Bending Adversity
As the near-empty aeroplane slid through the piercing blue towards Tokyo’s Haneda airport, I craned my neck to take in the scene below. In my mind’s eye, Japan was no longer a solid island rooted to the earth’s crust. Instead, it was a deeply unstable chunk of land erupting with orange flames and atomic explosions, a thin layer of earth floating on a boiling sea. But from this height at least, the runway looked perfectly normal and the land perfectly affixed. It was a beautifully clear afternoon. Around 150 miles to the north of Tokyo was the crippled nuclear plant at Fukushima, where the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl was unfolding. About 100 miles north of that lay Rikuzentakata. Tokyo had escaped the tsunami altogether. Yet the megalopolis of some 36 million people was still being thrown about by mammoth aftershocks, at magnitude 6.0 or above, big enough to cause huge damage in less well-constructed cities. The date was 15 March.
On the day of the earthquake itself, I had been working in Beijing. A couple of people I met that day swore they felt the earth tremble even there, 1,300 miles away. Yet when I received a call from a colleague telling me there had been some kind of earthquake off Japan’s northeast coast, my first reaction was ‘no big deal’. I no longer lived in Japan, but during my time there I had become inured to earthquakes, having felt many come and go with little consequence. Only when my phone vibrated again and I was told that a massive tsunami was heading for the Japanese coast did I rush back to my Beijing hotel to find out what was going on.
On the hotel TV I watched disbelievingly the footage that has now become so familiar. Few, if any, natural disasters of such magnitude can have been relayed live on television. When I first saw pictures of soupy water, thick with what appeared to be toy cars and matchsticks, I couldn’t work out what I was seeing. Subsequent images revealed molten water choked with flaming houses sliding up the beach; whole ships crashing into buildings or caught in whirlpools out at sea; an airport runway disappearing under a blanket of water. One television channel showed before-and-after aerial shots of a town in Iwate prefecture, Minamisanriku. In the first shot the town was there. In the second it just wasn’t. Most frightening of all were the images of an explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, sending shreds of concrete wall high up into the air. A subsequent explosion was accompanied by a fireball and a plume of smoke.
But the two video images that stuck with me longest were on a smaller scale altogether. One showed supermarket staff at the moment the earthquake started. Instead of rushing for cover, employees ran to the shelves as they writhed and wobbled. Using their hands, arms and even bodies, the neatly uniformed staff tried to prevent bottles of soy sauce, cartons of orange juice and packets of noodles and miso soup from toppling to the floor. Mostly their efforts were in vain, but the dedication of Japanese to their work, it seemed, held good even in moments of extreme danger. In the second clip, a television crew had found a young woman walking in a daze around a field. She had been out riding, yet there was no horse to be seen. The landscape had become a wilderness without distinguishing features, save for a few mangled trees. Still wearing riding breeches and a tight-fitting riding top, the woman stared at the nothingness around her. ‘The things that are supposed to be here are not here,’ she said as if speaking to herself.
In the following few days, as the story clarified, the scale of what had happened became apparent. The quake had been so powerful that the earth was knocked slightly off its axis, altering its spin and shortening the length of the day, if only by 1.8 millionths of a second. The death toll was still officially in the hundreds, but tens of thousands were missing. Perhaps half a million more had been evacuated. The Fukushima nuclear plant appeared to be out of control. Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), the operator, denied there had been a meltdown, but the company had decided to flood the reactors with seawater in what seemed like a desperate attempt to bring the situation under control. The government said radiation spewing from the plant was 1,000 times its normal level and ordered a two-mile evacuation zone around the site. That quickly widened to six miles, then twelve. People just outside the zone were warned to stay indoors.
Before I flew to Tokyo, I had tried calling Japanese friends. Some had fled to other parts of Japan, away from the jolting, unnerving aftershocks and the spreading fear of radiation. Those who remained were clearly shaken, their voices strained, even fearful, over the phone. One employee of a trading house told me the people from Tepco were doing their best. ‘I have heard the French are telling everybody to evacuate. I don’t think you should come,’ he said. I’d contacted another friend, an adventurer and photographer called Toshiki Senoue, to ask if he would be prepared to travel north with me to the disaster zone. He replied by email that he might be willing to go. But please, he asked, could I bring a Geiger counter.
• • •
Tokyo was profoundly changed. It was also the same. At Haneda’s stylish new international terminal, the escalators and moving walkways had been halted to save electricity, but an announcement still trilled in the high falsetto used on public address systems, exhorting passengers to hold on tightly to the moving handrail. My taxi driver was wearing the familiar white gloves and bowed as I approached the car. Across the back seat was spread the usual white cloth doily. Once I was seated, the door glided shut on its own. As we drove noiselessly away, the driver explained there had just been yet another big aftershock. The streets were virtually empty as we slid through a picture-perfect Tokyo. The sky, on this crisp spring day, was a lovely powder blue.
At my old office building, a black-glass skyscraper on Uchisaiwaicho, not far from the moat and monumental stone walls of the Imperial Palace, the lobby was dark and deserted. The Starbucks was closed. The shelves of the in-lobby convenience store, usually crammed with rice balls, bento lunch boxes, dried octopus snacks, cream buns and rows of green tea cartons, had been picked bare. In the bathroom, the hand driers were switched off, covered with a paper sign reading setsuden – ‘energy saving’. The toilet seats were still heated (some little luxuries you cannot do without). Yet in the next weeks, as the gravity of the post-nuclear-accident energy shortage became clear, even this most Japanese of basics was sacrificed. This was setsuden Tokyo, low-wattage Tokyo.
In the Financial Times bureau on the twenty-first floor, I found Mitsuko Matsutani, the loyal office manager, and Nobuko Juji, the long-serving secretary, still visibly shaken. They described how, on the day of the earthquake, the skyscrapers had careered towards one another, as they lurched from side to side. They had run downstairs, all twenty-one flights, and gathered in Hibiya Park, a European-style garden opposite. When a massive aftershock struck, they thought the tower block would surely topple. Now, a few days later, their work commutes were difficult. Trains that normally ran to the minute, if not the second, were subject to lengthy delays. Besides, it was frightening to venture underground with the earth still shaking. There were rumours of rolling blackouts to come and still worse disruptions to the transport system. Authorities had warned that another massive quake was likely within days. Perhaps this would be the ‘Big One’ for which Tokyo had long been braced. When I left the office for my first appointment with an old acquaintance, Kaoru Yosano, the 72-year-old minister of economic and fiscal policy, Matsutani handed me a hard hat. I didn’t know whether she was joking or not.
At the old ministry building, a brick construction of utilitarian style, the mood was just as subdued. Two receptionists sat huddled under blankets to keep their knees warm. The heating, along with most of the lighting, had been turned off. Yosano, who usually wore a well-tailored suit, arrived in a blue boiler jacket and long rubber boots. That was now the official uniform of the cabinet, which had adopted the attire and demeanour of wartime. Naoto Kan, the prime minister, had warned that this was Japan’s worst crisis since the Second World War: ‘Whether we Japanese can overcome this crisis depends on each of us.’
Yosano slowly removed his boots and flexed his feet. His office was large but short on pomp. When I asked him if this disaster could galvanize the nation, he looked at me in silence before making a small, defiant fist. The minister answered questions about the extent of the damage and the likely economic impact. Since the ministry’s offices were said to be particularly vulnerable to earthquakes, each time there was a tremor – and there was more than one during our hour-long encounter – his staff looked anxiously at the creaking ceiling and the swaying fixtures. Yosano, who had recently recovered from throat cancer, used the lull in the conversation to light up another cigarette.
I didn’t know it then, but at virtually the same time, Emperor Akihito, the 77-year-old monarch, was making a televised address to the nation. It was the first such broadcast of his twenty-two-year reign. His father, Hirohito, had famously made a declaration, spoken in hard-to-fathom imperial language, on 15 August 1945. In a voice unfamiliar to his subjects, who considered him a living god and had never heard him speak, Emperor Hirohito had told his subjects of Japan’s unconditional surrender, though he never used the word. The war ‘had not necessarily developed to Japan’s advantage’, he said in his archaic, roundabout Japanese. The people should prepare to ‘endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable’. That statement had been prompted by two nuclear bombs, which had made Japan’s surrender, and subsequent occupation, inevitable. More than six decades later, his son was confronting both a natural disaster and a nuclear one in similarly sombre tones. Dressed in a dark suit with black tie and seated before a wood-and-paper screen, Akihito spoke for six minutes. Coincidentally or not, that was the length of time the earth had shaken. ‘The number of people killed is increasing day by day and we do not know how many people have fallen victim,’ he said. ‘I pray for the safety of as many people as possible. People are being forced to evacuate in such severe conditions of bitter cold, with shortages of water and fuel.’ As to the gathering nuclear catastrophe, he professed deep concern. ‘I sincerely hope that we can keep the situation from getting worse,’ he offered.1
The situation behind the scenes was even more desperate than the emperor had let on. That morning, while my plane was still in the air, there had been a hydrogen explosion at the Fukushima plant, the third blast in as many days. Kan, the prime minister, a former social activist, marched into Tokyo Electric’s headquarters in central Tokyo. An investigation into the nuclear crisis later concluded that Kan had reacted with fury at suggestions by Tokyo Electric that it might abandon the plant altogether.2 In an angry confrontation with the company’s president, Masataka Shimizu, the prime minister demanded ‘what the hell is going on?’ So dangerous was the situation that Kan began to discuss a worst-case scenario with his cabinet. If Fukushima Daiichi were abandoned, the plant might spiral out of control, forcing the evacuation of nearby plants and risking further meltdowns. Yukio Edano, the down-to-earth-looking chief cabinet secretary whose regular television appearances made him the face of the crisis, privately warned his colleagues of a ‘demonic chain reaction’ that might force the evacuation of the capital. ‘We would lose Fukushima Daini, then we would lose Tokai,’ he said, referring to two other plants. ‘If that happened, it was only logical to conclude that we would lose Tokyo itself.’3
There was certainly a sense of buttoned-down fear in Tokyo, though no one at that point knew anything about the panicked deliberations going on inside the cabinet. Later there were rumours that some people with close government connections had quietly been tipped off to slip out of the city. Tokyo at night was stranger still than in the day. It was, as a colleague of mine wrote, like a city ‘operating on the lowest dimmer setting’.4 Of all the cities in the world, Tokyo in normal times burns perhaps the brightest. The fashionable avenues of the Ginza and the teeming streets of Shibuya, Ikebukuro, Shinjuku and Akasaka are a blaze of neon. The roads are jammed with yellow, green and red cabs, the pavements clogged with swaying salarymen, office ladies and dolled-up bar hostesses in evening gowns. Now, they were shadowy and deserted. The sushi bars, tonkatsu pork cutlet outlets, the high-end and low-end restaurants, the holes in the wall, the noodle shops, the izakaya pubs, the clubs, the jazz bars, the karaoke lounges and the drinking establishments of this, the most bedazzling of night-time cities – all had closed up the shutters by eight or nine o’clock. This in a city that usually thrums until two or three in the morning. But in setsuden Tokyo, a few days after the quake, people hurried nervously home before the power failed or the trains stopped running. In one less than brightly lit subway carriage I spotted a man wearing a miner’s hat, with torch attached, the better to read his newspaper. Even the lights of Tokyo Tower, an Eiffel Tower lookalike that is a symbol of the city, were turned off. The antenna at the top, it was said, had been bent by the earthquake.
That night, I telephoned an old friend, Shijuro Ogata. He is a charming man with impeccable English and a lively, liberal mind. Though he was once deputy governor for international relations at the Bank of Japan, a job of not inconsiderable prestige, he has none of the pomposity that sometimes attaches itself to important men in Japan. On the phone, Ogata was his usual cheerful self. He was fine, he said. He had hardly left the house since the earthquake, only venturing out to pick up a few essential supplies from the neighbourhood shops. He had been impressed with the stoicism of his fellow Japanese, many of whom had battled to get to work on time in spite of the chaotic train system and fears of a second earthquake. Where he lived there had been very little hoarding, he said. People had restricted themselves to one carton of milk, one packet of tofu.
Ogata was less thrilled with the officials at Tepco, who, he believed, had little handle on the nuclear crisis and appalling communication skills. ‘They are very clumsy and don’t seem to be so knowledgeable about what’s going on,’ he remarked in his understated way. But overall, he thought Japan would pull through its latest crisis. ‘My wish is this,’ he said. ‘I am hoping this may awaken the Japanese spirit, which was demonstrated after the war to rebuild Japan.’ Then he used a Japanese saying that I had never heard before: wazawai wo tenjite fuku to nasu. After I put the phone down, I looked it up. The dictionary rendered it, rather prosaically to my mind, as ‘make the best of a bad bargain’. I thought about it and settled on a more literal translation – ‘bend adversity and turn it into happiness’.
• • •
I had been here before. Except that no one had been here before. Four years earlier, almost to the day, I had come to this little fishing town of Ofunato on Japan’s northeast coast about 250 miles north of Tokyo. Tohoku is Japanese for ‘northeast’ and that is what people call the region where the tsunami struck. Back then, I had come to research a story about how mackerel, amberjack, blue-fin tuna, spear squid and dozens of other types of seafood are brought from these teeming fishing grounds to sushi counters and supermarket freezers around the country. Early one morning – very early one morning as I recall – I went out on a boat with one of the crews. We had left in the dark and returned to port after several bitterly cold hours of fishing. We drank homemade liquor together in the boat’s cramped mess and slurped down fish stew as we steamed through the darkness to the fishing grounds. I ate a piece of grilled meat that turned out to be dolphin. We watched the huge nets go down empty and come up alive with a silvery thrashing. It was a memorable experience and an insight into the salt-bitten lives of the men who catch fish for their urban countrymen. Now I had come again. Except the fishing boats had gone. And Ofunato was no longer there.
In the days after the quake, there was no easy way of getting to Ofunato – or rather the place where Ofunato had once been. Sections of the roads leading north from Tokyo were virtually impassable. The airport at Sendai, the biggest city in the north, was flattened and buried in mud by the tsunami. Flights to other airports in the three most affected prefectures – Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate, where I was headed – were fully booked with volunteers and rescue workers bringing supplies. In the end I flew to Akita, a northern city on the opposite, Sea of Japan, coast about 100 miles from Ofunato. There, I met Toshiki, my photographer friend, for the drive down. Toshiki had studied in America and had a wild side to him. He was taller, more rugged and more unkempt than the average Japanese man, certainly those who put on suits and work for its big companies. He loved motorbikes and cars and sleeping in the wilderness. Still, he had needed some convincing to head into the disaster zone. We were to leave the following morning. The first thing I had to tell him was that I didn’t have a Geiger counter.
That night, I watched television in my perfectly arranged, but coffin-sized hotel room. On one channel a woman was reading a never-ending list of names, of those missing and those found, in a slow, respectful monotone. After each name, read out with the family name first in the Japanese style, the announcer added the respect term san: ‘Sato Yoshie-san, Takahashi Michiko-san, Suzuki Mitsuko-san’. The Chinese characters that the Japanese use can be read in different ways and it is not always obvious how to pronounce unfamiliar names. (Yuko, a common first name, can, for example, also be pronounced Hiroko.) So sometimes the announcer was obliged to offer alternative versions of the names of people feared dead or missing. ‘Kawano or Kono-san,’ she said. ‘Kiyonari or Kiyoshige-san.’ Not only were people missing. Their very names were losing substance.
I switched channel. Tokyo firemen in orange outfits were saluting before being sent in to douse the smouldering Fukushima nuclear reactor with their tiny hoses. As they marched unhesitatingly towards the plant, still gushing radiation, I thought of the kamikaze pilots sent on doomed missions in the final months of war. Another channel had turned a variety show into a fundraiser. Doraemon, a blue-and-white cat-like creature with capacious pockets from which he extracted useful and whimsical items, had been recruited to the cause. He was urging viewers to send in money. After an hour or so, I switched back to the original channel. The woman was still reading out the names of people in her respectful monotone. ‘Ono Megumi-san, Uchiyama Tomoe-san, Uchiyama Mitsuo-san.’
The next morning we set out for Ofunato. We loaded the car with food and water since both were said to be scarce on the tsunami-afflicted coast. We needed a few extra provisions, Toshiki said, including protective boots for clambering over the rubble. The hardware store had posted a sign on its automatic doors specifying all the unavailable items, sold out due to panic buying. It was not a short list: fuel containers, batteries, radios, flashlights, portable heaters, gas canisters, mobile phone chargers, water, tea. Toshiki said that the disaster had revealed what was elemental: ‘Water, fire, communication.’
The drive to Ofunato was uneventful. The roads were virtually empty. We had managed to wangle an emergency pass and only cars like ours were allowed to buy petrol. Tolls were waived. The landscape was mountainous, with trees stretching to the horizon. Snowy fields, small hamlets, fir trees, a tin-metal sky. We passed occasional convenience stores, most with their lights dimmed and signs proclaiming: ‘We have boxed lunches.’ They didn’t appear to have much else. Just a few miles from the coast we passed the Maruhan Pachinko Parlour, the sort of place where the Japanese play noisy arcade games involving streams of metal balls. Toshiki shook his head at the sight of the car park full of vehicles. So near to tragedy, the people inside were in a sea of cigarette smoke and clanging machines. A few minutes later we rounded the corner and entered the valley that was once Ofunato.
• • •
For those who haven’t seen it with their own eyes, it is practically impossible to imagine the devastation left behind by a tsunami. A colleague of mine described it as like walking into a photograph of Hiroshima after the nuclear bomb. I wrote in my notebook that it was as if the man-made world had vomited up its innards. The things that were usually hidden – piping, electric cables, mattress stuffing, metal girders, underwear, electricity generators, wiring – were suddenly on full display, like secrets expelled from the intestines of modern living. Amid the shreds of wooden houses, twisted steel and old soy sauce bottles, one of the first things I noticed was a deer on its back, its glazed eyes staring up blankly at the sky. Next to it were a stoat, its snarl fixed in death, an eagle, an owl, a peacock and a second deer. It took me some time to realize what I was looking at. This must have been someone’s taxidermy collection. The hooves of the deer and the other animals were attached to a green baize board.
These were the things that were not meant to be here. Those that were – houses, streets, shops, factories – had mostly vanished. Even solid concrete buildings were reduced to frames, doll houses with their walls ripped off by an explosive force, their shredded contents flapping like paper in the wind. Then there were the mangled cars, perched in trees, or on their side, or on their back or even, by some fluke, the right way up. A coil of green mesh sat on top of a collapsing balcony, like some metal python surveying hell. There was an oil truck, nose down in the ground as if flung from the sky. Scattered in the mud was a collection of salacious magazines showing half-naked women emerging from the shower. There were dead fish washed far inland. The smell of sea salt hung on the frigid wind.
Suddenly, amid the rubble, I spied two tiny figures, picking their way along a twisted train track, bound uncertainly for a train station that was no longer there. There was something faintly shocking about seeing life stirring on the dead valley floor. I thought of The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s novel about a father and son moving their way through a charred, post-nuclear landscape. As the figures drew nearer, I saw that one woman was carrying a red cane. She wore a blue woollen hat and scarf, a sweater, jeans and a pink backpack. Her cheeks were red from the bitter cold. Her companion was younger and slimmer. She was wearing spectacles and her mouth was covered with a white facemask. She was also carrying a backpack. The two were staring intently at the ground as they inched along, occasionally raking the rubble with the cane or stooping to examine something more closely.
I approached and asked what they were doing. I felt as though I had encountered fellow travellers in the desert. They bowed slightly, their politeness out of place in these surreal surroundings. Hiromi Shimodate, the red-cheeked lady, explained they were searching for possessions, something from the café she and her friend ran together. ‘We are looking for anything of ours. Just something, a chair, anything,’ she said. Just a week before, they had both been in the café when the earthquake started. Shimodate waved her hand in the direction of the shore, indicating an area of rubble indistinguishable from the other rubble around it. On the morning of the earthquake, she had gone to the city hall to file taxes. She had returned to the café with some packages just as the last two customers were leaving after lunch. ‘I was with Kimura and I thought: Maybe we should get something to eat,’ she said, indicating her companion with the facemask. ‘That’s when the shaking started. It was very unusual. It lasted such a long time. I had never felt anything like that before.’ Even before the motion had stopped, Shimodate ran outside to check on the elderly couple who were the landlords of the café. ‘They were huddled behind the house, next to the train tracks, holding on to each other.’
When the tremor stopped she had gone back to find Kimura. ‘We went to the parking lot. Only my car and Kimura’s car were there. There’s a small river. Usually, there’s several feet of water. But it was only a few inches deep, and it was black and filled with fish thrashing about. We thought: This is definitely bad news.’ Water was seeping out of the tarmac in the parking lot, which had liquefied. They made it to their respective vehicles and drove off. Kimura’s car went to the left and Shimodate’s to the right. Shimodate immediately ran into traffic, all of it heading for the hills. So she took a detour. If she hadn’t, she thought, she would not be alive today. After she had reached her sister’s hilltop house, she looked back down into the valley. A massive wave was already surging on to the shore.
Shimodate fell silent. Yasuko Kimura, her companion, brought out her mobile phone and showed me a photograph of the café. It had a pink interior and framed pictures on the wall. It had been taken a few days earlier, in a different era. Shimodate said the tsunami had altered the shoreline. ‘I was born and brought up here. My family has always been here. A lot of people here have always been here,’ she said. ‘We all know it. The landscape that we saw everyday has changed. The water is definitely higher than it was before. Everyone says it. The sea has come closer.’
Suddenly, she let out a shriek. ‘Look, there’s something.’ She darted forward and retrieved a silvery object from a pile of crumpled wood a few feet away. Once she had brushed it off, it became clear what it was – a flat metal sieve with a simple wire handle. It was the sort you might use for straining scum from boiling soup, or for lifting tofu from hot water. She held it up, half in delight, half in regret for the lost world it evoked. ‘I knew it was mine straightaway. It’s something I used every day,’ she said, rubbing her fingers along its familiar handle and metal grid, not much bigger than the palm of her hand. She looked up to contemplate once more the destruction around her, the broken buildings, the mangled cars, the flattened houses. Then she looked anew at the sieve, a small, familiar object in the midst of desolation. ‘It’s a bit pathetic, isn’t it?’
Kimura broke the silence. ‘A lot of old people died here. They didn’t escape,’ she said. The older people of Ofunato, some of whom had witnessed three deadly tsunamis in their lifetime, remembered the biggest one that followed the Chile earthquake of 1960. That was the largest earthquake in recorded history and though it happened halfway round the world it sent a massive tsunami thundering towards the Japanese coast. ‘At that time, the tsunami only went up to here,’ Kimura said, indicating a place not far from us. ‘The older people didn’t think the water could come so far, so they didn’t move.’ It was a common tale, she said. Those who thought they understood the lessons of history were fooled into complacency. Even so, given the extent of the physical destruction, the toll of dead and missing had not been as bad as it might have been, she added. ‘Over in the next valley, they’ve had it far worse,’ Shimodate said, pointing at the hills to the south. I didn’t know it at the time. The town she was talking about was Rikuzentakata.
The town of the 70,000 pines was just eight miles south along the coast from Ofunato, on the other side of a mountain. By the time we got there, night had fallen. We stopped the car and absorbed the stillness around us. You could sense the destruction, but you couldn’t see it. As we drove slowly along the streets, many strewn with debris, we saw glimpses of rubble in the headlights, the odd carcass of a car or the marooned hull of an upside-down fishing trawler. In the dark, we couldn’t make out any buildings. In fact, there were no buildings left to see, none, that is, apart from a handful of concrete structures that had survived the oceanic onslaught. Among them was the Capital Hotel.
• • •
I went up north again with Toshiki in August 2011. This time we drove the 250 miles from Tokyo. Nearly half a year after the earthquake, the capital was returning to some kind of normality. The number of aftershocks, several a day in the weeks after 11 March, had abated. The city was gradually, if uncertainly, rediscovering its rhythms. The rowdy izakaya pubs where students and salarymen wash down copious quantities of sashimi, grilled fish and chicken skewers with even more copious quantities of draught beer and sake, were full again. The trains and buses were back to their punctilious schedules. Still, the buildings were dark and clammy (air-conditioning was set to ‘low’ or not on at all). Many of the city’s escalators were stopped dead in their tracks, cordoned off with yellow tape as though they were a crime scene. One employee of a large company told me he carried a torch to work so that in the shadowy corridors of his ultra-modern office block he could identify his colleagues. (No use bowing at ninety degrees to the boy from the post room.) A few months before, the traditional hanami cherry-blossom viewing parties, a boisterous rite of spring, had been less raucous than in less shaken times. Shintaro Ishihara, the rightwing Tokyo governor who had mused aloud that the tsunami must be divine retribution for Japanese ‘egoism’, had deemed it inappropriate to be guzzling sake in the city’s parks while fellow Japanese suffered in the north.
In Tohoku, the frost and snow of March had given way to flies and mosquitoes. If Rikuzentakata was anything to go by, the clean-up operation had advanced significantly in just five months. The town was still a wreck, but it was a pretty ordered wreck. Much of the rubble had been cleared away or piled into neat mountains. Cars, bent, twisted and crushed almost beyond recognition, were carefully stacked as if ready for sale. Lumber was piled to one side, household bric-à-brac to another. Local authorities were struggling to figure out what to do next. There simply wasn’t enough space in Japan to bury the millions of tonnes of rubble. In neighbouring Miyagi prefecture alone, rescue services piled up 16 million tonnes, the equivalent of nineteen years of general refuse. In Rikuzentakata, the city grid had been neatly exposed, cleared of debris. A casual observer might have thought this was a new town, with a neat scheme of intersecting roads already marked out. The Capital Hotel stood silhouetted against the flattened landscape, like some post-modern version of the Hiroshima A-Bomb Dome, the solitary and skeletal building left standing near the hypocentre.
I met Sasaki outside the shell of the hotel that used to employ him. I had been given his number by one of the tens of thousands of volunteers who had travelled up to Rikuzentakata, and other similarly devastated coastal towns, to help pile up the rubble and dig out the mud. Sasaki gave me a tour of the hotel’s wrecked interior. His itinerary was as well thought out as if he were an estate agent showing me around a new building and trying to clinch a sale. From the outside, the hotel looked reasonably intact, though the wall of the ground floor had been ripped away in several places. There was a large jaunty logo in red and pink above the main entranceway, but the hotel itself was quite deserted. Inside, it smelt of the sea. There was shattered glass everywhere. Wire and strips of metal dangled from the ceiling. There were piles of splintered wood, and a few pine trunks that had come crashing through the picture windows facing the ocean. We walked up the stairwell, its thick carpet matted with mud and scattered with pine cones. Broken chairs lay everywhere. We headed up, following the same path that Sasaki had taken after the earthquake. There was less mud and rubble on the fourth floor. The fifth floor was basically fine. By the time we reached the roof, Sasaki was pouring with sweat. We looked at the bay and the ocean, calm and unthreatening. He pointed out where the beach and its 70,000 pines had once stood and the single remaining tree. ‘It has become a symbol of our hope,’ he said.
There’s another, less heartwarming, story associated with the 70,000 pines of Rikuzentakata, one that speaks less well of the ability of Japanese to pull together in times of strain. Sasaki told me about it when we went to see his temporary house, a well-built wooden structure situated in the hills a little way from town. On a small table he had set out watermelon and Calpis, a milky coloured soft drink. A photograph of his wife was on a little altar in the corner, incense and apples placed before her likeness. ‘Please have a seat in my palace,’ he said with a grin, placing a cushion on the floor.
In March, after the tsunami waters had receded and many of the dead bodies had been recovered, the survivors wanted to mark the deaths of those who had perished. Not all had yet been identified. ‘Some entire families were lost,’ he said, studying the floor. ‘So there’s no one left living to look for the bodies. There’s a lot of people like that.’ Their ashes were placed in wooden boxes, wrapped in white muslin and stored in the Fumonji temple, like many Buddhist places of worship built on higher ground, and thus undamaged by the tsunami. Some bodies had been unidentifiable, at least by sight. In June, a corpse had washed up from the sea. ‘He may have been trapped in the rubble and his body dislodged by an aftershock,’ Sasaki said. It took a laboratory technician and a DNA test to determine that the corpse belonged to one of his school classmates.
What better way, thought the survivors of Rikuzentakata, to commemorate the dead than with the fallen pines. The townspeople carved some of the trunks into 340 woodblocks, on which they inscribed prayers and memorials for those who had died. The woodblocks were transported to Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital, 425 miles to the south, to be burnt in the August festival on Mount Daimonji. In that great spectacle, giant fires are lit on the hills around Kyoto shaped into the three-stroke Chinese character representing ‘dai’ or ‘big’. The Gozan no Okuribi festival is a ceremony to send off the spirits of the dead, which, according to Buddhist tradition, come to visit their relatives in the hot, sticky weeks of mid-August.
There was a hitch. Residents of Kyoto protested that the woodblocks might be radioactive since Rikuzentakata was just 100 miles from the stricken nuclear plant at Fukushima; it might be dangerous to burn them. Officials refused to include them in the ceremony. Kyoto can be a closed, stand-offish city. It is to Japan what Japan is to the rest of the world. Its residents speak their own dialect, and many regard their culture as purer than that of other parts of the country. Tohoku, poor and marginalized for centuries, did not figure much on their radar. ‘From Kyoto, us northerners must seem like oni,’ Sasaki said, using the word for devil. ‘The terrible thing is, there’s this idea, this image that the radiation fell here,’ he went on. ‘Kyoto is supposed to be the spiritual centre of Japan. We put our effort into writing on those pines and in the end they just looked out for themselves.’
Japan’s hibakusha, the survivors of the nuclear bombs, were often discriminated against by neighbours, who feared they might pass on contamination. After the tsunami, there were isolated instances of rescue workers refusing to evacuate people from close to the Fukushima nuclear plant and even evacuation centres turning people away until they had been screened for radiation. As for the 340 woodblocks, they were returned to Rikuzentakata, where they were incinerated in a square bonfire.
Even that was not the end of the saga. Feeling repentant and stung by the public outcry, Kyoto announced it had now changed its mind and was prepared to burn 500 woodblocks of Rikuzentakata pine. New blocks were duly prepared and dispatched. But when they were tested, tiny traces of radioactive caesium, which has a half-life of thirty years, were discovered. Once again, they were considered too dangerous to burn. Futoshi Toba, the mayor of Rikuzentakata who had lost his wife to the tsunami, even offered his apologies to the people of Kyoto for causing them anxiety. It was a dignified gesture. But it was the people of Rikuzentakata who deserved the apology.
Writing in the Mainichi newspaper, the columnist Hiroshi Fuse expressed sadness at the sorry affair. ‘Some people have criticized the Kyoto municipal government and the organizer as being “narrow minded” over the latest case, while others have appreciated their decision as “calm judgement not being overwhelmed by emotion”,’ he wrote. Personally he wondered why people were afraid of such minute levels of radiation. ‘I prayed to the Kyoto bonfire of 16 August that firewood from quake- and tsunami-hit areas can be burned in the Gozan no Okuribi festival next year.’5
While Sasaki was telling the story of the rejected pine, I noticed that Toshiki had quietly left the table. When I looked over, I saw he had lit some incense. He was on his knees, head bowed, quietly praying to the photograph of Sasaki’s wife.