The tsunami had the power of many atomic bombs, but the most impressive thing about it—more astonishing, in its way, than the spectacle of destruction—was the behavior of those who survived it. Within a matter of hours, hundreds of thousands of people were converging on schools, community halls, temples and shrines, huddling in classrooms, gymnasiums, hallways and corridors, anywhere that had space enough to unroll a quilt. They were panicked, grieving, and in shock; they included centenarians, newborn babies, and everyone in between. For the first few days, there was scant official help. Those left alive had to help themselves, which they did with unsurpassable discipline and efficiency.
Naturally, invisibly, without fuss or drama, order crystallized in the chaos of the evacuation centers. Space was allocated, bedding was improvised, and food was pooled, prepared, and distributed. Rosters, for fetching, fixing, cleaning, and cooking, were quickly established and filled. Everything was eased by the instinctive Japanese aversion to anything that could be judged messy, selfish, or otherwise antisocial. And all of it was achieved in an atmosphere of good humor and generosity, which sometimes bordered on the ridiculous.
Among the burdens of working as a foreign journalist in Tohoku was the constant struggle to fend off gifts of food—sweets, rice balls, chocolate biscuits, fish sausage—from homeless refugees who had only enough to feed themselves for the next few days or even hours. People who had recently lost their homes apologized, with pained sincerity, for the inadequacy of their hospitality. There was no significant looting; despite the chronic shortages of everything from gas to toilet paper, no one took the opportunity of scarcity to raise their prices. I never once saw fighting or squabbling or disagreement; and, most remarkable of all, there was a complete absence of self-pity.
It was impossible not to make mental comparisons. I pictured a school gymnasium in northeast England, rather than north-east Japan, in which hundreds of people were living and sleeping literally head to toe. By this stage, they would have been murdering one another.
Every foreigner who visited the disaster zone in the early weeks was struck by it; it transformed what should have been a harrowing experience into an inspiring one. There were many terrible and fearful scenes, and bottomless pain, but the horror was offset, and almost eclipsed, by the resilience and decency of the victims. It seemed to me at the time that this was the best of Japan, the best of humanity, one of the things I loved and admired most about this country: the practical, unsensational, irrepressible strength of communities. And I found myself thinking about history, and those moments when a national shock of one kind or another had galvanized Japan and marked the beginning of a new and dynamic era.
There had been the forcible opening of the feudal country in the mid-nineteenth century by American gunships. There was the catastrophic defeat of 1945. Both events had seemed at the time moments of irredeemable humiliation. Both had been followed by decades of resurgence and prosperity. By 2011, that atmosphere of expansive and ambitious optimism was twenty years in the past. Since the collapse of the economic bubble in the early 1990s, Japan had been adrift, becalmed between a lost prosperity and a future that was too dim and uncertain to grasp. The economy was shrinking or stagnant. Companies no longer promised the security of employment for life. The old ruling party, which had led Japan for half a century, was bankrupt of ideas and personalities; but the opposition politicians elected in its place were diffident and inept. So I was not alone in wondering whether this new disaster might turn out to be the force that jolted Japan out of the political and economic funk into which it had slithered.
A multitude of people had died at a stroke. Nuclear furnaces were venting poison into the air. In any country, surely, events such as these would be the catalyst of protest, and action, and indignant movements for change. “The Japanese people rose from the ashes of the Second World War using our fundamental strength to secure a remarkable recovery and the country’s present prosperity,” said Naoto Kan, the prime minister at the time. “I have not a single doubt that Japan will overcome this crisis, recover from the aftermath of the disaster, emerge stronger than ever, and establish a more vibrant and better Japan for future generations.”
Nothing of the kind was to happen; the promise of rebirth glimpsed in the evacuation centers would go completely unfulfilled.
* * *
Japan changed in various ways in the years after the tsunami, but it shed energy and confidence rather than gaining them. Partly this had to do with a gathering sense of insecurity in East Asia—the crackling belligerence of North Korea, the domineering assertiveness of China. At the core of it, though, was an ever greater disconnection between Japan’s leaders and the citizenry they were supposed to represent.
Naoto Kan and the centrist politicians who were in power at the time crumpled before the tsunami. They were the first Japanese opposition party to have won an outright majority; their inexperience and poor judgment had been obvious from the day they took power. In 2009, they had won the country’s biggest-ever election victory; three years later, they suffered its fourth-worst defeat. Rejuvenated by its period of opposition, the old Liberal Democratic Party was back in power, as it had been for fifty-three of the past fifty-seven years. Its victorious leader, Shinzo Abe, was the most nationalistic prime minister since the war.
He supported revision of Japan’s pacifist constitution and assumed new powers to deploy its armed forces. He pooh-poohed historical accounts of atrocities committed by the Imperial Army; he was a worshipper at Yasukuni Shrine, where hanged class-A war criminals were revered as Shinto deities. Despite the nationwide anxiety about Fukushima, he was unswervingly committed to maintaining Japan’s nuclear reactors. Opinion polls showed that his plans for Japan’s economy were widely supported. But his views about nuclear power, about wartime history, and the anger they excited among Japan’s Asian neighbors were the cause of deep unease.
At a moment when it most needed unifying leadership, Japan faced a democratic crisis. One party stood convicted of gross incompetence. The other was led by a man whose ideology was drastically at odds with the instincts of most of the population. Many of those who voted for Shinzo Abe did not like or approve of him. But he was decisive and consistent, and he had a plan, more persuasive than any other, for restoring to Japan its economic well-being. The weakness of the opposition was so extreme that many Japanese felt they had no choice.
In government, Abe faced protests of his own—against the restart of the reactors, against his plans to allow Japanese soldiers to deploy overseas, and against a sinister new state secrecy law. I followed these demonstrations and talked to the marchers; and I was always struck by the peculiar intensity of the opposition to Abe. It was not only about his nationalist enthusiasms; something in his personality excited in the demonstrators a deep, personal loathing. He was a lackey of big business and the powerful nuclear industry, they agreed; and a militarist who could end up leading Japan back into war. Japanese do not easily reach for invective, even towards their politicians. But many of the slogans denounced him as a fascist; some of the posters depicted Abe with the mustache of Adolf Hitler.
One old marcher told me that he had lived through the war, and the devastation it had brought. He remembered the incendiary bombing of Tokyo; his cousin, a young conscript soldier, had died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And now he found himself in a country in which radioactive fallout once again drifted across the land, with a prime minister who was slowly leading his people back towards militarism. “It feels to me as if history is going into reverse,” he said. “Who could stand by and watch such things happen?”
A huddle had formed about us as we talked on the margins of the demonstration. People, young and old, were nodding in agreement. Behind us, slogans were being shouted through a powerful amplifier: “Against the Abe government! Against war!”
If he was against Abe, I asked the old man, then who did he prefer? Where were the wise and responsible leaders? Who should be leading Japan?
His face displayed puzzlement, then surprise, and finally embarrassment. The protesters standing around us glanced silently at one another. A few smiled sheepishly; one man giggled. I suggested the name of Naoto Kan’s successor, the feebly uncharismatic leader of the disgraced centrist party, now in opposition; and people shook their heads in disgust. There must be someone, I said. But no other names were offered. I was standing among some of the most politically motivated people in Japan. Shinzo Abe was a hate figure to them, almost a bogeyman. But they could propose not a single person to take his place.
* * *
What accounts for this democratic deficit, this failure of the political system to generate a dynamic politics? It is one of the mysteries of modern Japan.
Technically, nothing is missing; all the moving parts are there. Japan has an unambiguous written constitution, an independent judiciary, and a free press. There are multiple political parties; elections are uncontaminated by coercion or corruption. And yet there is a stagnancy and lack of conviction to Japan’s political life. In North America and Europe, there is no lack of odious and incompetent leaders; but there is a sense of creative friction and of evolution, of a political marketplace in which ideas and individuals less popular and effective yield, over time, to those that prove themselves fitter for purpose, and where politics—even if it has its wrong turns and dead ends—is at least in constant motion. In Japan, this is not the case; even seventy years after the war, a genuinely competitive multiparty system has still not established itself.
After the tsunami had destroyed their homes, the survivors of the wave mobilized and organized, and took control of their fate. They did this instinctively, because it appeared to them the natural and moral thing to do. They also did so because they didn’t expect official help. In any comparable disaster in the West, its victims would quickly and shrilly have been demanding to know: Where is the government? In Japan in 2011, that was a question that was rarely heard.
At the time, such low expectations were an asset, a spur to resilience and self-reliance. But low expectations are corrosive to a democratic system. It is not universally true—there are in Japan many people who are deeply and conscientiously engaged. But it is common in discussing parliamentary politics to encounter indifference, disgust, and, above all, a paralyzing resignation. Our leaders are terrible, people seem to be saying—but what can we do about it? It is as if politics itself is a natural disaster of which the Japanese are the helpless victims, an impersonal misfortune beyond the influence of common men, and which can only be helplessly accepted, and endured.
* * *
One-tenth of the world’s active volcanoes are in Japan—the entire archipelago, in fact, consists of an immense range of volcanoes jutting out of the sea. Late every summer, typhoons churn into motion in the northwest Pacific and spend themselves on its long coast. The rain they deposit loosens the soil, which slides down the steep mountainsides in rivers of mud. In geological terms, Japan is in an appalling situation, on top of not one, but two so-called triple junctions—points at which three of the Earth’s tectonic plates collide and grate against one another. Fire, wind, flood, landslide, earthquake, and tsunami: it is a country of intense, elemental violence. Harsh natural environments often breed qualities that take on the status of national characteristics—the dark fatalism of Russians, the pioneer toughness of frontier Americans. Japanese identify in themselves the virtue of nintai or gaman, variously rendered as endurance, patience, or perseverance. Foreign journalists covering the disaster liked to refer to the “stoicism” of the survivors, but Japanese gaman is not a philosophical concept. The conventional translations fail to convey the passivity and abnegation that the idea contains, the extent to which gaman often seems indistinguishable from a collective lack of self-esteem. Gaman was the force that united the reeling refugees in the early days after the disaster; but it was also what neutered politics, and permitted the Japanese to feel that they had no individual power over and no responsibility for their national plight.
I happened to visit Okawa during the election campaign that brought Shinzo Abe to power. Nobody I met displayed any curiosity about the election, or even an awareness that it was taking place; it was as though it was occurring in a separate dimension, parallel with but invisible to the one through which ordinary human beings moved.
Posters along the road bore the slogans of the competing parties and photographs of their candidates. Vans mounted with loudspeakers drove through the villages, blaring out their names. It was impossible not to think of Mr. Oikawa and the men from the town office, driving along these same roads with similar equipment, broadcasting their message about the coming of the tsunami, which was similarly ignored.
“I’m not saying that they should have been rioting, and gaman or nintai—these qualities clearly had a positive role on the immediate aftermath,” said Norio Akasaka, an academic specialist in the culture of Tohoku. “But people had all kinds of demands and complaints and dissatisfaction. They should have spoken out—against the national government, against the nuclear-plant operator. Their complaints were not made. They kept those things within themselves, through endurance, through patience. And that was a bad thing.”
Sometimes in Japan I wondered if it didn’t come down to a simple proposition: Would you tolerate a certain amount of whining and squabbling and disorder, even a bit of looting and profiteering, if such selfishness was accompanied by a willingness on the part of ordinary people to fight a bit, to shout down authority, and to take responsibility for the people they elected?
There was another set of slogans that were ubiquitous at that time, employing a different Japanese word. Ganbarō is an exhortation to overcome challenges and hardships: the simplest English translations would be “persevere,” “stick at it,” or “do your best.” Ganbarō is what you say to a child studying for exams, or to an athlete competing in a tournament. Banners reading Ganbarō Tohoku! were often to be seen in stations and public buildings. They were intended as declarations of solidarity by those—the great majority in Japan—who were personally unaffected by the disaster. But as an expression of sympathy, let alone condolence, it was a curious expression.
Was it really a source of consolation to people newly homeless and bereaved to be told, in effect, to tough it out, like a marathon runner? Ganbarō always seemed to me a word in which empathy with those suffering was compromised by the implication that what they were going through would be good for them in the long run.
* * *
Tohoku people were famous for their gaman. It was what had fortified them over the centuries against cold, poverty, and unreliable harvests. It was also, I suspected, what had made them susceptible to their historical role as Japan’s exploited—inured to selling off their daughters and sending off their sons as cannon fodder in the empire’s wars. People spoke nostalgically of Tohoku as a repository of “the old Japan,” by which they meant a slower, gentler, rural way of life, a “village society” unsullied by urban ugliness and the viruses of greed and commercialism. But this outward simplicity masked a deep conservatism, a repression so deeply internalized that it was experienced by its victims as common sense. The people of the old Japan shut up and got on with it—and shutting up was the crucial element. They worried deeply about what other people would think if they stood up and argued. They rejected change, and efforts at change—the idealized village was a world in which conflict, and even disharmony, were immoral, a kind of violence.
It was a hidden world, of which I only ever caught glimpses. By definition, those whose mouths have been stopped by social convention do not talk about it to an outsider. I encountered it through the stories of those who did speak out, such as Naomi Hiratsuka, whose father-in-law regarded grief as an expression of weakness; and in the accounts of the old men of Kamaya who refused to believe in the possibility of a tsunami. Most eloquent of all was Masahiko Chiba, the car mechanic into whose house Junji Endo, and dozens of other refugees, had staggered on the afternoon of the disaster.
Over the next three days, more than a hundred strangers fetched up at the Chibas’ two-story house, to be fed, clothed, and sheltered. They included local people, passing motorists, local government officials, and young Tetsuya Tadano and the handful of other children who survived from Okawa Elementary School. The Chibas used up their stores of food, and gave away all their own clothes and those of their children and grandchildren. Afterward, many of those whom they had helped, including the Okawa children, returned to express their gratitude to Chiba and his wife. Junji Endo was not one of them; nor were any of the local bureaucrats. And after he spoke publicly about the discrepancies in Endo’s story, Chiba told me, he began to become aware of an invisible force of disapproval and reproach.
It came as no surprise. “In the village society, if you speak out, you will be ostracized,” he said. “There’s a common assumption that if you talk too much or do anything controversial, the authorities won’t help you. They won’t repair the road by your house. They won’t give the benefit of official services. That’s what people assume. We were lucky—our home and our business survived, and we didn’t need their help. But plenty of people around here lost their families, their homes, their possessions. People like that are not going to speak out, or criticize the local government.”
It was vanishingly subtle. No one said anything explicitly angry or reproachful—it was the Chibas’ friends who cautioned them, for their own good, to remain silent. But the fact was that out of eleven car-repair businesses operating in the local area, only two, including theirs, survived the tsunami. And as the months wore on, Chiba saw official business from the local government offices and their employees consistently going to his rival.
* * *
“The children were murdered by an invisible monster,” Sayomi Shito said once. “We vent our anger on it, but it doesn’t react. It’s like a black shadow. It has no human warmth.” She went on, “The tsunami was a visible monster. But the invisible monster will last forever.”
I asked, “What is the invisible monster?”
“I wonder myself what it is,” said Sayomi. “Something peculiar in the Japanese, who attach importance only to the surface of things. And in the pride of people who cannot ever say sorry.”
I was sitting with Sayomi and Takahiro in the Shito family’s big wooden house. It was late at night; we had been sitting there since dusk. I had asked all the questions in my notebook. Now the conversation had taken on a different quality—meandering, flickering between the particular and the general, between anger and sadness; marked by shifts, jumps, silences.
Sayomi’s family had lived in this village, Fukuji, for five hundred years. One of her ancestors had been a samurai who had traveled to the far northeast from distant Kyoto, Japan’s most magnificent and snobbish city. As a teenager, Sayomi had come to loathe the pressure of being a member of a grand old family and to long for escape and independence. But her two older sisters quickly found husbands and left home, and there were no brothers. So when Sayomi married Takahiro, he was legally adopted by her parents as their son, a common practice among families without a male child. Thus Sayomi was pulled back to the center of the family against which she had rebelled, and became the inheritor and custodian of the line of descent.
The banks of the Kitakami were remote from the sophistication of the city, but Sayomi’s forebears took a rich harvest from the sea, the river, the lagoon, the fields, and the forests. The hills cut the villages off from one another, but the water connected them. There was a sense even now of the water being older than the land, and of having a claim on it which had been only reluctantly surrendered. It was hinted at in the names of places miles inland, with no obvious connection to the sea. The land on which Okawa Elementary School had been constructed was called Nirajima—“Chive Island”; close to Fukuji was Shioden: “Salt Field.” As a child, Sayomi had dug up ancient shells from paddies that had once been under the ocean. The only sites of antiquity were stone monuments and Shinto shrines; and these, almost always, were positioned upon high ground.
“Those rice fields were the sea once,” Sayomi said. “Now they are the sea again. That’s the thing about water—water always tells the truth. There’s no argument to be had. Water goes freely where it must.”
Takahiro said, “Everything made by men will be destroyed by nature in the end. Mountains and river, the creations of nature—they will remain. Everything human, that will go. We need to reconsider the respect we give to nature.”
In the months and years afterward, Takahiro received invitations to give talks around the country to groups interested in the tragedy of Okawa. He accepted out of a sense of duty; he assumed that he would encounter people alert to the human component of disaster, anxious to learn how they themselves could reduce the chances of falling victim to similar catastrophe. “But I was shocked,” he said, “by how low their level of awareness was.” Takahiro’s audiences expressed sympathy and polite horror at what had happened, but it was as if they viewed it through the wrong end of a telescope, as something small, curious, and remote from their own lives. “For them, it was someone else’s problem,” he said. “They didn’t recognize it as the kind of thing that could happen again in the future, even happen to them. Perhaps it’s the same with nuclear power. Everyone played down the dangers for all those years, and the result was this sudden, terrible situation. In Okawa school, too, the teachers played everything down, took nothing seriously.”
Takahiro was a strong, healthy man in his forties. He spoke calmly; nothing in his tone suggested that he was in the grip of powerful emotions. But, as he continued, I could see that his hand was trembling.
He said, “If they don’t take this opportunity, even now when so many people have died, you can’t ever expect them to change the way they think or act. That’s why we are pursuing the real cause of the tragedy. If they consider this disaster but refuse to look into its core, the same tragedy could be repeated. But that’s how Japan functions, which the national government can do nothing to change.”
In this, and in many of the conversations I had in Okawa, it wasn’t completely clear to me who “they” were. I was about to ask when Takahiro said: “As a citizen of this country, I’m ashamed of that. I think it’s embarrassing. But it’s something that I have to say. By telling this story, even though I am ashamed of it, perhaps we can change the situation.”
The Shitos were victims; but the shame was theirs too. “They” meant “us,” meant everyone. The tsunami was not the problem. Japan was the problem.
“I tell them that the tsunami is not just water,” Takahiro said, in a rush. “The tsunami is a lethal weapon that can kill you in an instant. Don’t think of it as water. The first thing the tsunami hit was the forest that blocked the wind from the sea. The trees are swept away, and it is those trees that break the houses, and then the rubble of the houses that hits the people. And then everything is gone. Trees, houses, rubble, people—everything. That’s how the tsunami attacks. It’s not water.”