Tetsuya Tadano came to on the hill, blinded by mud and with the roar of the tsunami in his ears. His limbs were immobilized by spars of debris and by something else, something wriggling and alive, which was shifting its weight on top of him. It was Kohei Takahashi, Tetsuya’s friend and fifth-grade classmate. Kohei’s life had been saved by a household refrigerator. It had floated past with its door open as he thrashed in the water, and he had squirmed into it, ridden it like a boat, and been dumped by it on his schoolmate’s back. “Help! I’m underneath you,” Tetsuya cried. Kohei tugged him free. Standing on the steep slope, the two boys beheld the scene below.
Tetsuya’s first thought was that he and his friend were already dead. He took the raging water to be the River of Three Crossings, the Japanese equivalent of the River Styx. Those who have led good lives cross the river safely by bridge; evildoers must take their chances in the dragon-ridden waters. Innocent children, being neither sinful nor virtuous, rely on a kindly Buddha to make their passage, and to protect them from the depredations of hags and demons.
“I thought I’d died,” Tetsuya said. “Dead … the River of Three Crossings. But then there was the New Kitakami Great Bridge, and the traffic island. And so I thought this might be Kamaya after all.”
The water, which had receded, began to surge up the hill again. The two boys tottered up the slope. Tetsuya’s face was black and bruised. In the churn of the tsunami, the ill-fitting plastic helmet that he wore had twisted on its strap and dug brutally against his eyes. His vision was affected for weeks; he could make out only dimly what was going on in the water below.
Kohei’s left wrist was broken and his skin was punctured by thorns, but his vision was unaffected. Whatever was visible of the fate of his school and his schoolmates, he saw it. He would never talk publicly about it.
Tetsuya became aware that an expression of glazed sleepiness was passing over Kohei’s face. “Hang on, I thought—that’s dangerous,” Tetsuya said. “I can’t have him saving me, then dying on me.” But his friend was becoming more and more detached from the here and now. Tetsuya’s mind, too, began to drift and wander. He struggled even to remember what day it was. His little sister had been in the schoolyard too; his mother, who had disappeared on her vague errand, must be out there somewhere. He thought of the soldiers of the Japan Self-Defense Forces: surely by now they must be on their way. He called out to the soldiers: Help! Help! “But they didn’t come,” Tetsuya remembered. “And while I was thinking about all these things, Kohei had fallen asleep.”
* * *
With their loudspeakers blaring evacuation warnings, Toshinobu Oikawa and his colleagues from the town office had raced out of Kamaya and up to the traffic island opposite the Great Bridge. To his dismay, cars were still coming into the village from the opposite direction, towards the oncoming tsunami. They pulled in, with the aim of setting up a checkpoint to force drivers to turn back. Hardly had they parked when the water began to pour over the embankment.
“It came down over us like a waterfall,” Oikawa said. “We ran. There was no time to think.” The only place of safety was a steep slope on the other side of the same hill that backed onto the school. Four of them reached it and scrambled clear, by a matter of seconds. One man, Yukinori Sato, was caught by the water, but was dragged and yanked out by his colleagues. The sixth man, Hideyuki Sugawara, was trapped in his car and tumbled away by the waters, never to be seen alive again.
From the hillside, they watched the tsunami swallow up the road and the traffic island. That was the place of evacuation chosen by the deputy principal, Ishizaka—if any of the teachers or children had ever reached it, they would have perished there under thirty feet of water. By reckoning the distance the tsunami had traveled since it broke over the pine forest and the time that had passed, Oikawa calculated its speed—more than forty miles an hour. The pines, carried by the water, added greatly to its destructive power—sixty-foot-long battering rams that clubbed and crushed whatever they encountered. Where they met the bridge, the trunks became entangled in its arches, turning it into a kind of dam and diverting the tsunami’s flow over the downstream embankment—in other words, over Kamaya. “It made it much worse,” said Oikawa. “There was still water going under the bridge, of course. But the barrier of trees was pushing some of it back, over the village and the school.”
The construction of the embankment was of uneven quality: in places, the water washed it away like a child’s sandcastle, leaving the houses behind it completely exposed. The hamlet of Magaki suffered this fate. “Mr. Sato, who was with us, lived in Magaki,” Oikawa remembered. “He watched his own house being washed away. His parents, his daughter, his grandchild were in the house. He lost all of them. He was shouting, screaming, ‘My house, my house!’”
Sato had with him a video camera, and at one point he turned it on. The 118-second film is the only recording of the tsunami in full spate in the Okawa area. In the hands of the stricken cameraman, the image veers wildly back and forth between the black river, the green girders of the bridge, and Magaki, already reduced to a single house. Suddenly the camera is pointing up at trees and the sky; then it is lying on the ground amid stalks of dry grass. The voice of Sato, newly bereaved, can he heard, calling out, “Is the school okay? What about the school?”
* * *
Shivering in his sodden clothes, Sato made his way down the far side of the hill with one of his colleagues. The remaining three, led by Oikawa, climbed up it, in search of survivors. Rubbing their gloveless hands, they called aloud as they peeped between trees. Eventually their cries were answered by a strong voice, that of old Kazuo Takahashi, who had run up the hill past the fleeing schoolchildren.
Takahashi was a fierce and irascible old man. Reporters who called on him to ask about his experiences were sent packing. He had no interest in hearing it, but he was one of the heroes of that day. Half a dozen lives were saved by him at the meeting point of the land and the wave.
The tsunami had caught up with him as he climbed the hill, but he found his feet and outran it. He was aware of cries all around, and one voice close at hand. He ran to it and found a woman trying to save a young girl, who was trapped between floating rubble. Takahashi, risking his own secure footing, reached down into the water and dragged her out. This was Nana Suzuki, from the first grade of Okawa Elementary, the youngest of the children to survive the tsunami. Striding along the margins of the hill, Takahashi pulled to safety five more people, most of them elderly.
He led the survivors to a clearing on the hill, where they settled, shivering, on the ground. A cigarette lighter was produced, and a fire kindled with twigs and fragments of bamboo. From time to time, human calls could be heard through the trees, and Takahashi marched off in pursuit of them. After uniting with Oikawa’s team, they found Tetsuya and Kohei and seated them around the sputtering fire.
Fourteen people were gathered there, all told. It was by now completely dark, snowing, and profoundly cold. Most of the survivors were in wet clothes, and one old man was barefoot. No one spoke much. They fed the fire with twigs on which frost was forming. They propped up a branch close to the flames, draped with wet garments. There were no tears or hysteria; but no attempts at mutual encouragement, no songs to keep up the spirits. The minds of all those on the hill were turned to those who were not present—parents and grandparents, children and grandchildren, siblings and spouses, who must still be down there, somewhere.
Among the survivors was a married couple in their sixties, who had been thoroughly drenched by the tsunami. The woman clutched to her what Oikawa took to be a glossy black doll. Then he saw the doll moving feebly. It was a tiny dog, which had entered the water white and had come out dyed by evil-smelling mud. “It was the same with the shirts we wore,” Oikawa said. “In the tsunami, everything that was white became black.”
The woman’s husband had no visible wounds, but it was obvious that he had suffered dreadful internal injury. He could not speak at all. From the beginning, his breathing was shallow and labored. No one present on the hill had any medical expertise, and he needed help urgently. The main road was a few hundred yards away; to the village of Irikamaya it was less than a mile. But it was pitch-black, in a forest littered with obstacles and slippery with ice. Each man and woman on the hill was completely absorbed by the personal struggle against the cold. The idea of abandoning the fire, even in pursuit of help for a gravely injured man, was insupportable. They laid him alongside the fire and tried to keep him warm. Abruptly, at around 3:00 a.m., his gasping stopped.
“No one got upset by it,” Oikawa said. “Even his wife didn’t display much grief. In those circumstances, after what they had all managed to survive, that thing—I mean, death—was not frightening there.” It was snowing, steadily and heavily, and the earth was freezing. Tetsuya and the other two children were falling asleep on the cold ground. “Usually, you would stop that,” Oikawa said. “You would stop a child from falling asleep in that kind of cold. But we let them sleep.”
Around six, the sun rose. The three children, the dog, and the ten surviving men and women stirred and picked themselves up from the ground. At the high-water mark of the wave, someone found a mandarin orange and a packet of custard creams, which the children shared. None had the strength to carry the corpse, which remained behind them on the hillside. They picked their way down to the road and along it to Irikamaya, where refugees were gathering from all over the district. There they encountered another survivor—Junji Endo, the single teacher left alive, who surely must have known what had happened at the school.