Four weeks after the tsunami, the Ishinomaki City Board of Education, supervisory authority of Okawa Elementary School, convened an “explanatory meeting” for families of the children who had died there. The meeting gave the impression of having been arranged hastily, in chastened response to the fusillade of anger that had been directed against the board after the mishandled opening ceremony. It was held on a Saturday evening at the inland school to which the surviving children of Okawa Elementary had been relocated. Journalists were not admitted, but one of the parents made a video recording of the proceedings. It shows Kashiba, the principal, and five representatives of the education board seated on a row of chairs in the blue overalls that are the uniform of Japanese public officials. Opposite, with only their backs visible to the video camera, sit the parents and other relatives, ninety-seven of them all told. The room was unheated; in the film, everyone is swaddled in coats, hats, and scarves.
The meeting opened conventionally enough, with introductions by a Mr. Konno, head of the secretariat of the board of education. He began with an apology: he had lost his voice, and would therefore deliver only brief opening remarks. “Good evening to you all,” he croaked. “I extend my sincerest sympathies to those who fell victim to this disaster. In particular, I offer sincere prayers for those who died. This month, the children should have welcomed spring, their breasts swelling with hope. However, on the eleventh of March, the day of that huge disaster, a great tsunami snatched away in a moment the smallest pleasures of daily life. Having lost the irreplaceable, precious lives of many children and teachers, we face an unhappy spring.”
Public meetings in Japan are blandly formulaic occasions, by and large, replete with stock phrases, and characterized by an absence of confrontation or verbal fireworks. But then Mr. Konno gave the floor to Kashiba, the principal, and it quickly became clear that this was not going to be an ordinary meeting.
* * *
Grief and anger threatened the reputations of everyone connected to the school; for many people, it became impossible to look objectively on the character of Teruyuki Kashiba. He was a short, plump, gray-haired man in his late fifties, with oval spectacles and a habit of sucking in his lips at moments of stress or reflection. After a decade as deputy head in other schools, he had been appointed to Okawa the previous April. Even before the disaster, no one seemed sure quite what to make of Kashiba. After a year, not all of the parents knew who he was.
It was not his fault that he had been away from the school that afternoon; his horror and distress can only be imagined. But he made a grave error of judgment, first in taking so long to go to the site after the disaster, and then by his conduct when he did show his face. He was never forgiven for his failure to make any effort, even a token one, to help with the search for bodies. On his first visit, he answered questions from the media and took a lot of photographs with an expensive camera. On another occasion, he was seen expending anxious effort in a hunt for the school safe.
By the time of the meeting in the school, the rage and misery of the parents had been gathering for a month. That evening they found their object in Mr. Kashiba.
“Until the afternoon of the eleventh of March,” he mumbled, when his turn came to speak, “there were smiles on the faces of the children, and laughter in the voices of the children, but, truly, seventy-four children, ten teachers were lost. I apologize sincerely.”
“Can’t hear you!” called a voice from the audience.
“Don’t you have a mike?” said someone else.
Kashiba continued. “At the school, when I stood in front of the building, I could imagine the faces of the children. It was terrible.”
“When did you go to the school?” someone interrupted.
“Yeah, when did you go?” called another.
“What day did I go?” asked the ruffled principal. “It was the seventeenth of March.”
“Our daughter died on the eleventh.”
Kashiba bowed his head. “I apologize,” he said. “The delay in responding, the failures—there were so many—I am truly sorry.”
At that moment, a frisson passed through the assembled parents, as people in the room became aware of an unexpected presence—a man sitting at the far left, dressed in black. His head and shoulders were slumped forward, to the extent that it was difficult to see his face at all.
“Well, well, well,” someone called out. “If it isn’t Junji Endo.”
* * *
Even those who later harbored the greatest distrust towards him admitted that, before the disaster, Endo had been a successful and popular teacher. He was a self-deprecating, bespectacled man in his forties, third in the hierarchy of the school’s small staff. As head of teaching, he had no classroom of his own, but moved between the different grades teaching nature and science. “The children were very close to him,” Hitomi Konno told me. “Daisuke was a member of the nature club, and Mr. Endo used to show them deer horns, and how to make fishhooks, and tell them all kinds of stories about crocodiles and piranhas. They thought he was amazing.”
He had previously taught in the fishing village of Aikawa, seven miles up the coast. Among his responsibilities at Aikawa Elementary School had been disaster preparedness. Plenty of teachers would have treated this as a routine matter, demanding nothing more than the organization of evacuation drills and the updating of parents’ telephone numbers. But Endo went much further. The emergency manual at Aikawa stated that, in the case of a tsunami warning, pupils and staff should evacuate to the flat roof of the three-story building. Endo judged this to be inadequate. He rewrote the plan to require escape up a steep hill to the Shinto shrine behind the school.
Aikawa Elementary had been built on flat ground virtually at sea level, just two hundred yards from the water. When the tsunami struck here, it was more than fifty feet high and it overwhelmed the school completely. The roof was covered by the waves: anyone who had retreated there would have died. But, following the revised procedure, the teachers and children had quickly climbed the hill, and not a single one was hurt. At his old school, Junji Endo could rightly claim to have saved scores of lives.
In different circumstances, he might have been an object of sympathy and admiration. But since the morning after the disaster, no one seemed to have heard from him. His whereabouts, and the story he had to tell, had become matters of intense speculation—and now here he was.
“He saved his own life,” someone called from the audience. “He’s still alive. So let him talk to us.”
A board of education official named Shigemi Kato spoke. “Mr. Endo himself has injuries—he suffered a dislocation and frostbite and had to go to the hospital. He’s presently suffering from a serious psychological illness. Please keep this in mind as you listen to him.”
“No fucking kidding,” someone said. “Well, we parents are ill too.”
With an appearance of great difficulty and distress, Endo began to speak. His head and upper body were bent almost parallel to the ground. He frequently became choked with emotion; sometimes he appeared to be on the verge of collapse.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t help. I’m so truly sorry for that.”
The heckling ceased.
“Allow me to describe what happened on that day,” he said. “There may be gaps in my memory. Please forgive me if there are.”
* * *
“It was a Friday,” Endo began, “and lessons had just finished for the day when the shaking began. It must have been the time when the children were getting ready to go home, and they were with their teachers for the class meeting. The electricity was cut off and the loudspeaker didn’t work, so I ran up to the classrooms on the second floor and said to each class, ‘Get under your desks, and hold on to them.’ The children seemed scared, but the class teachers were telling them that it would all be okay. After the tremors subsided, I went back to each class in turn and told them to come out and evacuate.”
Endo remained behind, and checked the classrooms and toilets for stragglers. By the time he emerged, the roll had been taken and the children were sitting in the playground. “Some of them were vomiting from panic,” Endo said, “and some could not stop crying. The teachers were trying to calm them down. It had begun to snow, and some of the children had escaped in bare feet. I went back in and brought sweaters and shoes, and had them put them on.”
By now, local people from Kamaya were turning up at the school. They had fled their homes during the shaking, and asked to be allowed to shelter in the school gym. Endo explained that the broken glass there made it unsuitable. “While I was doing that,” he said, “parents began arriving to pick up their children, and it was the deputy head, mainly, who checked off the names and handed them over.”
A voice cried out from the audience of bereaved parents, “Why did you do that? If you’d just put everyone in cars and driven up a hill, they would all have been saved.”
Endo continued without replying. “After that, I learned that a tsunami was on its way. Of course, one alternative was the hill. But because the shocks were so strong and it was shaking continuously, I…”
He trailed off, then began again. It is difficult to translate what came next: the sentences were rambling and ungrammatical; the sequence of events was confused. “So when the tsunami hit,” he said, “because we never imagined such a big tsunami coming, we discussed whether we should evacuate to the safest part of the school, the upper gallery of the gym or the second floor of the school building, and I—because the damage to the school building was so bad—I went into the school building to have a look. Various things had fallen over, but I thought that we could go back in there. I returned to the playground, but by then a move had begun to evacuate immediately.”
The destination was the traffic island near the bridge, four hundred yards away and around the corner on the main road. The children formed a column, which threaded out of the back of the school and through the parking lot of the Kamaya Village Hall. Endo brought up the rear.
As he was passing through the parking lot, he became aware of a powerful rush of air.
He said, “It was a tremendous gust of wind, and a noise like I’d never heard before. I didn’t know what was happening at first, but when I looked at the road in front of the school in the direction of the Kamaya high street, I could see an immense tsunami. It was coming down the road.” The column of children was advancing directly into the coming wave. Endo immediately shouted, “The hill! The hill! This way!” and urged the children in the opposite direction, towards the rear of the school. “But when I reached the hill,” he said, “I was slipping on the snow and couldn’t climb, and there were children all around me.
“Just as I reached the hill, two cedars collapsed. They struck me on my right arm and left shoulder, and I became trapped. I felt the tsunami wash over me, and I thought that was it, but the tree was lifted off me, perhaps by the water, and when I looked up the slope, I saw a boy from the third grade calling for help. I’d lost my glasses and my shoes, but I knew I had to do everything to save this child. ‘Go, go up!’ I called. ‘Climb for your life!’ … The noise of the water was getting closer. ‘Up, up!’ I shouted as I pushed him.”
By now it had begun to snow. The boy had swallowed a lot of water, and both his clothes and the teacher’s were soaking wet. “I realized that it was impossible to go down,” Endo said, “and that I would have to spend the night on the hill with this child.” They found a hollow at the foot of a tree, and sat shoulder-to-shoulder on a heap of pine needles. “But the noise of the water was still getting closer,” Endo said. “And then—I don’t know if it was just a feeling—it seemed that with every aftershock there was a crunch of trees falling down. The boy said, ‘It’s coming! It’s still coming closer! I’m scared, I’m scared! Let’s go, let’s go higher.’”
At the top of the hill, the ground was covered with thickening snow. Endo found that he was unable to move his arm, the one that had been struck by the tree. Propped against his teacher’s shoulder, the child nodded off, and Endo began to worry about the small sleeping body in its wet clothes. “It was getting dark and it was terribly cold,” he said. “I thought if we stayed as we were, the child might freeze to death.”
In the blackness, he could see little without his spectacles. But he supposed that, if they walked down the other side of the hill, they would eventually encounter cars and motorists on the Ogatsu road. “I asked the boy to be my eyes,” Endo said, “and to tell me whether it was safe to go down. As we walked down step by step, I could make out headlamps on the road. We headed in that direction. We walked towards the light. And then there were people at a house, and we said, ‘Please help,’ and they helped us.”
They ended up at Irikamaya, where Hitomi found them. The next day, Endo was helped to the hospital in Ishinomaki; and from there he went home.
Endo said, “There are moments that have slipped from my mind, but this is more or less how it was on that day.”
He said, “Every single day, I dream about the children playing happily in the schoolyard. I dream about the teachers and the deputy head, who were preparing so hard for the graduation ceremony that was coming up. I’m so sorry.”
With that, his head and upper body slumped; at one point, it appeared that Endo was going to collapse onto the floor, and the members of the board of education jumped to their feet to support him. His naked distress, as raw as a wound, must have seemed to them to supply everything that they could not, with their formal politeness and their flowery clichés about swelling breasts. Who could question the abject pain of Mr. Endo, and the agony of his survival? Konno, Kashiba, and the other suited officials might have hoped that this would be the end of the meeting, perhaps the beginning of the end of the whole dreadful business. There was a silence as those present adjusted to the fact that Endo’s account was over. The meeting was poised at a moment of pivot: it might have turned either way. Then a man in the audience got to his feet.
His name was Toshimitsu Sasaki. His seven-year-old boy, Tetsuma, and his nine-year-old daughter, Nagomi, had died at the school. “Teachers, principal, members of the board of education,” he said—and the formality of this address must have raised the hope that matters would continue hereafter on a stable and predictable footing. Then he went on.
“Why didn’t you come quickly to the school the next day?” he asked Kashiba. “Why didn’t you come until the seventeenth? Do you know how many children are still missing now? Can you name them? Can you name the children who died? The families left behind—all of us have been going mad. There are ten of them still missing out there. Do you understand? Imagine how we feel, those parents who are still searching every day. Every day in dirty clothes. And if we don’t go there to search, we go mad.”
Sasaki stood up in front of the table behind which the officials sat, their eyes on the ground. He was wearing a blue windbreaker and brandishing something in his hand, which he waved in their downturned faces.
“Just this shoe,” he said, his voice rising. “That’s all we’ve found. All ruined, like this. My daughter—is this it?” He slammed the shoe down on the table, and Konno flinched. “My daughter!” he screamed. “Is she a shoe?”
* * *
The meeting went on for two and a half hours. In all that time, Kashiba and the others spoke in total for no more than a few minutes. Now and then, a request for information would be formulated, and a faltering and incomplete answer given—about what tsunami warnings had been given and received, and what Kashiba had done and failed to do, and when. But most of the time was taken up by the parents, one after another, shouting, snarling, pleading, whispering, and crying, with an anger directed almost exclusively towards the figure of the principal. On the video, he sits with eyes downcast. The faces of his accusers are invisible; their backs tremble as they denounce him:
—Tricky old bastard.
—Fuck off, you sod!
—I will devote my whole life to this, you bastard. I will spend my whole life avenging those children. I won’t let you hide anywhere.
People almost never speak like this in Japan—not in public, not to teachers and government officials. It is difficult to underestimate the violence of these interventions, and the intensity of emotion that they betrayed.
One woman said: “We believed that they would come back the next day. Everyone believed that. Everyone had faith in the school. Everyone believed they must be safe, because they were at school.”
A man said: “Every day, I hear our son and daughter crying, screaming, ‘Dad, help me!’ They are crying out in my dreams. They never leave my dreams.”
Much of the torrent of words took the form of questions. “Did you see those swollen faces?” a father asked. “They had changed so much after one month. A rotten thing. That was a human being, you know. A person. Dumped on a truck, covered with a rag. Come and talk to us after you find your own child like that, you bastard.”
Another asked: “Do you know the number of missing children in each class, Principal? Without looking at that piece of paper. You don’t, do you? You have to look at your piece of paper. Our kids—are they just a piece of paper? You don’t remember any of their faces, do you?”
Their grief was unquenchable, but what they were seeking was not mysterious—and a group of more sensitive men, less oppressed by protocol and panic, could have transformed the atmosphere in the room. All the parents wanted was a reflection of their own grief, a glimmer of recognition of their loss, a sense that they were facing not a government department, but fellow human beings. As their passion rose, they abandoned the indirectness of standard Japanese and expressed themselves ever more bluntly in the slurring dialect of Tohoku. And rather than emerging to meet them, the bureaucrats retreated in the opposite direction, into ever fussier and more bloodless speech.
Asked about the search for the missing, Konno said: “At present, personnel from the Japan Self-Defense Forces, central government, and the police are making their best efforts to recover remains of those regrettably not found yet. Hereafter, we will continue the search beneath the detritus, and the like.”
Pressed on a proposal to hold a joint funeral for the children, Kashiba, the head, responded: “By consulting with members of the board of education, and talking to bereaved family members, I suppose I think that I want to decide whether we will do this or not.”
“Don’t patronize us, like bumpkins,” someone shouted.
“Is it because we are in the country that you treat us like this?” asked another.
“If we were in the city, this wouldn’t happen,” said a third voice.
The words came, and kept coming:
—Principal, have you ever thought about the feelings of the children during that hour that they were waiting? How scared they must have been—have you thought about that? How cold they were, and their screaming for their mums and dads. And there was a hill, a hill right there!
—You people who came to the school after the road was cleared—you don’t know anything. I was there when it was just trees, pine trees scattered all around. We didn’t know where to start. Walking through the water in boots, with that sound, squelch-squelch. You’ll never understand what it was like to walk through that water, with the squelching, and the mud getting into your boots. Even when they found their own children, mums and dads came back to look for the others. What did you look for? Fuck you. You looked for the school safe.
—Will you come to the school, Principal? Will you search?
—We’ll lend you a shovel, if you don’t have one.
—If you haven’t got the boots, we can give you as many as you want.
—You’ve only got nice leather shoes, haven’t you?
—And he’s got a nice camera.
—It took us four years to have a child …
—Us too. We managed only after long years. And now he’s gone.
—Can’t you do something?
—Please return our child to us.
—Every night, I … What…? What can we do?
—They were our future.
—Please, please, return him.
—Yes!
—Release him!
It was after nine o’clock by the time the meeting broke up. Kashiba looked dazed. There were plenty of people present who had not spoken, but who felt sympathy for the principal and had been mortified by the shouting. Now their minds were racing. Much remained unresolved—but they had, at least, finally heard from the wretched Endo, and received an account of the missing time in the playground, on which everyone had been so unbearably fixated. His account made it clear that there had been tsunami warnings, that they had been received by the teachers and acted on—even if much too late.
The nine-year-old boy who had been with Endo on the mountain, whom he had huddled against in an effort to save him from the cold, was called Seina Yamamoto. His mother was present at the meeting and went to the teacher to thank him. While they were talking, another mother, whose son had died, also approached. She wanted to ask Endo if he remembered anything about her own boy; like many of the parents, she was avid for a last glimpse of him, just the memory of a word or two, or the look on his face. But the education officials told her that Endo was “unwell” and prevented her from speaking to him. Quickly, it would become clear that much of what he had said was not true at all. And after that evening, he vanished from sight.