Morning. Fickle June weather: cloudy, windy, rainy, misty, but mostly hot and humid—mushiatsui. In old Japan, weather watchers invoked rainfall by cutting off the head of a swan and throwing it behind a waterfall. In the town of Kuji, near the northern extent of tsunami damage, a swan that lost a wing has been rescued and given a home.
I pick through a pack of Hana Fuda cards, a simple Japanese card game printed on mulberry paper, based on the seasons, and try to see how people here hinge themselves to the natural world: caring for miniaturized alpine rock gardens, growing flowers, living in the play of light and shadow through paper doors.
Pine bough, flower, insect, bird, o-sake, and o-mizu are the shuffled emblems of seasonal shifts and transience, of luck, life, plentitude, and perishability. June’s card features “Peony (for beauty and medicine) with Butterfly (for transience and change).”
We take a torturous coast road that is tree-shrouded and buckled when it exists at all. The ocean view is intermittent because of the trees. The scenes below, when we can see them, resemble a painting by Hieronymus Bosch: you can count the dead and missing; you can see how a hill functioned as a knife slicing oncoming water; you can step through what’s left after the Wave. In one place, a Mitsubishi F-2 fighter jet banged into a damaged building. The steel ribs of a fish factory are bent over shredded rubble that resembles combed hair. Nikki gets a Tweet about the Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, who donated a million dollars to Tohoku’s disaster relief fund.
Losing altitude, we pass through the remains of towns and villages. Half of the town of Otsuchi was flattened, its marine research lab destroyed. It’s here that Dall’s porpoises are slaughtered for food. Members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society have tried to stop the capture and killing of these cetaceans, but since being caught in the tsunami, they’ve become volunteers, helping other survivors.