This is a true story, based in large part on the accounts of the individuals named and quoted in its pages, and on my own observations. Other sources are recorded below.
Among the various authors I have consulted, I am indebted above all to Masaki Ikegami. Without his painstaking reporting, it would have been much more difficult to piece together events at Okawa Elementary School during and after the disaster.
Japanese names are given in the Western order: given name first, family name last. Conversions of Japanese yen are approximate, and based on the exchange rate prevailing at the time. On March 11, 2011, one pound was worth about ¥131, or $1.50.
18,500 people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned: The most commonly cited figures for casualties of the disaster are those published by Japan’s National Police Agency, which counts separately the number of people killed and those officially regarded as missing. The former includes only those for whom a death certificate has been issued; but at this late stage, all those in the latter category can also be assumed to be dead. On March 10, 2017, there were 15,893 dead and 2,553 missing, a total of 18,446. See http://www.npa.go.jp/archive/keibi/biki/higaijokyo_e.pdf.
The separate count by the Fire and Disaster Management Agency records a significantly higher figure—19,475 dead and 2,587 missing, a total of 22,062. This includes those who died after the disaster from causes related to it, such as sick people whose health deteriorated after they were forced to move precipitately from hospitals, and suicides. See http://www.fdma.go.jp/bn/higaihou/pdf/jishin/154.pdf.
PROLOGUE: SOLID VAPOR
It knocked the Earth ten inches off its axis; it moved Japan: Kenneth Chang, “Quake Moves Japan Closer to U.S. and Alters Earth’s Spin,” The New York Times, March 14, 2011.
The earthquake and tsunami caused more than $210 billion of damage: Jeff Kingston (ed.), Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).
Japan’s remaining nuclear reactors—all fifty of them—were shut down: On the morning of March 11, 2011, Japan had fifty-four functioning nuclear reactors. Four of the six at Fukushima Dai-ichi were rendered unusable by the tsunami; by May 2012, all the others had been shut down due to public opposition. Ongoing efforts are being made to restart them, but the political and technical challenges are great. As of March 2017, only three were in operation.
Farmers, suddenly unable to sell their crops, committed suicide: Richard Lloyd Parry, “Suicide Cases Rise After Triple Disaster,” The Times (London), June 17, 2011; and Richard Lloyd Parry, “Tepco Must Pay Damages over Woman’s Suicide After Fukushima Leak,” The Times (London) online, August 26, 2014, http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tepco-must-pay-damages-over-womans-suicide-after-fukushima-leak-vsm5tgbmh83.
“All at once … something we could only have imagined was upon us”: Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York: Picador, 1998), 7.
HAVING GONE, I WILL COME
her son’s graduation ceremony from middle school: The Japanese school system is modeled on that of the United States. Children go to primary, or elementary, school from ages six to twelve, middle school from twelve to fifteen, and senior high school from fifteen to eighteen.
connecting Okawa in the south with the Kitakami district on the northern bank: The district on the south bank of the river, a sub-municipality of the city of Ishinomaki, is officially called Kahoku. Okawa is an older name for the area, but for ease of understanding, I have used it as a general term for the catchment area of Okawa Elementary School. It is pronounced with a long o, close to English “ore-cow-uh.”
JIGOKU
She went on: “He lifted up one of the blankets…”: In this passage I have drawn on my own interviews with Sayomi Shito, and on Chris Heath’s fine article “Graduation Day,” GQ (U.S. edition), July 1, 2011.
ABUNDANT NATURE
the meeting point, deep beneath the ocean, of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates: For an accessible account of the workings of earthquakes and tsunamis, see Bruce Parker, The Power of the Sea (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010).
“People cried and screamed…”: This is my adaptation of a translation from the Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku [The True History of Three Reigns of Japan] of 901 A.D., which appears in Jeff Kingston (ed.), Tsunami: Japan’s Post-Fukushima Future (Washington: Foreign Policy, 2011), 10.
Geologists found layers of fine sand: For the history of earthquakes and tsunamis on the Sanriku coast, see K. Minoura et al., “The 869 Jogan Tsunami Deposit and Recurrence Interval of Large-Scale Tsunami on the Pacific Coast of Northeast Japan,” Journal of Natural Disaster Science 23, no. 2 (2001): 83–88; and Masayuki Nakao, “The Great Meiji Sanriku Tsunami,” Failure Knowledge Database, Hatamura Institute for the Advancement of Technology, 2005, http://www.sozogaku.com/fkd/en/hfen/HA1000616.pdf, accessed March 2017.
On May 22, 1960, a 9.5-magnitude earthquake: Parker, Power of the Sea, 151–152.
the spiky-finned, bull-headed sculpions: Cottus pollux, the Japanese fluvial sculpion or sculpin.
“We had so much from the river”: quoted in Masaki Ikegami, Ano toki, Okawa shogakko de nani ga okita noka [What Happened That Day at Okawa Elementary School?] (Tokyo: Seishisha, 2012), 25.
Three hundred and ninety-three people lived in Kamaya: Ibid., 23.
THE OLD AND THE YOUNG
one of the disaster’s oldest victims: Remarkably, Shimokawara was probably not the very oldest person to die in the tsunami. According to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, twenty-five of those confirmed dead were one hundred or older, three of them men, and twenty-two of them women.
Fifty-four percent of those who perished were age sixty-five or older: Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, “Jinko dotai tokei kara mita Higashi Nihon daishinsai ni yoru shibo no jokyo ni tsuite” [“On Mortality Caused by the Great East Japan Disaster Based on Demographic Statistics”] (Tokyo, 2011), http://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/jinkou/kakutei11/dl/14_x34.pdf, accessed March 2017. People of seventy-five and older made up a third of the dead; a man in his forties was more than twice as likely to have perished as one in his twenties.
In the Indian Ocean tsunami that struck Indonesia: Richard Lloyd Parry, “The Town Left Without Women,” The Times (London), January 12, 2005.
Out of the 18,500 dead and missing, only 351—fewer than one in fifty—were schoolchildren: “Over 110 Schoolchildren Die or Go Missing in Tsunami After Being Picked Up by Parents,” Mainichi Daily News, August 12, 2011.
a man named Teruyuki Kashiba: I made repeated requests to speak to Mr. Kashiba, but received no response.
EXPLANATIONS
“Good evening to you all,” he croaked: Gakko KyoikuKa, Ishinomaki-shi kyoiku iinkai jimukyoku, “Kaigi-roku,” Okawa shougakko hogosha setsumeikai [School Education Section, Secretariat of Ishinomaki City Board of Education, “Proceedings of Meeting,” in “Explanatory Meeting for the Parents of Okawa Elementary School”], April 9, 2011.
He rewrote the plan to require escape up a steep hill: Information from Katsura Sato.
Tricky old bastard: In Japanese, Tanuki oyaji. Literally, “father raccoon dog”—the raccoon dog being proverbially unreliable and deceitful.
GHOSTS
“There are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue”: This is my adaptation of several translations of the Heart Sutra found on DharmaNet, http://www.dharmanet.org/HeartSutra.htm, accessed March 2017.
academics at Tohoku University began to catalogue the stories: See Hara Takahashi, “The Ghosts of the Tsunami Dead and Kokoro no kea in Japan’s Religious Landscape,” Journal of Religion in Japan 5, no. 2–3 (2016): 176–198.
the true faith of Japan: the cult of the ancestors: My account of the cult of the ancestors owes much to Robert J. Smith, Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan (Stanford University Press, 1974).
“The dead are not as dead there as they are in our own society”: Herbert Ooms, review of Robert J. Smith’s Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan, in Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 2, no. 4 (1975): 317–322.
WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT
The water had reached a height of thirty-five meters here: Figures for the height of the tsunami are taken from Tsuyoshi Haraguchi and Akira Iwamatsu, Higashi Nihon Daishinsai Tsunami Shosai Chizu/Detailed Maps of the Impacts of the 2011 Japan Tsunami (Bilingual, Tokyo, 2011).
PART 3: WHAT HAPPENED AT OKAWA
My account of the events at Okawa Elementary School on March 11 draws on multiple sources, including Ikegami, Okawa Elementary School; author interviews with Toshinobu Oikawa and Tetsuya and Hideaki Tadano; Japanese television interviews with Tetsuya Tadano, in the personal collection of Hideaki Tadano; official documents of Ishinomaki city; the final report of the Okawa Elementary School Incident Verification Committee; summary documents supplied by Sayomi and Takahiro Shito; and documents submitted to Sendai District Court by Kazuhiro Yoshioka.
THE LAST HOUR OF THE OLD WORLD
the Okawa school bus was waiting in the parking lot: “Gakko mae ni basu taiki” [“Bus Was Waiting in Front of School”], Kahoku Shinpo [newspaper], September 8, 2011.
“It was shaking very slowly from side to side”: Children of the Tsunami, BBC2 broadcast, March 1, 2012.
the city authorities would compile a minute-by-minute log of the events of that afternoon: Ishinomaki-shi kyoiku iinkai jimukyoku, “Okawa shogakko tsuika kikitori chosa kiroku,” Okawa shogakko kyoshokuin no goizoku-sama he no 3.11 ni kansuru kikitori-chosa no setsumeikai no kaisai ni tsuite [Secretariat of Ishinomaki City Board of Education, “Records of additional hearings concerning Okawa Elementary School” in “Concerning the holding of an explanatory meeting for the bereaved families of Okawa Elementary School teachers on the hearing relating to 3.11”].
The Education Plan: Ishinomaki-shi kyoiku iinkai jimukyoku, “Heisei 22 nendo kyoiku keikaku Okawa shogakko (bassui)” [Secretariat of Ishinomaki City Board of Education, “Fiscal Year 2010 Education Plan Okawa Elementary School (Extracts)”], 81, 145–146.
“I kept looking at the cars arriving and wondering, ‘Is Mum going to come?’”: Children of the Tsunami, BBC2 broadcast, March 1, 2012.
“Manno-chan was right next to me”: Children of the Tsunami, BBC2 broadcast, March 1, 2012.
an elderly man named Kazuo Takahashi: Takahashi’s story is told in Ikegami, Okawa Elementary School, 187–193.
THE RIVER OF THREE CROSSINGS
The 118-second film: It can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW0dqWR4S7M, accessed March 2017.
IN THE WEB
Tokyo will be shaken by an earthquake…: For background on the coming Tokyo earthquake, see Peter Hadfield, Sixty Seconds That Will Change the World (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1991), and Peter Popham, Tokyo: The City at the End of the World (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1985).
Seismologists point out that it is not, in fact, as simple as this: Rather than committing themselves to predictions, seismologists offer probabilities. A study by the Earthquake Research Institute of Tokyo University in 2012 calculated that there is a 70 percent chance that Tokyo will be struck by an earthquake of magnitude 7 or higher by 2042. “Researchers Now Predict 70 Percent Chance of Major Tokyo Quake Within 30 Years,” Mainichi Shimbun, May 25, 2012.
an earthquake under Tokyo could kill as many as 13,000 people: Richard Lloyd Parry, “Quake Experts Shake Tokyo with Forecast of 13,000 Dead,” The Times (London), December 15, 2004.
a tremor originating in one fault sets off earthquakes in two more: Richard Lloyd Parry, “Japanese Make Plans to Survive Overdue Treble Quake,” The Times (London), September 13, 2010.
an earthquake and tsunami originating in the Nankai Trough: Richard Lloyd Parry, “Million Victims from Next Tsunami, Japan Disaster Experts Warn,” The Times (London) online, August 31, 2012, http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/million-victims-from-nexttsunami-japan-disaster-experts-warn-gc3tx7vpw8s.
only a tiny proportion of the victims was killed by the earthquake itself: Kahoku Shinpo newspaper tallied ninety people who were killed by the earthquake rather than the tsunami. It is impossible to know exactly how many people died in collapsing houses, which were then inundated by the wave, but the overall number must be relatively low. “Daishinsai—yure no gisei 90 nin cho” [“Great Disaster—There Were More Than 90 Victims from the Earthquake”], Kahoku Shinpo, May 17, 2013.
“Why does it not upset people more”: Popham, Tokyo, 28.
“Far from being dull to the dangers”: Popham, Tokyo, 27, 28–29.
“Now I will tell how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made”: Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, tr. William Weaver (London: Vintage, 1974 [1972]), 67.
WHAT USE IS THE TRUTH?
Kashiba claimed that immediately after the disaster: Ikegami, Okawa Elementary School, 91–92.
“If it was such a big quake that so many trees fell down”: Ikegami, Okawa Elementary School, 89.
“He wore a check suit”: Ikegami, Okawa Elementary School, 211.
Endo wrote two letters: Ishinomaki-shi kyoiku iinkai jimukyoku, “2011-nen 6-gatsu 3-nichi zuke, Endo Junji kyoyu kara no Kashiba kocho ate FAX,” Okawa shogakko kyoshokuin no goizokusama he no 3.11 ni kansuru kikitori-chosa no setsumeikai no kaisai ni tsuite [Secretariat of Ishinomaki City Board of Education, “FAX from teacher Junji Endo to headmaster Kashiba dated June 3, 2011” in “Concerning the holding of an explanatory meeting for the bereaved families of Okawa Elementary School teachers on the hearing relating to 3.11”].
The men of the Ishinomaki city government were not villains: This section draws on Ikegami, Okawa Elementary School, 113–127.
a signed statement of apology addressed to the parents: Ishinomaki-shi kyoiku iinkai jimukyoku, “Kashiba kocho shazaibun,” Okawa shogakko kyoshokuin no goizoku-sama he no 3.11 ni kansuru kikitori-chosa no setsumeikai no kaisai ni tsuite [Secretariat of Ishinomaki City Board of Education, “Letter of Apology by Headmaster Kashiba” in “Concerning the holding of an explanatory meeting for the bereaved families of Okawa Elementary School teachers on the hearing relating to 3.11”].
Its findings were published in a two-hundred-page report: Okawa Elementary School Incident Verification Committee, Okawa shogakko jiko kensho hokoku-sho [Okawa Elementary School Incident Verification Report] (Tokyo, 2014), http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo5/012/gijiroku/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2014/08/07/1350542_01.pdf, accessed March 2017. See also “Report on tsunami-hit school should be used as disaster-prevention textbook,” Mainichi Shimbun, February 28, 2014.
The committee was funded by the city at a cost of ¥57 million (£390,000): “Okawasho kensho-i saishu hokokushoan ni rakutan suru izoku” [“Bereaved Families Disappointed at the Final Report of the Okawa Elementary Verification Committee”], Shukan Diamondo (Weekly Diamond), January 22, 2014.
Shigemi Kato … was promoted: Ikegami, Okawa Elementary School, 112.
THE TSUNAMI IS NOT WATER
“The Japanese people rose from the ashes”: Naoto Kan, “Japan’s Road to Recovery and Rebirth,” International Herald Tribune, April 16, 2011.
“The children were murdered by an invisible monster … It has no human warmth”: Ikegami, Okawa Elementary School, 20. The rest of the quotations in this passage are from my interviews with Sayomi and Takahiro Shito.
PREDESTINATION
she was evolving into what Japanese call hotoke-sama: For more on the hotoke-sama, see Smith, Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan, 50–56.
THERE MAY BE GAPS IN MEMORY
the symbolic ruins: Richard Lloyd Parry, “Tsunami Survivors Face Dilemma over Its Haunting Ruins,” The Times (London), August 24, 2012; Eugene Hoshiko, “Legacies of a Disaster Dot Japan’s Tsunami Coast,” Associated Press, March 10, 2016; “Residents Divided over Preservation of Remains 5 Years After Disaster,” Kyodo News, March 10, 2016.
“The Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima was preserved”: “Alumni of Tsunami-Devastated Miyagi School Ask for Support to Preserve Building,” Mainichi Shimbun, December 5, 2014.
Tetsuya spoke at a symposium at Meiji University: Recording in the collection of Hideaki Tadano.
CONSOLATION OF THE SPIRITS
the story of a man named Fukuji: Kunio Yanagita, The Legends of Tono, tr. Ronald A. Morse (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008 [1910]), 58–59.
SAVE DON’T FALL TO SEA
None of the towns destroyed by the wave had been rebuilt: Zoning regulations were introduced, which banned the construction of residential property in areas inundated by the wave. Businesses could still operate there, but homes were to be relocated inland or to higher ground.
nothing that mattered would be significantly changed: This is not to say that the actions of the education board are to be excused. Masaki Ikegami’s trenchant conclusion is worth quoting at length: “What the City Board of Education should have done from the beginning was to listen thoroughly and carefully to the parties involved, reliably document and record everything, disclose information obtained in the investigation to the bereaved families,… verify the facts one by one, and investigate the truth. Furthermore, they should sincerely apologize for sacrificing the lives of children under the management of the school, and discuss punishment of officials who have been neglectful in their responses and oversight. On top of that, they should make public the lessons learned from the worst such accident in history to parties such as prefectural boards of education and the Ministry of Education, and create the opportunity to reconsider fundamentally disaster management in Japan. These actions should be performed with speed, and shared with the bereaved families to the greatest extent possible. By acting in such a lackadaisical and untransparent manner, the City Board of Education has made the problem worse” (Ikegami, Okawa Elementary School, 83).
But there could hardly have been less sense of triumph: It was further undermined a few days later, when the defendants announced that they would appeal against the verdict in the High Court. The plaintiffs responded by making an appeal of their own, on the grounds that the damages awarded were inadequate. A verdict is expected in 2018.
Masaru knew this: Masaru Naganuma declined to speak to me. This account is based on conversations with Naomi Hiratsuka and Miho Suzuki.
A friend of Kaneta’s, who was present at one of the exorcisms: The religious studies scholar, Hara Takahashi, who corroborated Kaneta’s account.