Authors: Gretel Ehrlich
Strapped in for fourteen hours, we bend under the fractured arm of Alaska, as moon cuts ice into facets and snow clouds mound up high enough to touch the plane’s wings. From the Aleutians, we arrow south past Kamchatka, the Kurile Islands, the tentacle-armed shores of Hokkaido, and follow the undulant edge of the Pacific to touch down, mid-Honshu.
Nikki calls: “Ahoy, Gretel, welcome back, check out the lunar eclipse!” I crane my head to see: a sleeve of ember-reddened darkness slides over the moon. When I return to Tohoku, I will
reenter the umbra. All paths are made of shadow and substance. As Lao Tzu says, darkness gives the light a place to shine.
Now the moon’s shadow slides, illuminating a path, a
michi
, and I follow it. I go south instead of north, to Nara, to visit old friends, the writer Pico Iyer and his wife, Hiroko.
It’s said in Japan that drinking tea together constitutes an act of peace. At the Nara Hotel, an oddly shaped teapot is laid on its side and said to be “sleeping.” Pico and I watch it, as if watching a child. It doesn’t move. We talk quietly. I hear faint music. In the adjoining room there’s a photograph of Albert Einstein playing the piano at this hotel, where the Dalai Lama also likes to stay.
We mull over the Buddhist law of “the truth of suffering.” To say that the tsunami survivors’ attitude toward their tremendous loss is stoicism would be to underestimate the complexity of their response. Courage and self-discipline are evident everywhere in this deeply traditional culture, as well as an ability to accept “what is” without sentimentality, even as the government persists with its numbing denials. But the pain of loss is staggering; there’s confusion, nightmarish fear, and there are suicides.
Pico says, “For all the sadness that will not go away, I can’t help feeling, after twenty years living in Japan, that it’s the country’s strengths, more than its weaknesses, that have been and will be highlighted by the recent cataclysms.”
In the dark we walk through the Deer Park on our way to dinner. The moon shines through jagged pines. A deer brushes under a branch: brown needles fall. Nara, the first permanent capital of Japan and center of Buddhism, reeks of
furui
—a feeling of being old, yet burnished, like the shaved head of a monk pushing through delusion. We agree that the tsunami teaches us to “un-ask” the usual questions: Why me? Why these losses, this suffering? People here don’t make an enemy of sorrow.
They know that pain is real; that neurotic suffering is only the flapping of ego. Happiness is allowed to free-fall through grief’s fetters. The one never precludes the other.
Shunyata
means being “empty of self,” and therefore able to take in whatever happens. That’s what I see going on here—shock and disbelief, acceptance, survivor’s euphoria, deep sadness, and then movement: life’s extraordinary experiences entwined with the ordinary, and from that littered ground, the courage to leap.
Pico’s wife, Hiroko, meets us at a traditional, unlit restaurant. “Dark magic still happens here. Believe it,” she says. We laugh hard—so happy to be together again.
“My grandfather came from priest-side; my grandma from spirit-side,” Hiroko says. Plates of food come. “Both had powers. My grandmother saw a Fox Woman, a fox who pretended to be a human being. Another time she saw a thief running away with someone’s money, and my grandfather cast a spell on him so he couldn’t move. If we don’t have rain, we still go to the mountain where the dragon-god lives and offer food. In the old days, women were sacrificed. Not now, though.” Laughter. “Pretty soon, it is the Year of the Dragon!”
She leans across the deeply shadowed table and whispers: “I know when ghosts are around. I’m scared to meet them. Sometimes the spirit comes at midnight. Behind me, a feeling [
she gestures with her hand
], so I step aside and let them go by.” As with the nation’s sorrow.
In a phone call on the train the next day, heading toward Sendai, Masumi tells me it won’t be possible to visit her aunts and uncles. “Please understand, they are having a bad time now,” she says. In an inexplicable reversal, Great-Uncle Satoru canceled the carpenter whom he had hired to rebuild his house. He says he is confused about what to do. Yet he takes a taxi from his
temporary apartment to his old house to replant the vegetables that were destroyed by the typhoon. And the flower seeds have begun to arrive by the hundreds.
Kazuyoshi and Kayuko, Masumi’s uncle and aunt, have returned to the neighborhood as well, planting vegetables in front of where Grandmother’s house once stood. Their neighborhood group is still trying to decide which piece of land offered by the government to buy. But so far, no land is suitable.
“If we ask Kazuyoshi and Kayuko about it now, they’ll feel they have to give an answer, even if it’s not true, so better not to,” Masumi says.
The tick of railroad tracks is a clock summoning the winter season; its rhythm, a reminder of the episodic taking of towns by the wave. Moon after moon lights up the ocean’s destruction. The yen surges and gold drops. Night is bright. Moon has shed its embers. Cesium-137 is found in baby formula. Money for tsunami survivors has been used to help prop up the Japanese whaling industry. The Daiichi nuclear plant scraps plans to dump its contaminated water into the ocean. TEPCO’S new insurance policy costs three hundred million yen a year.
It’s revealed that eight and a half tons of radioactive water have leaked from reactor 4, whose structural integrity has become worrisome. Experts say that a collapse of its spent fuel rods could cause a disaster worse than the three reactor meltdowns. The first load of contaminated debris from Tohoku is shipped out to be buried somewhere near Yokohama. A total of “thirty-three football stadiums’ ” worth of dirt still needs to find a home. Older couples from Fukushima Prefecture are taking the train to Yamagata to get away from the radiation, but once there, commit suicide because they can’t stand to be away from their old neighborhoods.
* * *
At a small station north of Sendai, Nikki, Abyss-san, and I meet up once again. Abyss-san buys vegetables at the station store, then we drive north. His mountain house is frigid inside, but swept clean. In the morning we drive toward the walled fishing town of Miyako.
Unwalled
is a better word. Water gates are still bent as if made of aluminum foil, and seawalls are breached and broken. We roll by a vacant lot where cranes and front-end loaders are being rented. Salmon season has just ended: their eviscerated bodies hang to dry from the eaves of every house, the sides held open with three-inch-long sticks.
Death leaves marks: a woman told Abyss-san that her fourteen-year-old grandchild was practicing with the school’s swim team when the tsunami occurred. The wave came over the pool. The granddaughter survived but she had scratch marks all down her legs made by other girls as they tried to claw their way up to air. They drowned.
Back at the mountain house the tiny bush warblers chatter, but no longer sing.
Midday and Miyako harbor is lively. The fish market, a huge structure where fish of all kinds are unloaded, washed, sorted, iced, and stored, has a new roof and three walls. Seventy-five-foot trawlers with purple bows are lined up at the dock, and deckhands are unloading debris they’ve disentangled from the nets. Their catch of saury is already being readied for sale. Since the ice factory began working again, there is no limit to the number of fish brought in.
Today Hirayama-san and his father are working on the far side of the bay. They’ve already rebuilt their tool and storage shed and are making buoys for clam season. They work together in silent, choreographic unison—braiding back rope ends, securing nets, tying knots.
“When we saw you last time we were living in a shelter,” Hirayama-san, the thirty-six-year-old son, begins. His name means “flat mountain,” but he’s anything but flat. Tall and lithe, he’s pencil-thin with a youthful face, and like his father, has a calm, straightforward demeanor. “Now we’re in temporary housing up on the hill. It’s tough—it’s very cramped, especially with small children, but it’s better than the shelter. We have a different pattern than other people: we go to bed at 5:00 p.m. and get up at midnight to go fishing. When we were going to bed, everyone else was just relaxing, having dinner. It was hard to sleep in a room full of people.
“Once we moved to temp housing, we had to begin to pay for everything ourselves. The government gave us three payments
per household: an initial 500,000 yen, then 800,000, then 100,000 for living costs. Now that’s finished and we’re on our own. In two years, we’re supposed to move on, but how and where, I don’t know.”
Father: We used to live in a big house. At least our electric use and bills are smaller now! We want to get out of the temporary housing, but there’s nowhere to go. It may be five or six years before we can move …
Things are hard for office workers and those who have no job at all. Recently, in Morioka, a pile of donated clothes and food was incinerated because they were no longer needed in that city (which was unaffected by the tsunami). But there are many needs here. They didn’t consider others. The official who ordered the burning was punished.
The government is now giving aid to construction companies so they can stay in business, but our payments have ended. If we work hard and make money we’ll be able to rebuild.
Hirayama-san: I started writing a blog as a hobby. I’ve been doing it for three or four years as a way to talk to friends. But it got more intense after the tsunami. In the first few days I got one hundred thousand visitors, then two hundred thousand. People wanted to know what had happened here. We had no cell phone service, but I could upload from my phone. We only had power a few hours during the day so I used it to send text and photos.
Hirayama’s father smiles. He’s almost sixty-nine, but his face is unlined and he’s still handsome. His talk is by turns untroubled, cheerful, and earnest. He’s matter-of-fact but never bitter.
Father: I don’t get anything about the Internet. Or blogs. I can’t even use a cell phone. Anything Western or electronic—
I’m lost! The tracking devices on our trawlers used to be in Japanese. Now they’re all in English, Katakana, borrow-words. Why? When I was young people lived more closely. We’d go down to the port and talk all together, exchange information about fish and the weather. No one does that much anymore. But the scale of this disaster was huge. It didn’t matter if you had a cell phone or not. No one knew where anyone was, or if they were alive.
I’ve been here all my life. There have been no large-scale tsunamis. In 1963, when the urchin cages started popping up on the surface of the water after a
jishin
, I knew there would be a tsunami, but the wave was small. But before I was born, there were tsunami two times, and twice, the family houses were washed away. My grandmother was caught by the wave and swam to safety in 1933. Her house was fifty meters from where our house was … both have been swept away by a wave. We have this kind of loss in our family memory, and yet, we continue to live close to the ocean! Many people swam and survived in this tsunami too.
About twenty fishing trawlers went out when the Wave was coming in. It was a giant wall of water, but it’s what we know how to do. The motorway was closed, so many fishermen couldn’t get to their boats in time. We were lucky. But once out there, when we borrowed some binoculars and looked, we could see everything was gone—our houses, our shed—and we were afraid to go back in. We stayed out for two days.
There will be another tsunami. We always have an escape plan in mind. There’s a lot of tectonic plate pressure in the Sanriku area up here in the north. So in the next thirty years, another 9.0 quake could result from seismic movement. Our peninsula faces north, so we’ll get hit by it. Those of us who lost houses must move from the neighborhood where our family has lived for many generations. It’s hard to think of it, but we will.
Hirayama-san: The disaster has been hard on young children. My five-year-old gets scared every time there’s a shake. She won’t stay in a room by herself. There always has to be a parent or grandparent with her. It’s hard to believe, but the Wave that came into our town was more than 124 feet high! It crashed over the seawall, smashed the water gates, inundated the fish market roof and the four-story building next to it. I instruct my children in
tendenko
—it means don’t go back for anything, don’t spend time trying to save others’ lives. Just run to high ground. That’s what I drill into them.
Some people didn’t see the water coming. There were houses in the way, and they couldn’t see it. They thought they were okay. But a woman high up in a building was yelling down to them to run. Some heard her and ran. My grandmother didn’t want to leave the house. She said she didn’t care if she died. But we cared. They had to slap her face and drag her to safety.
Tsunamis are cruel. Some are victimized, others are not. I keep my important papers with me at all times. If the fishery here dies out, the whole town dies. All the fishermen are working hard to keep it going.
Father: We lost everything except our boat, but we still have our lives. We can’t do anything about possessions. We knew a tsunami would come sometime. When we were coming in on our boat and couldn’t see any houses here, we knew it was all gone.
It’s better to look into the future. We’re grateful to strangers and distant relatives who gave kindness and aid, to you for coming from so far away to see us again. Our family has everything we need. Others need more help than we do. Some kids lost their parents. Wives lost husbands. Grandparents are raising their children’s kids. One man lost his two children, his wife, and his parents. Now he wonders how he can keep living.
A bank of clouds lies on the horizon in the west where the sun begins to sink. Father and son finish the last buoy, working seamlessly and in unison, never having to speak about what they’ve been doing with their hands. I take out my camera and snap a picture. Hirayama-san is tall. The father is shorter and strong. Both men look younger than they are, fit in body and mind.