Facing the Wave (2 page)

A temporary morgue had been set up in a school gym for unidentified bodies. Kikuchi-san found body #59, and a written description of his father. He unzipped the body bag. His father’s watch was still ticking but the man’s lungs had filled with seawater, and his heart had stopped. He was sixty-nine years old.

“He spent his whole life on the water,” Kikuchi-san said. “And even though it took him, I love the sea; it’s all I have.”

From under a thin futon on tatami that no longer smells like grass, I hear the rattle of shoji screens until a seismic wave carries the house forward and upward in a hard jolt—a slice of contained chaos—and drops it again, down the face of a geologic wave to Earth’s uncertain crust.

Masumi’s cell phone sounds an alarm. “
Jishin!
” she cries out—earthquake—and rushes fast for the stairs. There’s a thud and the roaring noiseless noise that follows, drilling deep inside the ear, deeper than touch, almost beyond hearing. A dog barks. In the distance the tsunami-warning siren sounds. It’s dawn on the western outskirts of Sendai.

By the time Masumi, her parents, and I gather downstairs the shaking has stopped, but Kazuko, Masumi’s mother, is still holding the kitchen cabinets shut with one outstretched arm. Since the big quake and tsunami on March 11, which devastated almost four hundred miles of Japan’s northeastern coast and caused the cooling apparatus of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to fail, resulting in three hydrogen explosions and the massive nuclear meltdowns in four nuclear reactors, she’s replaced broken dishes three times and now keeps the house stocked with bottled water and extra food.

“It wasn’t much but …” Masumi begins. Her mother finishes
the sentence: “It’s still scary.” She dispenses green tea from a large thermos into small cups. We drink in silence. Tectonic plates are always locking up, warping Earth’s crust and moving, and a prediction has been floating around that another big earthquake is coming, and Japan’s northeast coast, called Tohoku, will be ravaged again by a tsunami.

Upstairs I roll up my futon. The smell of green tea, coffee, rice, and fried eggs wafts through the small house, mixing with the savage beauty of geological violence that continues to take place. There have been over eight hundred aftershocks greater than 4.5 since March, and it’s only June now. In the hallway Masumi confides that, so far, she’s been unable to take photographs of the destruction.

Masumi is thirty-five, long-limbed and high-strung; she came back to her parents’ house after a ten-year stint in western Canada to get her doctorate in photography. “I should be taking pictures, but it feels like an invasion, like going somewhere I shouldn’t go,” she says.

Another aftershock comes. Masumi braces herself, and flees downstairs. This is my first time staying in a modern Japanese house with neon lights and a living room full of Western furniture, and as things rattle, I long for the recesses of dark rooms and deep eaves, where the shaking of Earth is also the shaking of shadows, where what Jun’ichiro Tanizaki called “the laws of darkness” are stirred.

* * *

On March 11, 2011, Japan’s earth-altar broke. The descending oceanic plate—a slab of lithosphere—slid under the overlying plate that carries the island of Honshu. Pulling and grinding, the subduction zone was pulverized. Its topmost plate bulged and dropped, and a rupture occurred: an undersea rip, 6 feet across, 310 miles long, and 120 miles wide.

Friction is stress; stress is energy. The earth moved. A wave was born. Three sorrows: quake, tsunami, meltdown. In the quake’s “seismic moment,” the total energy released was two hundred thousand times the energy at the earth’s surface, equal to six hundred million times the energy of the bomb dropped at Hiroshima. In six shaking minutes the northeastern coast of Japan was torn off its roots with an undersea roar that could be heard on hydrophones in Oregon.

Seismic waves are not tidal. There is no moon-pulling or wind-pushing involved. They occur when ocean-floor earthquakes displace seawater at the fractured fault line. The first thing to reach the coast is the trough, what might be called “the emptiness aspect of the wave.” The drawback is severe: the ocean floor is bared. The backed-up water is a fist ready to spring, and when the waves finally arrive, their kinetic energy packs a punch equal to, say, seventeen hundred pounds in the face. Forward-rolling, they drag bottom all the way. Upon entering shallow water, they slow suddenly, the water behind piling up, and grow to a tremendous height.

Legends about tsunamis describe them as “whirling waves of foam.” This wave was a mist-spitting, white-crested monster that pulled back fast and drove forward, breaking its own legs, and collapsing onto more than three hundred miles of shore.

The curtain in Masumi’s living room fills with wind and empties out. “Have you noticed that
jishin
—earthquakes—usually come when there’s changing weather?” Masumi asks. Outside, the sky is a pale sheet veined with radioactive rainclouds. They are gray, layered with black, and hang over the sacred mountains to the west, then darken the Sendai Plain with a tattered fringe. A hefty downpour begins.

In the origin myths of Japan, Izanagi and Izanami stand on the floating bridge of heaven looking down. They are lonely. His swinging phallus drips; her oceanic vulva opens and they
are joined. The progeny of their union is at first terrestrial: the eight large islands of Japan. Then gods appear: the goddess of the sun, the god of the moon, and the emperor. Divine creatures lived in an undersea palace with pillars of jade and gates of pearl, carpets of sealskin and silk, its spirit-filled, imperial beginnings seemingly inviolate. Many earthquakes, wars, and tsunamis later, this island nation felt its vulnerability.

Tohoku, the northeastern region of the island of Honshu, was affected by the tsunami from Sendai north to Hachinohe, about thirteen hundred kilometers. Its “bridge of heaven” was clobbered by a wave, its furnishings and population ground down to fantastic shapes. Every morning I wake to the unfamiliar: wave-like aftershocks rise to the second floor of the house. Every morning I wonder where I am. The constant jolts and shakes remind me that this isn’t my country, my culture, or my disaster. Yet, since my first trip to Japan in 1968, I’ve returned many times. When I heard about the tsunami on the radio, I came as soon as I could, though I’m not sure why. Maybe, just to walk Tohoku’s charnel ground; to meet those who faced the wave and survived.

Soft rain falls on Kazuko’s garden shrine, a miniature Shinto temple glazed red with a curved tile roof. Two cups have been placed on its tiny veranda: one for water, one for salt. Water to make the household harmonious, salt to scare the bad spirits away. With so many dead and missing—approximately twenty thousand so far—Tohoku is swarming with ghosts.

The list of Japan’s seismic events dates back to the year 684. Japanese ideas about religion, architecture, theater, and literature are based on
wa
and
shunyata
—concepts of plentitude and uncertainty, of togetherness framed by impermanence. “Every time there’s an aftershock, a tremor, my grandmother’s mind shakes into coherence, into wisdom. Every time the earth shakes she gets better,” Masumi tells me.

* * *

Masumi was driving when the 9.0 earthquake hit. After the early warning alert on her cell phone sounded she turned on her wide-screen GPS, also a television, and watched the tsunami as it was happening. A police helicopter filmed the Sendai coast where the Natori River empties out: she watched her old neighborhood wash away. “I saw waves coming,” she said. “I saw my uncle’s rice fields disappear, and the trees at the coast break in half. I saw where water had pushed my grandmother’s house until it came apart. I saw the roof floating.”

Getting home from Tohoku University to the western side of Sendai took hours. Roads had buckled and bridges were ripped apart by the force of the waves. There were traffic jams: people rushing away from the coastal areas, and hurrying back to see if their houses had survived. Another 7.0 aftershock made her car “buck like a horse.” More quakes came. Streets and rice fields were flooded. Water was knee-deep. It started to snow.

“Two pilots in training were returning to Sendai Airport just after the tsunami occurred,” she told me. “The tower, operating on backup generators, told the planes to turn back. The pilots asked why. Ground Control replied: ‘The Sendai Airport no longer exists.’ ”

Masumi drove the long way around Sendai as if trying to regain lost microseconds. Speed × Time: what did it mean? The Tohoku earthquake had altered time, and caused the axis of the earth to shift ten inches. The planet’s moment of inertia had been shaken loose. The earthquake was inertia in action: what inertia does when it dances. Earth spun faster and days were shortened. Perhaps it will keep spinning harder and harder until there are no days at all.

Along every water-logged road Masumi traveled on the way home there were obstructions. The Tohoku coast had dropped
vertically two feet, allowing flood water to stand and not drain, and the narrow harbor and river openings invited the wave to intrude inland as much as six miles. Roads were also rivers, and rivers ingested salt. The Wave was time pouring onto shore, the future moving into the present, invading houses, taking lives, and ordering the warped world into an unstable
now
.

Wave follows wave. They can be crust or else water. It’s thought that a quake like this can jar the planet into what’s known as “free vibration,” setting up new kinds of terrestrial wave rhythms. Earth is not water, but bell. The tsunami proved it: the sea’s wet clapper made Earth ring.

Masumi’s drive took longer because the planet’s mass had been redistributed, as if mass and mantle were currencies. She’d thought Honshu was a solid place, but between the moment the cell phone alert sounded and the beginning of her drive home, the width of the island increased by almost eight feet, and near the epicenter of the quake, the seabed shifted seventy-nine feet.

By the time Masumi arrived home, no one on the Tohoku coast had heat, water, electricity, or phone service. Unbeknownst to them, the earthquake and the tsunami had knocked out the diesel backup generators that cooled the four operating nuclear reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO’s) Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, releasing a reported 1.7 × 10
¹⁹
becquerels of xenon-133, and 3.5 × 10
¹⁶
becquerels of cesium-137, as well as iodine and strontium.

Between March 11 and 13, the wind was blowing out to sea, but on the morning of March 14, it changed direction, carrying radioactive particles inland, west toward the spine of mountains that dissects Honshu, and north up the devastated coast, passing directly over Sendai, where rain began, intensifying the deposition of radioactive material onto the ground.

Inside their house, Masumi and her parents wrapped themselves
in a Pendleton blanket given to her by a Blackfoot Indian in Canada. As it grew colder, they piled on quilts, sheets, and the living room drapes. In preceding days there had been fore-shocks, some as strong as 7.1. Now aftershocks came in sharp spasms, the earth’s crustal instabilities making themselves known. Masumi and her parents huddled, cried, and laughed. The sea, the air, and the ground were now drenched with radioactivity. She asked her father, a tall, calm man from a family of alpine skiers, if it was the end of the world, and he smiled, wiped his eyes, and said, “I don’t know.”

* * *

No fixed points. No shore. Only continual flux, nuclear explosions, vented radiation, flooding and flexing, crustal recycling and collapsing, the annihilating heft of water.

Masumi and I have begun to explore the coast where she spent her childhood. Every morning her mother, Kazuko, fills thermoses with ice water, packs rice balls for lunch, and stuffs our pockets with charms from the sacred mountain of Haguro, plus gloves of garlic and small packages of salt to keep ghosts away. When I ask, why salt? she stares hard at me. “Ghosts don’t like it,” she says.

Kuruma no michi
. The path of the car, or rather, Masumi’s bright red 4×4 Toyota. It’s the small joke between us, this allusion to the poet Matsuo Bashō’s
Oku no Hosomichi, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
. But we’re driving, not walking, looking for the living among the dead, so fraught and hypervigilant, we sometimes break into hysterical laughter, followed by tears.

A
michi
is a road but can also mean “following the Buddhist way” as well as “a path to a grave”;
kuruma
is “car,” and the word
grave
comes from the old French and can also mean “shore.”

When Masumi went to search for her relatives who had farmed rice, vegetables, and flowers at the coast for five generations, most roads at the coast were impassable.

Families were split up. Wherever you were when the earthquake hit was where you remained for days. No cell phones worked. She did not know who was dead, who was alive, and, either way, where they might be.