The territory of the Okawa Elementary School appears on globes and atlases as an unlabeled blank. The two great plains surrounding Tokyo and Osaka, the megacities at Japan’s core, are a density of roads, railways, and place names, which dwindle and fade to the north of the main island of Honshu. Even before disaster struck its coast, nowhere in Japan was closer to the world of the dead.
In ancient times, the region known as Tohoku was a notorious frontier realm of barbarians, goblins, and bitter cold. Even today, it remains a remote, marginal, faintly melancholy place, the symbol of a rural tradition that, for city dwellers, is no more than a folk memory.
The seventeenth-century haiku poet Bashō wrote about Tohoku in his famous travel sketch The Narrow Road to the Deep North, in which it figures as an emblem of loneliness and isolation. Even after Japan’s rapid modernization in the late nineteenth century, Tohoku was poorer, hungrier, and more backward than anywhere else. Northern men, tough and uncomplaining, filled the imperial armies. The fields were rich in grain and fruit, but their produce was consumed in the richer south, and a bad harvest often left Tohoku in famine. There were three commodities, it used to be said, that the north supplied to Tokyo: rice, fighting men, and whores.
Today, Tohoku makes up one-third of the area of Honshu, but one-tenth of its population. It is associated with an impenetrable regional dialect, a quality of eeriness, and an archaic spirituality that are exotic even to modern Japanese. In the north, there are secret Buddhist cults, and old temples where the corpses of former priests are displayed as leering mummies. There is a sisterhood of blind shamanesses who gather once a year at a volcano called Mount Fear, the legendary entrance to the underworld. Tohoku has bullet trains and Wi-Fi, and the rest of the twenty-first-century conveniences. But the mobile network gives out in the remoter hills and bays, and beneath the glaze of affluence, something lingers of the old stereotype of Tohoku people as brooding, incomprehensible, and a little spooky.
I knew the region’s largest city, Sendai, which was as blandly pleasant as most of Japan’s prefectural capitals. But the other names reeled off by the television news on the night of March 11—Otsuchi, Ofunato, Rikuzen-Takata, Kesennuma—were as obscure to many Japanese as they were to foreigners. And between Kesennuma and the fishing port of Ishinomaki, an intricately spiky coastline, indented with deep and narrow bays, the atlas displayed no place names at all.
A larger-scale map revealed the name of this obscure zone: the Sanriku Coast. Three physical features distinguished it: two obvious and spectacular, the other stealthy and invisible. The first was the Kitakami, Tohoku’s greatest river, which rose in the mountains and flowed south to empty itself through two distinct mouths, one in Ishinomaki, one at a thinly populated place called Oppa Bay. The second was those sharp, fjord-like bays, called rias, formed by river valleys that over the millennia had been drowned by the rising sea. The third was the meeting point, deep beneath the ocean, of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates, titanic segments of the Earth’s crust, from whose grating friction earthquakes and tsunamis are born.
* * *
On this jagged coast, close to Oppa Bay, was Okawa Elementary School. I traveled there for the first time in September 2011. Half a year had passed since the disaster, and in that time I had made repeated journeys to the tsunami zone. At first it had been accessible only by car, along roads strewn with rubble, after hours of lining up for a single jerry can of rationed fuel. In time, gasoline supplies resumed, and after anxious checks on the safety of its tracks, the shinkansen, or bullet train, restarted its northbound service. Early September is high summer in Japan; the air was hot and full, and the sky was a cloudless, fine-grained blue. The shinkansen raced smoothly and effortlessly north, slurping up the distance so quickly that the ninety-minute journey felt closer to commuting than to travel. But to come to Tohoku was always to experience a transformation. In spring, the snow in the northeast lingered longer and deeper on the ground. Plum and cherry blossoms flowered and fell later; summer here was less harsh, less sticky, and gave way sooner to the chill of autumn. Arrival from Tokyo brought a palpable shift in the air and its qualities, a sense of transition experienced on the skin and in the back of the throat.
Sendai station, where my companions and I alighted, displayed no visible signs of the disaster. Our hired car maneuvered north, through a city center of silver office buildings and department stores, and mounted the overhead expressway, also recently reopened after months of structural checks. After an hour, the city of Ishinomaki came into view on the coastal plain ahead: hangar-like factories and shopping malls, and billows of white smoke out of aluminum chimneys.
No city suffered more in the tsunami than Ishinomaki. Most of its center had been inundated; one-fifth of those who died in the disaster died here, in a town of 160,000 people. The fishing port had been entirely destroyed by the wave, along with the shipyard and an immense paper mill. But three-quarters of the Ishinomaki municipality was another world altogether, a hinterland of steep hills and forests, penetrated by the broad agricultural plain of the Kitakami River; and fishing villages at the head of the deep ria bays, separated from one another by elaborately ramifying peninsulas, which extended talon-like fingers into the ocean.
Beyond the town, we descended from the expressway and entered a realm of bright fields bordered by dark hills. Some of them contained heavy-stalked rice, ripe for harvest; others held greenhouses of tomatoes and fruit. The houses along the road were built of wood with stately tiled roofs. The sky, which was already huge overhead, gaped wider as the hills fell away and we turned east along the bank of the Kitakami.
Most Japanese rivers are a wretched sight, even outside the big cities. Upstream dams drain them of power and volume. Towns and factories suck off their waters and pump back effluent, human and chemical. The Kitakami, by contrast, is wide, full, clean, and alive. Its single dam is in the upper northern reaches, leaving the salmon free to swarm every autumn to their spawning grounds. Its breadth—hundreds of yards across, even deep inland—opens up vistas of sky and mountains in the built-up towns through which it passes. Herons, swans, and teal live among the dense beds of reeds that grow along its banks; every year the reeds are harvested to furnish thatch for temples and shrines. The river’s southern outlet, where it meets the sea at Ishinomaki, is a tumult of wharves, cranes, and containers. But its other mouth, at Oppa Bay, is that rare thing in a populous industrialized country—a great river estuary left to sand, eagles, rocks, and currents.
This was the prospect revealed to us as we drove along the Kitakami into Okawa that morning: the arching sky; the green hills divided from one another by valleys packed with rice; villages at the edge of the fields; and, in the hazy distance, lagoon and sea. It was an ideal, an archetypal scene: farm and forest, fresh and salt water, nature and humanity in balance. Trees covered the mountains, and the sea dashed the rocks, but both were welcoming to the hunter and fisherman. The river was wide and powerful, but tamed by bridge and embankment. The tiled houses were small and few, but the fields, hills, and water paid tribute to them. Human civilization was the pivot about which the natural world turned.
* * *
On the Sanriku Coast you experienced the sensation of entering an altered world. It was a subtle change—for all the jokes about spooky Tohoku yokels, there was nothing unsophisticated about northerners. But there was a shagginess about them, compared to the lacquered neatness of Tokyo people—a robust, tousled quality suggestive of bracing weather, and an indifference to indulgences such as indoor heating. Everyone had strong boots and thick socks; in the colder months, they all wore nylon fleeces, often two, even inside. The hair of both men and women stuck up in tufts, as if it had just been tugged through several layers of thick sweaters and incompletely patted down. Certain surnames—Konno, Sato, Sasaki—cropped up again and again, as if there was a limited supply of them, as in a society composed of clans. People in Sanriku had clear, pale complexions, and the transition from bitter wind to warm interior flushed their cheeks rosy and bright. Everyone talked about the beauty of nature, and his or her relationship with it. Everyone seemed to have deep family roots in the area, reaching decades and centuries into the past.
I met an old man named Sadayoshi Kumagai, whose memory went back before the Second World War. His ancestors had been samurai riflemen; the family had lived in the area for three hundred years. Old Mr. Kumagai was a master thatcher, who had traveled the country constructing temple roofs out of the fine Kitakami reeds. “It was a while before I understood,” he said. “But there’s no doubting it. I’ve been everywhere in this country, from Hokkaido to Okinawa. And nowhere else has the abundance of nature we have here: mountains, river, marsh, sea. People who never leave the area don’t understand how lucky they are. There’s no place like this.”
He grew up in Hashiura, a village opposite Okawa Elementary School on the north bank of the river. It was an isolated, even backward community of horse-drawn carts and unmade roads. But for a young boy it was a place of wonder and adventure. In the summer, the village children swam in the river and the sea. In autumn, they followed the trails into the hills and gathered nuts and chocolate vine. A little way off the road was the site of a Neolithic village: classmates of Kumagai used to come to school bearing fragments of four-thousand-year-old pots. Kumagai’s grandfather taught him to shoot—there were duck and pheasant in the hills above the river and, in Oshika to the south, wild deer. “We didn’t hunt for fun, but for a living,” he said. “When we took game, we sold it.” Once, in a moment of opportunistic mischief, the young Kumagai shot and slayed a swan. “I was so proud of myself, and I told everyone what I’d done. Well, the police heard about it, and they came around and gave me a good telling off.”
On their hunting expeditions, Kumagai’s grandfather told the boy about the wonder and horror of the tsunami. The old man had lived through two of them in his own lifetime, and the historical record went back much farther than that. “The province of Mutsu”—eastern Tohoku—“trembled and greatly shook,” recorded a chronicle of A.D. 869, the eleventh year of the Jogan Era:
People cried and screamed, and could not stand. Some died beneath the weight of their fallen houses; some were buried alive in earth and sand when the ground sheared open beneath them … Great walls, gates, warehouses and embankments were destroyed. The mouth of the sea roared like thunder, and violent waves rose up, surging through the rivers, until, in the blink of an eye, they reached the wall of Taga Castle. The flood extended for so many ri that you could not tell where the sea ended and the land began. Fields and roads were transformed into ocean. There was no time to board boats or to climb the hills; a thousand people drowned.
Geologists found layers of fine sand across the sedimentary layers of the Sendai plane—the wash of immense tsunamis that had recurred at intervals of eight hundred to a thousand years. Lesser waves were many times more frequent. Among many other years, they struck the Sanriku Coast in 1585, 1611, 1677, 1687, 1689, 1716, 1793, 1868, and 1894. Their effects were especially devastating when they encountered the long, narrow ria bays, which concentrated the waves and channeled them like funnels onto the fishing villages within. The most destructive of modern times was the Meiji Sanriku Tsunami of 1896, when twenty-two thousand died after what had felt—because it occurred far out at sea—like a mild and inconsequential earthquake. In 1933, the year before Sadayoshi Kumagai was born, another moderate tremor generated waves as high as a hundred feet, which killed three thousand people. “My grandfather lived through both of those, and he talked about them,” he said. “I was always told that when an earthquake strikes we must be prepared for a tsunami.” There were even “tsunami stones” marking the extent of previous inundations, engraved by earlier generations with solemn warnings not to build dwellings below them. The fishermen on the Pacific coast to the east, whose homes faced directly onto the ocean, were brought up to know instinctively what to do after the earth shook: ascend without hesitation to high ground, and stay there. But the people of Kitakami lived on a river, not the sea. And what if there was no shaking at all?
On May 22, 1960, a 9.5-magnitude earthquake, still the most powerful ever recorded, struck the seabed off the west coast of Chile. Waves eighty feet high inundated the city of Valdivia, killing a thousand people along the coast. Twenty-two hours after the earthquake, the tsunami struck Japan, having traversed 10,500 miles of sea. It was the morning of May 24; none but a handful of seismologists in Tokyo knew what had happened in Chile, and even they never imagined the effect it would have twenty-two hours later on the far side of the Pacific. The Sanriku Coast saw the worst of it; in places, the water was more than twenty feet high. One hundred and forty-two people were killed that day, because of an occurrence in the depths of the ocean bed literally half a world away.
In Hashiura, Sadayoshi Kumagai saw the tsunami from Chile surging up the Kitakami River. “It was this mass of black,” he said. “Huge stones were rolling over and over upstream. It wasn’t just one wave, but one after another. The water rose so high—it came halfway up the bank. I had never seen that happen before. I thought at the time what a strange and powerful thing it was. But I never imagined that it could ever come up over the bank.”
When the earthquake struck on March 11, 2011, Kumagai recognized immediately that a tsunami could follow, and what a menace it would be to anyone on the river. With a prickling of alarm, he remembered that eight of his employees were gathering reeds on an island close to the mouth of the Kitakami. He rushed down to the bank and supervised their evacuation by boat. Filled with relief that his people had been brought to safety, he drove back to Hashiura.
He was in the open when the tsunami arrived. He watched the black shape breach the bank and tumble towards him. He leaped into his car and reached the road into the hills seconds ahead of the water. From there, he looked down as the second tsunami of his life destroyed Okawa and Hashiura, including his own house and office. “It was like a black mountain coming over,” he said. “It was incredible that the mountain was moving. I saw a car with its taillights on going under the water. There must have been somebody inside. Another few seconds and I would have been in the water too.”
* * *
Much of the beauty of Okawa derived from the many things that were not there—those everyday uglinesses unthinkingly accepted by city dwellers. Even as we drove in on that September afternoon, I was conscious of their absence. Between the outskirts of Ishinomaki and the sea, there were few traffic lights, road signs, vending machines, or telegraph poles. There were no strip-lit restaurants or twenty-four-hour convenience stores, no billboards or cash machines. Most transforming of all was the character of local sound: the song of birds and cicadas in the trees, the low noise of the river, the slap of waves, and a subtle, pervasive, barely audible susurration, which took me days to identify—that of air passing through the reeds.
Ryosuke Abe, who spent those weeks searching through its remains after the disaster, was the headman of Kamaya; no one I met talked more passionately about the life of the village. The home he described, and the childhood he remembered, was that of the archetypal furusato, the Japanese Arcadia, the village of the imagination, with its forested hills, paddies cut by a meandering river, a small local school, and family-run shops.
There was Aizawa the tobacconist and, across the road, Mogami the sake-seller, with its distinctive green-and-orange awning. Suzuki the tofu-seller was farther down the road, next to the Takahashi Beauty Parlor. Kamaya had its own koban, or police box, manned by a single officer, and the Kamaya Clinic, run by the well-regarded Dr. Suzuki. And dominating the center of the village, fronted by a row of cherry trees, was the school.
“Kamaya was a place of abundant nature,” Abe said. “The natural world was so rich. These days, when kids go for a picnic, they get on a bus. They don’t really know their way around their own area. But we roamed far and wide—Nagatsuura, Onosaki, Fukuji. We’d play baseball on the beach—each hamlet had a little team. We played in the river—you could swim anywhere. We spent the whole summer outside.”
Most families had more than one source of income: a job, or at least part-time work, in Ishinomaki, supplemented by a small household farm and gleanings from the forest and river. The hills produced their own harvest of mushrooms, berries, and chestnuts. The local rice variety was called Love-at-First-Sight. The briny mingling of the freshwater and the salt had intriguing effects on natural life. It made the reeds thin, but very strong. It nurtured unlikely fish, such as the spiky-finned, bull-headed sculpions, and shijimi clams, which were sold across Japan as a delicious ingredient for soup. “We had so much from the river,” Ryosuke Abe said. “We used to make a trap out of an oak branch and its leaves. You put it on the riverbed, and when you pulled it up onto the boat with a landing net, it was full of eels—big fat eels.”
* * *
Three hundred and ninety-three people lived in Kamaya at the time of the tsunami. More than half of them—197 people—died, and every one of their houses was destroyed. Virtually all who survived did so because they were away from the village at the time, at work or running errands. Of those who were present in Kamaya that afternoon, only about twenty had not drowned by the time the sun went down. And these numbers did not include the teachers and children who died at the school. It was easy, often too easy, to reach for superlatives in describing the tragedy of the tsunami. But in all the disaster zone, I reflected as I drove in that September afternoon, I knew of no single community that had lost so much of itself.
The road, which had been fully repaired, at first gave no clues about what had happened six months earlier. The vegetation along the riverside had begun to grow back, and the rubble had been tidied away. But the fields, which a mile back had the glow of ripe rice, were muddy and unplanted, and here and there were discreet relics of destruction: a buckled pickup truck among long grass; a windowless, roofless building alone in the mud. My eye was drawn to the screen of our car’s satellite navigation system. Kamaya was visible upon it as a mesh of lines and rectangles, with each block of houses distinct, the school, the police station, and the community center individually marked. We reached the turning to the New Kitakami Great Bridge, which was teeming with repair workers in yellow vests. On the satnav screen, the moving dot representing our car paused on the threshold of the glowing village. But in the real world there was nothing there.
I knew what had happened at Okawa. Everyone knew. It was the worst of the tsunami, the story hardest among all the stories to hear. I was always conscious, on reaching the school, of a faint dizziness, a quailing of the heart at the idea of the place. And yet the site itself possessed an air of quiet, even tranquillity: a two-story block beneath an angled red roof, with concrete arms enclosing what would once have been the playground. The buildings were windowless and battered, their surfaces abraded by impacts, with walls warped and toppled in places, but still, for the most part, sound on their steel frame. Above was a steep and thickly wooded hill, buttressed at its foot by a concrete wall.
At the front was a weather-beaten table bearing a jumble of objects that identified it as a makeshift shrine. There were vases of flowers, incense holders, and wooden funeral tablets bearing characters brushed in ink. There were bottles of juice and sweets, soft toys, and a framed photograph of the village in sunshine, with the river, hills, and summer sky magnificent in the background.
Standing in front of the shrine, tidying a vase of flowers, was a figure in boots and a heavy coat, her hair tied up in a ponytail. Her name was Naomi Hiratsuka. She lived upriver; her daughter, Koharu, had been a pupil at the school. She was the woman I had come here to find.