When I heard the news, two weeks afterward, the surprise was not that Takashi Shimokawara was dead, but that he had lived this long. I was driving back to Tokyo late in March 2011 when a friend called and read out the small, down-page headline in a Japanese newspaper: Noted Athlete Dies in Tsunami. For the past fortnight, as I traveled among the ruined coastal towns of north-east Japan, I had found myself thinking about Mr. Shimokawara and the afternoon that I had spent with him two and a half years earlier.
I had never heard of Kamaishi, the town where he lived; the train that took us there was slow and trundling, and stopped at stations that were no more than platforms beside a deserted road. It was a freezing December afternoon in one of the coldest parts of the country, but Mr. Shimokawara’s house was cozy and warm. His daughter-in-law served green tea and biscuits as he showed us his world-record certificates, and later we drove to the recreation ground where he trained, and photographed him as he stretched and jogged and made practice throws of his javelin and shot.
After more tea, we said our goodbyes, and took the slow train home again. One fact alone had elevated this from an interesting to an unforgettable experience: Mr. Shimokawara was 102 years old.
Even to lift a javelin would be an achievement for most such men, but Mr. Shimokawara threw it farther than anyone his age. He competed in the class known as M-100, for athletes in their eleventh decade of life. His record throw—of 12:75 meters, at the Japan Masters Athletics championship in 2008—broke the world centenarian javelin record, formerly held by an American. Often, after our brief meeting, I would find myself thinking of Mr. Shimokawara and wondering how he was.
Far from having merely clung on to life, he had flourished. The previous year, he had turned 104. The article recording his death reported that at the Japan Masters in 2010 he had narrowly failed to beat his own world records. Eighteen thousand five hundred people died in the disaster, and each of them was a tragedy. But to have survived to such a great age triumphantly fit and alert, to have lived through two world wars, only to be felled by something as capricious and random as a tsunami, was unbearably bitter and ironic.
* * *
A month later, I went back to Kamaishi to look for traces of one of the disaster’s oldest victims. I found them in the home where I had talked to him two and a half years before, a stout two-story house, still standing 400 yards from the sea. Mr. Shimokawara’s middle-aged grandson, Minoru, was sorting through what remained, with a team of helpers and friends. There was his grandfather’s white tracksuit, and the postcard confirming his most recent achievements—3:79 meters in the shot and 7:31 meters in the discus. And there were photograph albums, sodden but intact, the colors of the prints bulging and dissolving before our eyes.
They contained pictures of Mr. Shimokawara holding his medals, standing alongside his wife and at a school reunion. All of them showed a cheerful elderly man, not all that much fitter or healthier than the one I had met—and plenty of these photographs were more than forty years old.
This is the most dizzying, and at the same time the most banal, thing about the situation of centenarians—just how very, very old they are. Takashi Shimokawara was born eight years before the First World War, and outlived all of his contemporaries and two of his six children. The youngest of his eight great-grandchildren was younger than him by more than a century. And yet there had been nothing about Mr. Shimokawara to suggest that he would live to such an age.
Both his parents died in their fifties. He led an active life as a high-school PE teacher, but he had his share of illness, including tuberculosis and gallstones. He admitted to me that as a young man he used to drink and smoke heavily, and that he still enjoyed a glass of sake with meals.
“When did you give up smoking?” I asked.
“When I was eighty,” he said.
I recounted this to his grandson, who smiled and said, “He lied. When I went drinking with him, he had much more than a glass, and he used to cadge my cigarettes.”
All his life Mr. Shimokawara was active in the community, as a teacher, a local councillor, and, in later years, a local celebrity. But despite being surrounded by people, I recognized something painful: that he was intensely, unquenchably lonely. He had been a widower for thirty-five years. Many of the children he taught as a schoolmaster had long ago died of old age. “All my brothers and sisters are dead,” he said. “I’m the last. My oldest friends are twenty years younger than me. My situation is fearful, in a way. So many have died around me—I have been to so many funerals. I don’t cry about it, but this is my biggest sadness, this loneliness.”
The second painful thing dawned on me a little later: that, at the age of 102, Mr. Shimokawara had a lively fear of death.
Lulled by clichés about “serene” old people, I had assumed that attachment to life diminishes with age. But here was an extreme example of the opposite: an ancient man fending off death with javelin and discus. It was this—the urge to stay on his feet at all costs—that drove his athletic achievements. “The most important thing of all is to stay supple and flexible,” he said. “The moment you will be most stiff is when you die—you never get stiffer than that. So you’ve got to sleep well, eat well, and keep moving.” And all of this made the facts of his eventual death all the more pitiful.
* * *
Because Mr. Shimokawara’s son and daughter-in-law died with him, his friends and family had to work out for themselves the puzzle of the family car. It was found a few days after the disaster, carefully parked on a hill, safely beyond the reach of the tsunami. This discovery immediately inspired hope—for repeated searches of the area around the family home had turned up no trace of the Shimokawaras. Then eight days later, the three bodies were recovered from a public hall a few hundred yards from the house—and it was this that unlocked the sad truth.
In Kamaishi, as elsewhere, the earthquake itself caused little serious damage, and tsunami warnings were immediately broadcast through loudspeakers across the town. Mr. Shimokawara’s seventy-three-year-old son had plenty of time to help his father and wife into the car and to drive them to the single-story public hall. It was only a few hundred yards from the sea, and scarcely more elevated than the family house. But by the time this became obvious, it would have been much too late.
The wave surged around Mr. Shimokawara’s house, although its upper floor was spared. But it overwhelmed the public hall and drowned those who had retreated there. Three minutes’ walking distance farther up the road, the water petered out against a steadily rising slope. “If they had stayed with the car, or walked up the road, or even just stayed at home and climbed the stairs, they would have made it,” said Keizo Tada, an old friend. Instead, as a good citizen obediently following the drill, Mr. Shimokawara’s son drove to safety, parked his car, and calmly and obliviously walked back down the hill to his death.
Takashi Shimokawara had lived through the 1933 tsunami, the Chile tsunami in 1960, and countless minor waves and false alarms. When his old friend Tada last spoke to him, he had talked of the forthcoming athletics championship when he would compete in the over-105 age group. Without question, he would have set new world records—he would, literally, have been in a class of his own.
The funeral of such an old man would not normally be an occasion of intense grief and tragedy, but this one was. “To be honest, I still don’t feel as if they are dead,” said Minoru, who buried his mother, father, and grandfather on the same day. “Of course, I have identified the bodies, signed the documents, and organized the cremation. But it’s as if I’m in the middle of a nightmare, and the real pain is still coming towards me.”
* * *
The tsunami was a disaster visited above all upon the old. Fifty-four percent of those who perished were age sixty-five or older, and the older you were, the worse your chances. But the converse of this was even more striking. The younger you were, the more likely you were to survive—and the number of children who were killed was astonishingly small.
In the Indian Ocean tsunami that struck Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand in 2004, children died disproportionately because they were less physically capable of swimming and dragging themselves to safety. In Japan, the opposite was true. Out of the 18,500 dead and missing, only 351—fewer than one in fifty—were schoolchildren. Four out of five of them died somewhere other than school: because they were off sick that afternoon or had been quickly picked up by anxious parents. It was much more dangerous, in other words, to be reunited with your family than to remain with your teachers.
If you are ever exposed to a violent earthquake, the safest place you could hope to be is Japan; and the best spot of all is inside a Japanese school.* Decades of technological experiment have bred the most resilient and strictly regulated construction in the world. Even against the immensity of the tsunami, Japan’s seawalls, warning systems, and evacuation drills saved an uncountable number of lives: however great the catastrophe of 2011, the damage caused would have been many times worse if it had happened in any other country. And nowhere are precautions against natural disaster more robust than in state schools.
They are built on iron frames out of reinforced concrete. They are often situated on hills and elevations, and all of them are required to have detailed disaster plans and to practice them regularly. On that afternoon, Japanese architecture and bureaucracy did an almost perfect job of protecting the young.
No school collapsed or suffered serious physical damage in the earthquake. Nine of them were completely overwhelmed by the tsunami, and at one of them, in the town of Minami-Sanriku, a boy of thirteen was drowned as his class hurried to higher ground. But with one exception, every other school got all its children to safety.
On March 11, 2011, seventy-five children in Japan died in the care of their teachers. Seventy-four of them were at Okawa Elementary School. Later, many of their parents were tormented by self-reproach for not rushing there to collect them. But far from being neglectful or lazy, they had followed the course of action that, in every other circumstance, would have been most likely to secure their safety and survival.
* * *
“I was hardly conscious of what I was doing,” said Katsura Sato. “There were so many feelings. All I could do was to deal with life one piece at a time. We had lost Mizuho, my dearest girl. But we hadn’t lost anything else. My other two children were fine. Our house was untouched. People on the coast lost their families, their houses, and their community. There were people who were still looking for their loved ones. They were much worse off than us. Once water and electricity returned, we got back to some kind of ordinary life.”
Katsura was an art teacher at a high school in Ishinomaki and lived with her husband, parents-in-law, and three children in Fukuji, a few hundred yards from Sayomi Shito and her family. Katsura and Sayomi’s daughters, Mizuho and Chisato, were best friends at Okawa Elementary School. They were cremated on the same day. “Until then,” Katsura said, “that was all I could concentrate on. After the cremation—well, I’m usually healthy, but I became ill. I couldn’t get up. I stayed in bed for three days. And I started thinking and thinking, and I became very suspicious about the circumstances in which we lost our daughter. I knew that this was a great natural disaster, and I assumed at the beginning that there must have been many other cases like this, other schools where the same thing happened. But why did I never hear of them?”
In the villages along the river, as they began to catch their breath in the weeks following the disaster, other parents were asking the same question.
Much of their suspicion focused on the actions of two men. The first of them was Junji Endo, the only teacher to have survived the tsunami, whom Hitomi Konno had seen, stunned and almost speechless, in Irikamaya in the early morning after the disaster. The second was the principal of the school, a man named Teruyuki Kashiba. By chance, Kashiba had been off work that Friday afternoon and was attending the graduation ceremony of his own daughter at another school miles inland. Whatever had gone wrong at Okawa, the testimony of these two—the only surviving adult witness to the events at the school, and its head, the man responsible for all its safety procedures—was clearly crucial. But since that first morning of dread and confusion, no one seemed to have seen or heard from Endo; and even the principal had been strangely elusive.
The searchers picking through the mud were surprised not to see Kashiba at the ruins of the school. He eventually put in an appearance, six days after the tsunami, followed by a train of journalists and cameramen. Two weeks later, Katsura Sato was startled to see Kashiba’s face on the local television news, and even more amazed by the subject of the report—a ceremony at Okawa Elementary School. The thirty surviving children were marking the start of the new school year, which in Japan begins in April. Okawa Elementary had been reconstituted in a classroom at another school in the area. Katsura remembered clearly the words that the principal used in addressing the children: “Let’s forge a common effort to rebuild a school full of smiles, for the sake of our friends who died.”
“At first the children were a bit nervous,” Kashiba told the television interviewer. “But when I said these words to them, they nodded firmly.”
School ceremonies, even for young children, are a matter of great importance in Japan, occasions of pleasure and pride for an entire family. Fifty-four families had lost children at the school; none had received notification of a ceremony in which their dead sons and daughters should have been participants. The intention was clear enough—to make some attempt at resuming normal life, and to create a place where the survivors could pick up again the business of simply being schoolchildren. But it was experienced by many of the grieving families as a punch to the stomach.
“The invitations were sent out to the parents of the kids who survived,” Katsura said. “I thought, ‘Our kids are gone, but aren’t we still Okawa parents?’ We had had no explanation—no word from the school at all. This principal, Kashiba, turned up at the school once or twice, without even getting his hands dirty. And then we see him on television, talking about ‘smiles.’”
Katsura went on, “It was as if they were abandoning us before the kids were even buried. That night I couldn’t sleep for anger. I said to my husband, ‘How can we let this happen?’ And I wondered: Was it just me who thought like that?”