiko drumming competitions. Water rushed into the building, where it became trapped, swirling around the domed interior as if in a washing machine. Sasaki later used the Japanese words ‘guru, guru, guru’ to describe the sound. Terrified people tried to clamber onto the metal girders arching along the gymnasium’s roof. A few managed to hang on, but altogether sixty-seven perished there that night. The clock high above the second-floor seats stopped at 3.30 p.m., marking the moment when water neared the ceiling. At some point, the tidal force became such that it broke through the gymnasium’s back wall and spilled out to continue its destructive journey. Locals call the ghastly, gaping hole it left in the gutted building the ‘devil’s mouth’.12
As these terrible scenes were playing out, Sasaki was watching the inundation from his hillside vantage point. He too was frantic about the fate of his wife, 57-year-old Miwako. With mobile networks down, he couldn’t reach her by phone. He watched awestruck as water poured over the defence wall. The ghostly smoke rose as buildings crumpled under the tidal force, sending powdery debris into the air. It was then that he witnessed something he had thought he would never see. The pine forest of 70,000 trees gradually disappeared before his eyes as waves knocked down the towering trunks like so many matchsticks. It was a sight as unlikely as the marching forests of Dunsinane in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. ‘I was dazed and couldn’t really understand what was happening,’ Sasaki recalled.13
His wife must have been making her rounds delivering soba noodles when the earth started shaking. By the time the tsunami siren sounded, she would have been trying to drive back to the family home, about a mile-and-a-half from the shoreline. She didn’t make it. A firefighter, one of the first emergency workers to enter the city, described the scene he encountered. ‘People in the high places were crying, in shock, with their mouths hanging open. Along the river, we found no one alive, not a person.’14
By the time those few minutes were over, virtually the entire town of Rikuzentakata had been annihilated. There is no other word for it. Nearly one in ten of its population was dead or missing. Four-fifths of the buildings had been turned to matchsticks. Even the town’s few sturdy concrete structures, including the Capital Hotel, were gutted, as debris-carrying water smashed through their interiors. As Sasaki had witnessed with his own disbelieving eyes, the 70,000 pines that had symbolized the town for hundreds of years had vanished in a few instants, swallowed by the raging flood. Even the beach on which they had stood was churned up and partially washed away. The very topography of the town had been altered, its coastline ripped and torn. Some of the land along the shoreline had sunk by nearly three feet.15 Nothing was as it had been. Except, that is, for one thing. Almost miraculously, a single, straight pine stood, its 100-foot-high trunk – surrounded by shorn-off stumps – defiantly pointing skywards. The people of Rikuzentakata, those who survived that is, called it simply the Lone Pine.