Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (5 page)

Ogata was less thrilled with the officials at Tepco, who, he believed, had little handle on the nuclear crisis and appalling communication skills. ‘They are very clumsy and don’t seem to be so knowledgeable about what’s going on,’ he remarked in his understated way. But overall, he thought Japan would pull through its latest crisis. ‘My wish is this,’ he said. ‘I am hoping this may awaken the Japanese spirit, which was demonstrated after the war to rebuild Japan.’ Then he used a Japanese saying that I had never heard before:
wazawai wo tenjite fuku to nasu
. After I put the phone down, I looked it up. The dictionary rendered it, rather prosaically to my mind, as ‘make the best of a bad bargain’. I thought about it and settled on a more literal translation – ‘bend adversity and turn it into happiness’.

•   •   •

I had been here before. Except that no one had been
here
before. Four years earlier, almost to the day, I had come to this little fishing town of Ofunato on Japan’s northeast coast about 250 miles north of Tokyo. Tohoku is Japanese for ‘northeast’ and that is what people call the region where the tsunami struck. Back then, I had come to research a story about how mackerel, amberjack, blue-fin tuna, spear squid and dozens of other types of seafood are brought from these teeming fishing grounds to sushi counters and supermarket freezers around the country. Early one morning – very early one morning as I recall – I went out on a boat with one of the crews. We had left in the dark and returned to port after several bitterly cold hours of fishing. We drank
homemade liquor together in the boat’s cramped mess and slurped down fish stew as we steamed through the darkness to the fishing grounds. I ate a piece of grilled meat that turned out to be dolphin. We watched the huge nets go down empty and come up alive with a silvery thrashing. It was a memorable experience and an insight into the salt-bitten lives of the men who catch fish for their urban countrymen. Now I had come again. Except the fishing boats had gone. And Ofunato was no longer there.

In the days after the quake, there was no easy way of getting to Ofunato – or rather the place where Ofunato had once been. Sections of the roads leading north from Tokyo were virtually impassable. The airport at Sendai, the biggest city in the north, was flattened and buried in mud by the tsunami. Flights to other airports in the three most affected prefectures – Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate, where I was headed – were fully booked with volunteers and rescue workers bringing supplies. In the end I flew to Akita, a northern city on the opposite, Sea of Japan, coast about 100 miles from Ofunato. There, I met Toshiki, my photographer friend, for the drive down. Toshiki had studied in America and had a wild side to him. He was taller, more rugged and more unkempt than the average Japanese man, certainly those who put on suits and work for its big companies. He loved motorbikes and cars and sleeping in the wilderness. Still, he had needed some convincing to head into the disaster zone. We were to leave the following morning. The first thing I had to tell him was that I didn’t have a Geiger counter.

That night, I watched television in my perfectly arranged, but coffin-sized hotel room. On one channel a woman was reading a never-ending list of names, of those missing and those found, in a slow, respectful monotone. After each name, read out with the family name first in the Japanese style, the announcer added the respect term
san
: ‘Sato Yoshie-san, Takahashi Michiko-san, Suzuki Mitsuko-san’. The Chinese characters that the Japanese use can be read in different ways and it is not always obvious how to pronounce unfamiliar names. (Yuko, a common first name, can, for example, also be pronounced Hiroko.) So sometimes the announcer was obliged to offer alternative versions of the names of people feared dead or missing. ‘Kawano or Kono-san,’ she said. ‘Kiyonari or Kiyoshige-san.’ Not only were people missing. Their very names were losing substance.

I switched channel. Tokyo firemen in orange outfits were saluting before being sent in to douse the smouldering Fukushima nuclear reactor with their tiny hoses. As they marched unhesitatingly towards the plant, still gushing radiation, I thought of the
kamikaze
pilots sent on doomed missions in the final months of war. Another channel had turned a variety show into a fundraiser. Doraemon, a blue-and-white cat-like creature with capacious pockets from which he extracted useful and whimsical items, had been recruited to the cause. He was urging viewers to send in money. After an hour or so, I switched back to the original channel. The woman was still reading out the names of people in her respectful monotone. ‘Ono Megumi-san, Uchiyama Tomoe-san, Uchiyama Mitsuo-san.’

The next morning we set out for Ofunato. We loaded the car with food and water since both were said to be scarce on the tsunami-afflicted coast. We needed a few extra provisions, Toshiki said, including protective boots for clambering over the rubble. The hardware store had posted a sign on its automatic doors specifying all the unavailable items, sold out due to panic buying. It was not a short list: fuel containers, batteries, radios, flashlights, portable heaters, gas canisters, mobile phone chargers, water, tea. Toshiki said that the disaster had revealed what was elemental: ‘Water, fire, communication.’

The drive to Ofunato was uneventful. The roads were virtually empty. We had managed to wangle an emergency pass and only cars like ours were allowed to buy petrol. Tolls were waived. The landscape was mountainous, with trees stretching to the horizon. Snowy fields, small hamlets, fir trees, a tin-metal sky. We passed occasional convenience stores, most with their lights dimmed and signs proclaiming: ‘We have boxed lunches.’ They didn’t appear to have much else. Just a few miles from the coast we passed the Maruhan Pachinko Parlour, the sort of place where the Japanese play noisy arcade games involving streams of metal balls. Toshiki shook his head at the sight of the car park full of vehicles. So near to tragedy, the people inside were in a sea of cigarette smoke and clanging machines. A few minutes later we rounded the corner and entered the valley that was once Ofunato.

•   •   •

For those who haven’t seen it with their own eyes, it is practically impossible to imagine the devastation left behind by a tsunami.
A colleague of mine described it as like walking into a photograph of Hiroshima after the nuclear bomb. I wrote in my notebook that it was as if the man-made world had vomited up its innards. The things that were usually hidden – piping, electric cables, mattress stuffing, metal girders, underwear, electricity generators, wiring – were suddenly on full display, like secrets expelled from the intestines of modern living. Amid the shreds of wooden houses, twisted steel and old soy sauce bottles, one of the first things I noticed was a deer on its back, its glazed eyes staring up blankly at the sky. Next to it were a stoat, its snarl fixed in death, an eagle, an owl, a peacock and a second deer. It took me some time to realize what I was looking at. This must have been someone’s taxidermy collection. The hooves of the deer and the other animals were attached to a green baize board.

These were the things that were not meant to be here. Those that were – houses, streets, shops, factories – had mostly vanished. Even solid concrete buildings were reduced to frames, doll houses with their walls ripped off by an explosive force, their shredded contents flapping like paper in the wind. Then there were the mangled cars, perched in trees, or on their side, or on their back or even, by some fluke, the right way up. A coil of green mesh sat on top of a collapsing balcony, like some metal python surveying hell. There was an oil truck, nose down in the ground as if flung from the sky. Scattered in the mud was a collection of salacious magazines showing half-naked women emerging from the shower. There were dead fish washed far inland. The smell of sea salt hung on the frigid wind.

Suddenly, amid the rubble, I spied two tiny figures, picking their way along a twisted train track, bound uncertainly for a train station that was no longer there. There was something faintly shocking about seeing life stirring on the dead valley floor. I thought of
The Road
, Cormac McCarthy’s novel about a father and son moving their way through a charred, post-nuclear landscape. As the figures drew nearer, I saw that one woman was carrying a red cane. She wore a blue woollen hat and scarf, a sweater, jeans and a pink backpack. Her cheeks were red from the bitter cold. Her companion was younger and slimmer. She was wearing spectacles and her mouth was covered with a white facemask. She was also carrying a backpack. The two were staring intently at the ground as they inched along, occasionally raking
the rubble with the cane or stooping to examine something more closely.

I approached and asked what they were doing. I felt as though I had encountered fellow travellers in the desert. They bowed slightly, their politeness out of place in these surreal surroundings. Hiromi Shimodate, the red-cheeked lady, explained they were searching for possessions, something from the café she and her friend ran together. ‘We are looking for anything of ours. Just something, a chair, anything,’ she said. Just a week before, they had both been in the café when the earthquake started. Shimodate waved her hand in the direction of the shore, indicating an area of rubble indistinguishable from the other rubble around it. On the morning of the earthquake, she had gone to the city hall to file taxes. She had returned to the café with some packages just as the last two customers were leaving after lunch. ‘I was with Kimura and I thought: Maybe we should get something to eat,’ she said, indicating her companion with the facemask. ‘That’s when the shaking started. It was very unusual. It lasted such a long time. I had never felt anything like that before.’ Even before the motion had stopped, Shimodate ran outside to check on the elderly couple who were the landlords of the café. ‘They were huddled behind the house, next to the train tracks, holding on to each other.’

When the tremor stopped she had gone back to find Kimura. ‘We went to the parking lot. Only my car and Kimura’s car were there. There’s a small river. Usually, there’s several feet of water. But it was only a few inches deep, and it was black and filled with fish thrashing about. We thought: This is definitely bad news.’ Water was seeping out of the tarmac in the parking lot, which had liquefied. They made it to their respective vehicles and drove off. Kimura’s car went to the left and Shimodate’s to the right. Shimodate immediately ran into traffic, all of it heading for the hills. So she took a detour. If she hadn’t, she thought, she would not be alive today. After she had reached her sister’s hilltop house, she looked back down into the valley. A massive wave was already surging on to the shore.

Shimodate fell silent. Yasuko Kimura, her companion, brought out her mobile phone and showed me a photograph of the café. It had a pink interior and framed pictures on the wall. It had been taken a few days earlier, in a different era. Shimodate said the tsunami had altered the shoreline. ‘I was born and brought up here. My family has always
been here. A lot of people here have always been here,’ she said. ‘We all know it. The landscape that we saw everyday has changed. The water is definitely higher than it was before. Everyone says it. The sea has come closer.’

Suddenly, she let out a shriek. ‘Look, there’s something.’ She darted forward and retrieved a silvery object from a pile of crumpled wood a few feet away. Once she had brushed it off, it became clear what it was – a flat metal sieve with a simple wire handle. It was the sort you might use for straining scum from boiling soup, or for lifting tofu from hot water. She held it up, half in delight, half in regret for the lost world it evoked. ‘I knew it was mine straightaway. It’s something I used every day,’ she said, rubbing her fingers along its familiar handle and metal grid, not much bigger than the palm of her hand. She looked up to contemplate once more the destruction around her, the broken buildings, the mangled cars, the flattened houses. Then she looked anew at the sieve, a small, familiar object in the midst of desolation. ‘It’s a bit pathetic, isn’t it?’

Kimura broke the silence. ‘A lot of old people died here. They didn’t escape,’ she said. The older people of Ofunato, some of whom had witnessed three deadly tsunamis in their lifetime, remembered the biggest one that followed the Chile earthquake of 1960. That was the largest earthquake in recorded history and though it happened halfway round the world it sent a massive tsunami thundering towards the Japanese coast. ‘At that time, the tsunami only went up to here,’ Kimura said, indicating a place not far from us. ‘The older people didn’t think the water could come so far, so they didn’t move.’ It was a common tale, she said. Those who thought they understood the lessons of history were fooled into complacency. Even so, given the extent of the physical destruction, the toll of dead and missing had not been as bad as it might have been, she added. ‘Over in the next valley, they’ve had it far worse,’ Shimodate said, pointing at the hills to the south. I didn’t know it at the time. The town she was talking about was Rikuzentakata.

The town of the 70,000 pines was just eight miles south along the coast from Ofunato, on the other side of a mountain. By the time we got there, night had fallen. We stopped the car and absorbed the stillness around us. You could sense the destruction, but you couldn’t see it. As we drove slowly along the streets, many strewn with debris, we saw
glimpses of rubble in the headlights, the odd carcass of a car or the marooned hull of an upside-down fishing trawler. In the dark, we couldn’t make out any buildings. In fact, there were no buildings left to see, none, that is, apart from a handful of concrete structures that had survived the oceanic onslaught. Among them was the Capital Hotel.

•   •   •

I went up north again with Toshiki in August 2011. This time we drove the 250 miles from Tokyo. Nearly half a year after the earthquake, the capital was returning to some kind of normality. The number of aftershocks, several a day in the weeks after 11 March, had abated. The city was gradually, if uncertainly, rediscovering its rhythms. The rowdy
izakaya
pubs where students and salarymen wash down copious quantities of sashimi, grilled fish and chicken skewers with even more copious quantities of draught beer and sake, were full again. The trains and buses were back to their punctilious schedules. Still, the buildings were dark and clammy (air-conditioning was set to ‘low’ or not on at all). Many of the city’s escalators were stopped dead in their tracks, cordoned off with yellow tape as though they were a crime scene. One employee of a large company told me he carried a torch to work so that in the shadowy corridors of his ultra-modern office block he could identify his colleagues. (No use bowing at ninety degrees to the boy from the post room.) A few months before, the traditional
hanami
cherry-blossom viewing parties, a boisterous rite of spring, had been less raucous than in less shaken times. Shintaro Ishihara, the rightwing Tokyo governor who had mused aloud that the tsunami must be divine retribution for Japanese ‘egoism’, had deemed it inappropriate to be guzzling sake in the city’s parks while fellow Japanese suffered in the north.