Sodden skies and a slight chop on the water of Matsushima Bay. Today the ferry is taking Masumi and me to a small outer island. One islet is a house-sized boulder with a red pine growing out of a crack. We pass small fishing boats heaped with debris rather than fish. Because most ice factories are still inoperable, the government is paying fishermen to clean up the seas.
After several stops we arrive. Except for three women mending fishing nets, the island is deserted. I ask a man with a small boat if he’ll take us around. His name is Mori. A brightly polished brass key hung around his neck falls forward as he leans down to start the engine. I ask what it’s for, and he says, “My new temporary house.”
Mori is shy, sixtyish. An orphan, he was adopted by an islander here. “It’s funny. Now I have a home and I’m ferrying orphans and refugees. That makes us all the same,” he says with a faint smile.
When the earthquake hit his boat swung back and forth, from side to side in the water. “I couldn’t drive it at all!” he tells us. “Finally I came back here, tied up, and ran up the hill just as the tsunami came.”
Mori was lucky. Tucked in behind a hill, his twenty-five-foot fishing boat was protected from the Wave. “All the boats parked on the far side of the island were safe. The island cut the tsunami wave in half. Most of it went to the other side of the anchorage.”
He looks toward the open ocean: “I heard the noise. Like something breaking. A horrible sound. I saw boards, whole houses, and boats being smashed and washed around. I can still hear it, and see the snow and the broken houses washed together with the ones coming in from other islands. It was awful …” But he smiles.
He starts the engine and we putt-putt across a narrow strait to a tiny island: “I’ll wait for you,” he promises. Houses are built closely together here and, because the ground has subsided, water splashes in and around their foundations. The village seems deserted, then we hear a sound—a woman’s voice—and we walk toward her. The first floor of every house holds a few inches of water. We come to a door that opens onto a flooded living room. The furniture is in disarray, and beyond, another door opens to the bay.
We hear the voice again and go through. A lone woman is talking to herself. She squats on wet cement cleaning oyster shells. Small waves splash water over the wall. This whole island is wet.
Wearing traditional work clothes, she looks up, surprised to see us, but her hands never stop: “I’m supposed to be putting the seed of the oyster into the shell,” she explains. “But now we missed the crop, so I’m seeing which of these old shells can be reused and which cannot. I clean each one and string them together.”
She works alone. Her house is still habitable, she tells us. There is electricity and water, but at high tide, the first floor fills with water. A minor inconvenience, she says. “Every day the tide comes up five feet. I work until it comes in, then I must stop. But the second floor of the house is okay. I want to stay living here, but in the fall the tides will be higher, and this house and all of them along here are sinking.
“We were fifteen families here. Now there are only nine of us. I wasn’t on the island when the jishin hit, and couldn’t get here. There was no ferry for twenty days.” She stops to light a cigarette. Her face is wind-chapped. After a few puffs, she flicks the cigarette into the water. Finally she smiles, squats down, takes up a gray shell, scours the inside, and lays it in a heap with thousands of others.
Mori is waiting for us when we return, his bald dome shining in the sun. “Thirty-three years ago there was a tsunami but it didn’t damage the houses. This used to be an island where lots of visitors came, and we always had fun. Island people do, you know. But now … there’s no one … It’s too quiet,” he says, his cheeks going bright red.
Back on the island he offers to drive us up to the evacuation center. “We can borrow one of the pickup trucks. They all have keys in them. Pick one!” I point to one of many small white Toyotas. “Okay. Let’s see if she starts.” It does, and we climb in back. He drives us up the hill. But the shelter is empty. “I guess they’ve all gone to the matsuri—the festival on the small island over there,” he says, nodding toward an arm of land across the water. “I’ll take you there in my boat.”
It’s a short ride. The school celebration consists of relay races, the awarding of trophies, and student speeches given over a microphone on a raised podium. In some towns there have been arguments about whether it’s appropriate to have festivals so soon after the disaster, but the islanders here seem to have a sunnier attitude. Why not? Mori says, smiling sheepishly.
I sit on a rock wall under a tree by a man who has a dog on a leash. From there I have a view of the judges’ stand where Utsumi, our friend from Katsura Island, looks suave in a pink oxford shirt and a blue blazer. A young girl about to receive an award breaks down and begins sobbing. It’s hard to tell if she’s faint from the heat or overwhelmed with grief. I ask, but no one around me seems to know.
At the end of the day the school song is sung; then everyone stands and sings the Japanese anthem. After, they raise their fists and shout an enthusiastic “Banzai!!”